Section Two Summary

Chapter Two starts out with the assertion that schools actually ARE improving, moving up the vertical axis of their industry. However, schools have endure significant disruptive events—the Nation at Risk report and NCLB—that have changed the way they are judged, and has made them look less than stellar.

Then the book starts getting into its main thrust of expertise: disruptive innovation theory. While somewhat complex, here’s a quick summary of the key points:

· Companies are constantly innovating, but most of these changes can be described as sustaining innovations because they sustain performance improvements in established markets (faster computers, more fuel-efficient airplanes, longer lasting batteries, etc.). While there are dramatic breakthroughs, most are routine.

· Disruptive innovations are different because they disrupt the “established plane of competition” by reaching a new market which previously held “non-consumers”.

· Disruptive innovations are actually inferior in quality—at least at first—but it doesn’t matter because they satisfy the need of the new market. One prominent example is the personal computer, which was originally marketed as a toy (remember the early Apples?) to children.

· Eventually, the product or service improves to a point where it eventually replaces the established ones, the way microcomputers displaced mainframe minicomputers.

· Established companies and products are usually unable to stop this because they have too much invested in the way they do things.

They attempt to apply this theory to schools, again reiterating that schools have been improving over the years despite various hardships. Schools have been asked to do the equivalent of rebuilding an aircraft in mid-flight: to adjust to changing metrics, then to improve on each new measure. These essentially became “new” jobs to do, tasks that the public school system in its existing paradigm was never designed to undertake. The authors outlined, as a means of providing historical context, the jobs that schools have been assigned over the years.

· Job 1: Preserve Democracy and Inculcate Democratic Values—from the inception of our country to the mid-late 1800s

· Job 2: Provide Something Different for Every Student—disruptive events such as industrialization, promotion of high school, the cold war and the space race—through 1960’s

· Job 3: Keeping America Competitive—a shift began, underscored by the belief (for the first time) that our schools weren’t doing well enough.

· Job 4: Eliminate Poverty—NCLB and ensuring that every child in every demographic improves his or her scores.

Clearly the job of education has become harder to do. But based on this history, the authors assert that schools have been consistently improving and are motivated to improve their outcomes.

Chapter three outlines the reasons why our attempts at employing technology in education have largely met with little improvement in achievement. The authors utilized examples from several different private industries to show that “unless top managers actively manage this (innovative) process, their organization will shape every disruptive innovation into a sustaining innovation—one that fits the processes, values, and economic model of the existing business…” In other words, we shape change to our existing purposes because we naturally choose to not disrupt ourselves.

Schools invested heavily in computers because they saw industry do it. We crammed our classrooms with them. Many students, however, report using them infrequently. Even when they are used a lot, are used as a tool, rather than as a primary instructional mechanism that helps them learn in ways that are customized to their type of intelligence. (Ref. Gardner, ch1) Traditional practices have not evolved despite the presence of computers.

At the end of the chapter, the authors make a strong case that successful disruptive innovation can only take place when it competes against “non-consumption.” Take, for example, if the earliest recorded music (victrola, phonograph records) had competed against actual live music. It never would have thrived or developed. In the same way, simply “cramming” computers into classrooms to be utilized in the same way as traditional instruction doesn’t fly.

If deployed “disruptively”, computers could “bit by bit change the way learning takes place in schools” and can transform the classroom into places where “all students can learn in the ways their individual minds are wired to learn.”