Clayton Christiansen loves disruption.
He loves the idea that almost everything familiar to us will die and be replaced by competition.
Many corporate reformers swear by him. They think disruption is creative.
I wish they would get out of our lives and make money selling something other than disruption.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When will competition die and be replaced by collaboration?
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Competition does not need to die and be replaced by collaboration. There needs to be a balance between the two…. yin/yang……feminine/masculine….. collaboration/competition. Except for in the wealthiest of communities, where women and children are the beneficiaries of a
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Decentralized markets, under some circumstances, are the best way to cooperate.
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……. oops hit post before the edit. Let’s just leave it this way ….
Competition does not need to die and be replaced by collaboration. There needs to be a balance between the two – yin/yang – feminine/masculine – collaboration/competition…
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TE,
What are those “some circumstances”? And if the “free hand of the market isn’t god’s hand then how do we know when the devil is in control?
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add this guy to your watch list: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-new-science-of-giving-212647170.html
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John Arnold gave $25 million to New Schools for New Orleans to generate more charters even though 66-80% of existing charters are D or F schools. He is not the smartest guy in the room, just the richest. And he follows Gates and Walton, so he is not innovative either.
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“D or F schools”: This is another misleading fact that Diane repeats periodically without explaining the grading system (it doesn’t adjust for demographics) or whether this represents improvement over the schools that were replaced (New Orleans has dramatically closed the gap with the rest of the state). I’ve called her out on this numerous times (like I have on her selective use of CREDO studies), but she persists. Tribal warfare doesn’t have much use for the truth.
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Ken,
You are quite correct in insisting that to use these “grades” in on sense but not another is not good logical thinking. But the fact is that all “grades” and grading of students lack validity. Those who choose to be on the side of “just” education shouldn’t be using these “grades” to condemn certain schools.
Duane
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Ken,
As you well know, New Orleans is a completely different city post-Katrina. It is smaller, and many of the poorer neighborhoods have been emptied.
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GREED, PURE GREED.
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Difficult to read that one Diane. Personally, I think the guy is an idiot. On the job training on the upswing? No, companies have been getting rid of their training for a number of years now, and they expect the universities and high schools to produce job candidates that need no training. Why do you think the companies are complaining about the skills and the level of education that our public schools are producing? Because the companies don’t want to pay to train them. They used to, but they don’t any more.
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Disruption does not equal money selling to those who espouse transformation.
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Disruption creates new markets. That’s why biz school professors love it. Families not so much.
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Businesses hate disruption – they like monopoly, heavy government intervention (in their favor), and regulations which restrict new competition.
There can’t even be a conversation on anything as long as the free-market myth exists in this country.
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I am not sure what the free market ” myth” is. Certainly firms wish to be sheltered from competition themselves, but it is in societies interest to encourage competition where it can take place and place limits on firm behavior where competition is not sensible.
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Disruption also created the modern world. If I can quote my favorite swords swallowing health statistition, “it was the last 200 hundred years that changed the world”.
If you want to see why, have a look:http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world/
If you like that, and are interested in why I argue in favor of allowing as many firms as possible to move to Bangadesh and transform the economy there, you might want to watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
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TE, I will thank you not to disrupt my family, my community, or my grandchildren’s schools, and I would ask the same of Clay Christiansen. I will make my own decisions, thank you very much.
Not all disruptions are beneficial: think war, famine, plague, hurricanes, other natural or man-made disasters.
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dianerav: I heartily concur.
In my experience, the folks who advocate ‘no excuses’ and ‘shaking things up’ and the like invariably mean that others must bear the burdens and consequences of their ill-thought out ideas. They consider themselves above those sorts of ‘petty’ concerns because they aren’t in need of improvement or, if they are in need of some minor refinement, they should be gently coaxed and helped along.
They truly and sincerely don’t think or feel that they have to walk their own talk.
And in a related matter: you are about to hit half a million views of your blog in less than one month.
And you did it in a time-honored American fashion: by “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.”
Disrupting the comfort of the charterites/privatizers: now that’s the kind of disruption I can support!
🙂
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I disrupt no one. At best I am a slight inconvenience to some of my students.
Not all disruptions are beneficial, yet all large scale increases in welfare are disruptions. History will decide if the information revolution improves human welfare to the degree that the industrial revolution did, but I would not bet against it.
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TE,
Interesting thought about the benefits of the “knowledge” revolution in relation to the “industrial” revolution. Will have to digest that some more but at first glance I think I agree with you.
Duane
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No one is saying firms should not move to Bangladesh. They are saying a thousand people should not be killed in the name of wanton greed.
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But the policies that are suggested of boycotting firms that do business there or forcing firms to pay significantly higher wages will reduce the size of the garment industry there and force more women back into rural agriculture or the informal urban sector of the economy.
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“No one is saying firms should not move to Bangladesh.”
You must be joking.
