For years, I’ve hoped that school districts could take a page from other industries and “disrupt” themselves to optimize learning for each and every child.
I’ve changed my mind.
It’s not because districts can’t innovate. They can, and many do.
But a proper application of Disruptive Innovation Theory shows that the vast majority of existing school districts will not drive the Disruptive Innovation needed to transform the education sector in the US—not because they lack visionary leaders, but because districts themselves are the incumbent business model.
For those who haven’t followed all my past work on this topic, a bit of grounding.
Disruptive Innovation is how sectors are transformed from ones dominated by expensive, complicated, and inaccessible services to those that are more affordable, simple, and convenient. As I’ve explained previously, the reason Disruptive Innovation matters in K–12 schooling is that it’s likely the only mechanism by which we can replace the existing system of schooling that was never built to optimize the learning of each and every student.
Historically, I argued that opportunities for Disruptive Innovation existed primarily inside classrooms rather than schools because public schooling was effectively a universal, zero-price offering.
But as I have written, disruption of the traditional classroom to create schools optimized for learning hasn’t happened. Most schools have instead crammed technology into their traditional classes. And the value network in which schools operate—the policies, regulations, boards, unions, and more that dictate their priorities—has kept the traditional schooling model largely intact despite any Disruptive Innovation within.
With the rise of education savings accounts in certain states, however, as I’ve written, the opportunity now exists for true Disruptive Innovation at the school level. Families now have an incentive to consider the relative value of different educational goods and services, make tradeoffs, and choose accordingly—or remain with their “free” public school option and incur an opportunity cost as they forego funds they could otherwise use to customize their children’s education.
Given that background, might we see districts lead some of the potential Disruptive Innovation? Or will disruption come from entrants?
To be clear, escaping the innovator’s dilemma by disrupting oneself isn’t easy for any organization in any field. As one acquaintance working in the robotics industry once said to me, even when you know the innovator’s solution playbook, implementing it is still virtually impossible because every force within your existing organization pulls you back to the status quo.
Despite that, I argued that the best hope was for districts to steal a page from the dual transformation playbook and create independent models—whether schools within schools, alternative schools serving dropouts or overaged and under-credited students, or microschools.
Launching these models is a good idea. It creates needed options for families and can stimulate important innovation.
But on its own, it won’t result in Disruptive Innovation.
Here’s why.
Disruptive Innovation Theory shows that while specific business models—comprised of a value proposition, resources, processes, and a financial formula—can’t disrupt themselves, umbrella organizations can create new business models capable of disrupting the old.
When Dayton Hudson disrupted itself, for example, it did so by creating Target—a wholly separate business model with its own distinct value proposition, resources, processes, and financial formula. Just as importantly, Target was allowed not only to grow but ultimately to displace full-service department stores… including Dayton Hudson.
The initial problem for districts is this: schools are not the business model. The district itself is the business model.
Individual schools certainly have organizational characteristics, but they don’t control the elements that define a business model—particularly the financial formula.
Schools are programs and offerings that districts administer, more akin to General Motors’ lineup of automobiles: Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac.
The financial formula sits typically at the district level, where funding flows from property taxes, state-allocated dollars, and federal formula grants.
Because the district is the business model, it cannot disrupt itself unless it launches an autonomous entity with a fundamentally different value proposition, resources, processes, and financial formula—and a customer distinct from the government entities that directly fund it today.
Could that eventually happen in an education savings account world? Perhaps.
But even then, districts would need something they rarely sustain: long-term leadership willing to protect an autonomous organization from being reabsorbed into the district’s existing priorities. Superintendent turnover, school board elections, and taxpayer pressures all work in the opposite direction. Protecting a new organization over many years would require a level of continuity and understanding of the underlying theory that is difficult to sustain in most districts.
Alternative schools serving under-credited, overaged students—the few true nonconsumers of K12 education and therefore seemingly ripe for Disruptive Innovation—fill a niche, but don’t ever grow to displace existing schooling models.
Similarly, new microschools or radically redesigned schools inside districts don’t get the luxury of competing on a new metric of performance. They instead look more like Saturn than Target—hybrid innovations that must at once be different but also perform “better” according to the incumbent system’s existing measures of success.
This understanding actually helps explain some of the most significant innovation successes inside districts.
Take Lindsay Unified School District in California, for example. The district introduced blended learning as a sustaining innovation that dramatically improved the existing schooling model for underserved learners—exactly the population that needs and benefits from sustaining innovations.
It was an important accomplishment, but not a fundamentally disruptive one.
This isn’t a criticism. This was an incredible development. It’s simply a recognition of what districts are structurally positioned to do.
Creating relatively separate places to rethink school can be important heavyweight teams that can pioneer new models of learning for different populations of students and introduce critical sustaining innovations for underserved students.
But those efforts remain structurally constrained in their ability to grow, displace the incumbent model, and ultimately become disruptive.
Readers may point to charter schools, innovation zones, or district-run microschools as counterexamples. These efforts can produce meaningful innovation. But again, my argument is not that districts can’t create new programs. It’s that those programs almost never become autonomous business models capable of competing against—and ultimately replacing—the incumbent district itself.
If Disruptive Innovation ultimately transforms K–12 education across the country—and that remains a big if—then history and theory suggest it’s unlikely to originate from most existing school districts.
Districts will continue to matter enormously for a long time. They remain institutions serving large numbers of students that must improve today’s schools through sustaining innovations.
But if the education sector is ultimately transformed through Disruptive Innovation, we should expect that transformation to come primarily from autonomous organizations built outside the incumbent district structure.
