Disrupting Class: A Disruptive Educational Pattern

I’m reading Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, and posting a few of my favorite passages.

From Chapter 4: Disruptively Deploying Computers —

Because most organizations have limits on their resources, they allocate their priority resources to those customers whose business is most critical to their continued prosperity - or, in the language of disruption, they focus up-market. And they under- or disinvest in those less-profitable products or services whose sales actually pull profit margins down.

School districts are responding to the scarcity of resources by investing in what they judge to be most important. The overriding concern among school leaders is to improve the test scores in the subjects on which schools will be judged. Schools are doubling up on reading and math at the expense of other subjects. The Center on Education Policy released a survey in March 2005 that showed 71 percent of the nation’s school districts are spending more time on math and reading to the exclusion of other subjects. The core subjects on which standardized achievement tests are administered is where priority resources are being focused.

To do this, schools are disinvesting in those “nice-to-have” courses that are less critical to the mandates of improving test scores and leaving no children left behind. A darkening budget picture could make this focus on the core even more dramatic. The good news for managing the transition to student-centric learning is that as schools stop teaching certain courses, it creates a vacuum of nonconsumption - the ideal place for student-centric online technology to be deployed. Schools should greet these pressures as opportunities to implement a long-range plan to shift the instructional job to student-centric online technology to be deployed. Schools should greet these pressures as opportunities to implement a long-range plan to shift the instructional job to student-centric technology step by step and course by course.

Disruptive innovation requires targeting not those courses that the public schools want to teach in-house. They must instead focus on courses that the public schools would be relieved not to have to teach, but do feel the need to offer.