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I read the report on Christensen “destruction theory” twice. It’s chilling to read high conceptual work totally devoid of moral or ethical design. The human pain of business policy is a vast area of reality invisible to him(and to business?); what counts is which company wins and how did they did it. Non-starters to this kind of intellect: The fact that famous label marketers in the West outsourced production to Bangladesh b/c labor there gets 20cents/hr and no labor unions allowed; the 1100+ crushed bodies are invisible. What will kill Apple?, Christensen worries, not what will kill Apple’s labor force. I’d say his reading of higher ed history is all wrong too b/c the emergence of the online ddisplacement of expensive fac with cheap screens was acdtually preceded by 40yrs by the displacement of expensive f/t fac with cheap p/t adjuncts. Digital delivery of teaching is an extension of the next big labor-cutting measure, not a singular breakthrough by itself. Cutting the wage package is the global obsession of globalization so it’s easy to see why Christensen is a darling of the private charter crowd which is now destroying public schools and the public sector. They found the niche and the tool that will kill the public schools’ monopoly and grossly lower the teacher wage package. The pvt charter schls sucking up public taxes and assets are analogous to what Christensen calls the “almost good enough is good enough” effect. Pvt charter schls overfinanced by tax levies and billionaire funds offer some parents a semi-exclusive alternative to the pub schl system–that is, “private-like” schools without pvt schl or catholic schl tuition b/c they suck off public taxes while and are given former pub schl bldgs for free. They are also mostly non-union so they cost less to run. These “private-like schools” appeal to a mass market of parents seeking advantages of real private schools for their children but unable to afford the 20K-50K pvt tuition bill. So, they are offered a “middle-market” item, the “private-like charter schl financed by pub funds but not regulated like other pub schls.” The “private-like charter schools” provide slightly smaller classes than do the public schools, and a closely-managed admissions process which effects a barely-under-the-radar process of targeted exclusion, excluding those children most hard or costly to teach or manage(ELLs, spec ed, behavioral, homeless, etc.). Should any such “difficult, costly, disruptive” students survive the admissions process, they can be “counseled out” later on. Thus, in this manner, the “private-like charter schools” offer parents lesser-copies of elite pvt schls, “almost-as-good-as” Dalton or Spence(not really, but marketed or represented as such)in lieu of under-funded, over-regulated “real public schools” where every child that walks in the door must be accepted. As long as teachers are unable to organize with parents for robustly funded, child-friendly real pub schls, parents are distinctly vulnerable to this marketing lure
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Should we just send the women working in the garment industry back to the country side? Are you comfortable with them being married off at 14?
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Should we let 14 year olds be locked in to factories, where they sit in front of sewing machines for 12 hours a day and then live in locked domitories when they are not at work.
(And should it be our choice anyway.)
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I most definitely agree that it should not be our choice, but boycotting goods made in Bangladesh and trying to prevent other folks from buying goods made there is an attempt to take the choice away from these young women. I do not think I know what is best for them.
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That’s not a choice in any real sense. Your frame is a perversion of the meaning of the word choice.
Would you wax philosophical over the choice of slaves to work on the plantation or run away ?
Firms could run safe factories in Bangladesh but they choose not to because they want as much profit and money as possible. Non of these retail firms are hurting, at all.
That is the real choice.
And please argue on your own merits, don’t post links to TED.
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Slavery is an entirely different issue because its defining characteristic is a lack of choice.
If the firms there are squeezing as much profit as possible out of their factories, they have expanded the workforce to the point where the cost of hiring another hour of labor is exactly equal to the revenue that is created by that hour of work. Increasing the cost of hiring labor will result in the company reducing the size of the workforce until it once again squeezes the most profit possible.
My concerns are twofold. First, there are women who would have been able to leave the traditional rural society and wrk in the garment industry who are no longer able to do that. Their life will be materially worse. Second, increasing wages to well above what these people can earn elsewhere in the country will create an informal sector of the economy where people will wait in the hope of getting one of these relatively attractive jobs. Making the formal sector (the garment industry in this case) salary higher will end up reducing the unregulated informal rate of pay.
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If disruption is such a grand thing, how is it that some of the biggest and best known German companies have been in business for upwards of 100 years?
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Dienne: a lot said in a few words.
Let me add this. Consider that the leading charterites/privatizers furiously promote, are handsomely rewarded for, and sternly mandate for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN a schooling qualitatively different from what they ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN. Why? Disruption [creative and otherwise] and its accompanying uncertainty is for us, not for them.
That is what it means to be a one of the ‘right sort’ of people. Their children ‘obviously’ deserve to choose from the broadest range of guaranteed educational opportunities [academic, artistic, athletic, social, etc.], delivered in just the right amounts of difficulty and ease by well qualified educators that nurture, strengthen, and prepare them for their future roles as the acknowledged and undisputed leaders of our country, nay, the world. Sadly, the vast majority of children [who most unfortunately come from the unwashed and undeserving majority], are only capable of minor improvement and growth through rewards and punishments, hence their parents should properly be grateful that their offspring are being pushed to develop the compliance, low-level skills and silence that will enable them to happily toil under the guidance of their ‘natural born’ leaders.
