Choice book blog: Disrupting Class

In Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen makes a strong case that online learning is the way of the future. Throughout the book, it was clear that I was reading the work of an economist rather than an educator as most of Christensen’s theories were obviously developed for business and later applied to education. Similarly, most of his examples throughout the book to explain and validate his ideas come from the business world. This made the book a denser read, but it also gave considerable weight to some of Christensen’s arguments, such as his projected rise of online learning. Some of what he predicted in 2008 has already begun to manifest in the present.

For example, to support his projections for online learning, he cites a study from the middle of the last decade showing that schools are investing in reading and math to the detriment of other subjects because of a focus on standardized test scores. He predicts that “a darkening budget picture could make this focus on the core even more dramatic” (103). The current decay of school funding in Wisconsin certainly supports what Christensen predicted a few years ago, but what is interesting about the book is its application of economic theory to this reality. He argues that this atmosphere creates a vacuum of nonconsumption and that schools should take this as an opportunity to move all courses away from local instruction to technology-aided instruction. The vacuum created by budget shortfalls should be used, according to Christensen, to “outsource more and more of the instructional job to virtual providers” (104).

To back up, this sly method of upending traditional education by infiltrating and conquering its operations is Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation at work. Schools have been implementing technology all wrong, according to Christensen, and to truly reform instruction, computer-based learning needs to beat monolithic learning at its own game. When Apple first introduced personal computers, he argues, it did not attack existing PC markets but created its own market by selling its computer as a toy for children. Likewise, if school administrators “first implement computer-based learning in places and for courses where there are no teachers to teach, then computer-based learning will, step by step, disrupt the instructional job that teachers are doing in a positive way” (73).

Christensen’s application of his economic theory to advance education leaves me torn in coming to my own conclusions about his ideas. On one hand, I approach everything I read critically and tend to play the role of devil’s advocate. This leads me to argue that Christensen is adopting a starve the beast strategy to promote his educational agenda. Of course, I would say, depriving school systems of funding will force them to look for cheaper educational alternatives. Of course cutting resources from traditional classrooms will cause them to become less effective. However, I believe that Christensen believes that disrupting traditional instruction is the only way to improve student outcomes. I accept that he believes this disruption will change things in a positive way.

It is difficult to set aside my rational self interest and accept the fact that his proposed system will need less people like me and achieve better results. Reading his book, I felt that Christensen spent too little time arguing why his way would succeed and too much time explaining how it would be implemented. It sounds good when he states that students will never receive a customized education in the traditional system. It sounds compelling when he argues that computer-based learning is the way to achieve a modular, student-centric system (38). Unfortunately, after establishing this thesis in chapter 1, he spends the rest of the book taking it for granted. By the time he gets to his conclusion and argues that disruptive innovation must “go around and underneath the system [to drive] affordability, accessibility, capability, and responsiveness” (225), I find myself wondering which of these outcomes he finds most important. There is no question that a computer-based instructional model could be more affordable than the current system, but Christensen never fully convinced me it would be better.