EDSS 541

My thoughts and reactions to Disrupting Class, by Christensen, Horn & Johnson

It is not entirely clear to me why Christensen et. al. place so much initial importance on the terms ‘modular’ and ‘interdependent’, but there it is.   In an interdependent design, the interfaces between the different components of a system are unique to that system making it impossible to substitute components form a similar system from a different source.  In a modular system, interfaces are standardized such that components from different system may be interchanged without modification.  The authors point out that modularization generally happens only when a technology has become mature.  For example, the drive battery from a Honda hybrid vehicle cannot be replaced by one from a Toyota Prius whereas their 12-volt system batteries are pin compatible and could be swapped at will.  The electric drive system is a technology in its infancy while the system battery architecture has been unchanged for at least 50 years.

The authors argue that the American educational system has an interdependent architecture.  I’m not sure I agree.  As I sit in the RBV student library writing this, I see that it is indistinguishable from the VHS library nearby and from the Windsor High library 600 miles away.  Surely that is an example of modularization.  The standardized curriculum and assessments  mandated by the state of California, and soon to be mandated nationwide also strike me as sings of increasing modularization.  It is not so much that “you can’t study this in ninth grade if you didn’t cover that in seventh…” as “If you are in ninth grade, you did cover that in seventh”, so you could move from one school to another and never notice the difference.

What the book is primarily about is ‘disruptive innovation’.   Disruptive innovation occurs when a product or system, which has been designed to address an unmet need in a segment of the consuming population, unexpectedly overtakes and supplants existing products and systems.  An example is FedEx.  Designed to address the needs of those who just HAD to have their packages delivered overnight, whatever the cost, the more efficient delivery systems the company developed for that purpose are taking over the function of simply delivering packages and driving the USPS out of business.  A key component of disruptive innovation is the word “unexpected”.  Disruptive innovation is rarely if ever planned.  Those innovators see an underserved niche market in which their idea can flourish and the technology is found serendipitously to be applicable over a wide market.  MySpace, for example, was originally conceived as a means for musicians (only) to share their work.  By contrast, sustaining innovation has to do with improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of existing products and systems, and adapting them incrementally to meet the evolving needs of their consumers.

Considering the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovation, I would say that the American school system, in the face of the ever-changing demands made on it, is arguably the most successful sustaining innovator in history.  But there remain significant populations of children who are chronically underserved by it, populations which it was, perhaps, not originally intended to serve.  (The authors cite Thomas Jefferson as wanting education to be universal, “so that all citizens could participate in the democracy”.  Bear in mind, however, that to Jefferson, “citizens” meant white, male landowners.)   So this system of education is ripe for being taken down, so to speak, by a disruptive innovation in the generalized field of developing children into adults.

Christensen posits education as a value-added process.  Somewhat confusingly, he describes both the process of educating children and the business of providing instructional and curricular tools as value-added industries.  Certainly such commodities as textbooks are produced that way and the result is a one-size-fits-all kind of approach to learning.  But it is interesting to consider schools themselves as value-added enterprises.   Like a factory that takes in pieces of sheet metal and turns out auto bodies, the schools take in partially socialized children and turn out competent adults by way of implanting knowledge, habits and attitudes.  Many would argue that value is actually subtracted in that process, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that efficiency in a value added chain dictates uniformity of both process and product and makes individualized instruction difficult if not impossible.  Like chickens bred for uniformity of size so as to be easily processed by automatic machines, students are expected to fit a mold and if some part doesn’t fit, well that part gets squished, and the machine moves on.  This is the trap of monolithic education, for which he prescribes student-centric education as the cure. 

Student-centric education is not a new concept.  In past centuries, institutions of higher learning were for the elite (remember Jefferson’s white, male landowners) group instruction was in comparatively small groups and every student had a mentor.  In the trades, apprentices were individually instructed in the intricacies of their trade by journeymen, and journeymen by masters.  Today, the wealthy still have access to schools where individual mentoring is the norm and class sizes are in the single digits.  But, to be blunt, our desire to provide high level education to every member of our society has not been matched by our willingness to pay for it, so we have followed a path of increasing standardization of both product and process.  That path, as we’ve heard, makes educational institutions ripe for disruption.

Our authors seem to believe they have identified the disruptor in the form of computers, but I think it is more likely that the real disruptor is student-centric education, which may or may not turn out to be accomplished by way of the cloud.  In any case, they are correct to state that attempts to exploit disruptive innovation through existing monolithic systems geared toward sustaining innovation are likely to fail.  They call that cramming, and point out that simply equipping classrooms with computers has not, and will not, automatically lead to student-centered education.

I think it comes down to this.  If information technology is able to lower the cost of student centered education to the point that it is available to (almost) everyone, then (almost) everyone will take advantage of it and we will see a real transformation of our school systems.  If market or political or other forces prevent the necessary level of cost reduction and individual adoption oon the part of students, then internet-based education will turn out to be just another technology that was never able to climb the S-curve.