All with a veneer of scientific ‘objectivity.’ A felicitous way of putting it from Nicholas Lemann (THE BIG TEST, 2000): high-stakes standardized testing works on the national level as a mechanism to categorize, sort and route.
Unequally. Disruptively. Unfairly.
Disruption. Coming to a neighborhood near you [certain zip codes excepted!]
Finally, keep posting. I don’t always agree with you but I look forward to every posting.
🙂
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This transistor radio example is used in two of Cornell’s online executive leadership series—Strategic Thinking and Scenario Planning, both by Michael J. Hostetler.
The thing is, if we (public schools) are going to have a business model forced upon us whereby competitors (savvy in business thinking) present themselves, where before there really were none (because typically private schools have not been able to compete just because of the size of the public school entity), then in my mind those in charge of public schools and within public schools should try to understand these business models and apply them to come up with next steps. I know I have read bloggers who say the day public schools have to market themselves is the day it’s all over, and how we wish they would stay out of the education “business”—but they are not going to. So to me the best bet is apply the business models they use, figure out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats—-be innovative and be creative. Be the little guy they predict can sink the big guy. Because as the big guy, public school (it looks like) has sunk as we have always known it. We aren’t the big buy anymore. We’re the little start-up. So let’s start thinking like the little start-up. The fact that we “have to take everyone” is not a threat—it’s an opportunity. Who else can boast of that? Nobody. The fact that our teachers undergo years of training and internships is a plus. I know there are barriers. I know there are hurdles. (pay dependent on growth, etc.) But if we roll up our sleeves and think like business people we can get things back on track. It sure beats whining about it. And as my mother (a veteran teacher) always wisely told me: children will show up for school and they will need teachers to teach them. And there is no better indicator of whether a teacher is good than by how a child responds to them. We know what children respond well to (another strength we have). Those who are not sincere in their mission, will eventually fail. Eventually they will run out of teachers if they really do use models and methods that crash and burn through countless teachers (or people who think they want to be teachers). The pool of twenty-somethings wanting to teach will eventually not be enough.
I challenge every reader of the blog who hates what is happening to sit down and do a SWOT analysis of his or her school district. If you had to market your school, what would you say?
The post office has had to do this. It is not surprising that public schools do too. That and we need to resist, in my opinion, the USDOE stepping beyond reasonable boundaries. Two areas of lessons can be learned here. . .that from the government aspect, and that from the business aspect.
That’s the tactic I am taking. I am taking business classes. I want to understand this way of thinking. For that I will spend my own money with or without CEUs. With or without tenure.
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If you follow his theory the same fate is due the entire ed deform movement which has not become the status quo. And maybe capitalism itself ends up being disrupted at some point. This guy really a closet Marxist.
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That’s what I got out of it, too, Norm!
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I meant now become the status quo.
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Stratos City Dwellers who wish for Disruptors should be more careful what they wish for — just sayin’ …
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Oh Goody, it looks like we can add all this fuss about Disruption to our ever-growing list of red herrings and other distractions —
They keep us diverted with one foil after another. None of these options is good or bad in itself, except as it comes to be applied, exploited, or weaponized in actual practice.
The real questions we need to keep asking are —
Who’s in charge?
And to what end?
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Diane, I’ve been following your posts with great interest. I am a teacher and an erstwhile blogger myself. I wrote about this idea of creative destruction in education a few months back that may interest you.
http://mches.teachforus.org/2013/01/03/61-schumpeter-creative-destruction-and-imposing-markets-in-education/
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Businesses hate competition and go to great lengths to avoid it.
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Funny, when I am disruptive, it just pisses people off. Especially a certain admin…
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It took me a while to get to this… I’m not sure that all commenters read the 48 page white paper but at the end Christensen makes a case that disruption will eventually lead to more individualized learning, more equity, and greater cost effectiveness. While he offers quotes from Chubb and cites lots of charter schools that are featured in your blog, he does so because at this point they tend to be the ones who are moving fastest in terms of hybridization (as opposed to disruption). As he notes in the paper, most of the charters are NOT disruptive… the most disruptive schools are the ones who are serving “nonconsumers” e.g. drop outs, students attending small rural schools, and students who have no schools at all… He does not see disruption happening quickly in public schools because there are very few students who do not have access to a public school… my hunch is that colleges, which are increasingly unavailable due to cost constraints, are FAR more vulnerable to the disruptive forces described in his white paper. I found the white paper thought provoking in a good way. One take-away: if your state is moving away from Carnegie Units (a GOOD thing in my opinion) they are setting the stage for disruptive change.
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Disrupter, disrupt thyself …
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