Disruption Can Take Time

There’s an impatience when it comes to education reform and transformation.

In my experience, some foundations supporting reform will seemingly rethink their strategies every five years or so—well before they’ve had a chance to see whether their grantmaking is yielding dividends (see, for example, Ben Daley’s LinkedIn post about the investment into small schools for a sense of how this plays out).

As I’ve noted in recent years, the disruption we laid out in Disrupting Class didn’t unfold as we had hoped—in part because, to the extent we do see traditional age-based classrooms disrupted, that disruption is still occurring within the factory-model K–12 school system; in part because merely disrupting the curricular market from analog to digital content doesn’t necessarily change how learning occurs; and in part because system-wide disruption simply takes a long time.

Because many people took the wrong lessons from our book, system-wide disruption will arguably take even longer than it otherwise might have (and that’s assuming system-wide disruption is even possible in the United States). That’s because following the prescription for disruption necessitates focusing outside the mainstream system in areas of nonconsumption (from homeschoolers to dropouts to students missing credits or not having access to a tutor and so on)—which, by definition, isn’t where the bulk of U.S. students are today (nor were they when we wrote the book).

The approach we outlined then has at least two “drawbacks” from the perspective of those trying to change the system.