If your school has been closed, if the staff was fired in a “turnaround,” you have experienced the theory of disruptive innovation, which is associated with Harvard Business Professor Clayton Chistensen.
Or perhaps your neighborhood school fell victim to Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction.”
Just so you can see these ideologies from a critical perspective, be sure to read Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s critique of Christianson’s work on disruptive innovation, which first appeared in “The New Yorker.” She challenges his thesis and argues that those bold start-ups flamed out, while stable institutions live on. And yet the idea of disruption has become wildly popular, as we now see in education policy.
Charters and vouchers are disruptive. Firing entire staffs is disruptive. The results of these “innovations” have been unimpressive and sometimes disastrous, yet their champions continue to demand more and more. To understand why, read this article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Ravitch and Jill Lepore are the working historians I most admire. Both write brilliant books, and they also bring their well researched ideas to the general public through websites like this and publications such as the New Yorker. Starting with our first MBA, business school graduate, George W. Bush, to our current administration, the B-school graduates’ outlook on education (and everything else) has dwarfed all other viewpoints, even, counter-intuitively, after the Great Recession, caused, I would argue, by B-school graduates. I hope pieces such as these and this website are the beginning of a coherent narrative representing a massive pushback against this wrongheaded set of beliefs.
One of the best book titles ever was one chosen by Robert Graves for a collection of his essays. He called the collection
Difficult Questions, Easy Answers
Answers come easily to the ignorant. Wrong answers, but answers.
Bob Shepherd: not an old dead Greek guy but he’ll do in a pinch:
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” [H. L. Mencken]
And notice this one inconvenient fact re “creative disruption” and “innovative disruption” and “disruptive innovation”: the, er, facts don’t back it up.
But what the hey! When one is a member of the BBBBC [BusyBody Billionaire Boys Club], for example, there are plenty of folks [aka employees and those looking for handouts] that are eager to tell you what you want to hear.
Ain’t life grand?
😎
Disruption does occur, of course. There are many, many examples. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke compares changes in sociopolitical systems to demolishing an old structure as part of a renovation:
“If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable.”
How might they be rendered miserable? By unfathomed factors.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
While we should constantly be subjecting underlying assumptions to critical scrutiny, we should also be cautious to avoid hubris and hasty decision making when dealing with complex systems.
I love Graves’s title because it represented what was for him a rare moment of humility, a recognition that his essays were essays in the root sense of that word–incomplete, speculative attempts or forays.
Re. Your Burke quote… I think history teaches us that revolution (and disruption) tend to replace what we believe to be horrible mediocrity with that which is truly evil… It’s the rare exception that disruption ends up positive. And that makes sense. The universe doesn’t follow rules where catastrophe is good.
Your point is well made, Doug. How short a period of time elapsed between the Russian Revolution, with all its promises, and the Holdomor famine/Ukrainian genocide!
Often, however, a judgment regarding the consequences depends upon the time frame that one is considering–the immediate consequences or the long-term ones. The dinosaurs get wiped out. Catastrophe. Little furry creatures get niches to expand into. Lovely if you happen to be a descendant of little furry creatures.
Ah, how to guarantee you’re a furry creature? (Very funny way to describe it, by the way.)
The consequences of catatrosphic changes are not usually very good for most people going through them. Long before the Holomodor, in the Civil War following the Bolshevit Revolution conditions were horrific. In a few years after the French Revolution the economy collapsed about 50% with widespread famine and violence. In order to get food to eat the French invaded the Rhineland – “exporting their misery” as it was said. France did not fully recover from the economic effects of the French Revolution until about 1840.
On the other hand declining cultures may be doomed to collapse in any case and ultimately such collapse may even have positive effects. Joseph Taintor states that the standard of living for common people in 6th century Italy after the collapse of the Roman empire was higher than in the 5th century.
Sure hope one of my former professors reads this. He assigned this to a bunch of education master’s students in a class I was TA’ing and I was horrified. Not only at him and his ardent belief in it, but also at the teachers/students who agreed with them. How could they possibly think that disruption at this scale – i.e. firing and replacing an entire staff – was good for kids? But then, he’d never taught, even though he was teaching an education class…
Disruptive Innovation has as a corollary “destructive change replaces one set of problems with another equal to, or more severe, than the original”.
Counter examples are everywhere to disprove the theory. Stable, long lived companies and brands that quietly exist through savvy leadership, incremental improvements, and careful, deliberate planning with corporate self-discipline. Sadly, business schools thrive on pop theories and selective, anecdotal observations. Give me a professor who has worked his/her way up the corporate ladder in a solid, centuries old firm over an ivory towered “innovator”.
Fogyism? Who cares. The reality is change through innovation stands on the shoulders of giants, not by knocking them over and stomping on them.
MathVale: in baseball terms, a base-clearing four-bagger.
You knocked it out of the park!
😎
I remember first seeing Christensen’s name in the late 1990s. The buzzphrase wasn’t “disruptive innovation,” but “disruptive technology.” And the “disruptive technology” of the day was “network-attached storage,” which was a relatively new type of data storage system that consisted of simple computers that could be stacked or linked to expand storage capacity. The computers were simple and single-purpose: they did nothing but store data. And they were modular, so you only had to buy what you needed and could expand as necessary. The darling of the “network-attached storage” sector was a company called Network Appliance. If you look at a NTAP chart from, say, 1995 to 1999, it looks like it’s approaching a vertical line. Christensen got hired by Merrill Lynch and sat on a tech advisory board. I’m not exactly sure what he did on that board, but it may not be a coincidence that Merrill’s computer hardware analyst started promoting Network Appliance as a purveyor of “disruptive technology” that would ultimately unseat EMC as the established, dominant player in the storage market.
Anyway, according to Christensen, the point was not that disruptive technologies are “better” technologies. The point was that they are rough, unsophisticated, and often buggy, but are also cheap and simple enough to deploy that they get a foothold in an industry, and then, before you know it, they take over. It wasn’t about improvement, or even “innovation” (from an engineering process perspective).
I see Christensen’s branched way out from what, back then, seemed like a very narrow point that was most applicable to computer technology. I don’t know how seriously he’s taken in his field or in the tech business anymore. But I think this basic point is interesting to note: that “disruptive” technologies are not disruptive because they’re better.
But disruption isn’t the goal; money is the goal and in order to get their hands on it, they have to destroy, defame, debase, vilify everything else. They know they are spouting lies, but they don’t care who or what gets harmed in their wake. The are driven by greed and greed alone. They are masterful at rhetoric and diabolic in their actions and deeds.
Two years ago the Las Vegas Review Journal made a big deal and highlighted weekly articles about the turnaround schools, showing the wonderful changes going on there. Our ultra reform minded superintendent and board were cheerleading this innovation. They swore success was inevitable, so they dis some things they should have done anyway, like repair toilets, paint hallways… In the end, after two years, test scores went down, staff has left, and there is no mention in the news of the great turnaround schools. They are considering turning them around again. Persistence is one trait they seem to possess in abundance.
Old teacher: Last week, the Review Journal published a three-part series profiling a student at Chaparral High, one of the turn around schools, and one where I taught 18 years ago. Did you read that? Test scores and graduation rates went up, not because they fired staff and hired new, but because, as you say, the school received more funding for building maintenance, wrap around social services, tutoring and more. But this one student still didn’t graduate due to crushing problems at home, reinforcing the fact that poverty is the problem for low performance in some schools, not the teachers. I found this article interesting, given the paper’s disdain for teachers and praise for reform and charter schools in every single editorial on education.
Thanks for the update, I have been gone the last few weeks. Could it be that the RJ may be seeing a glimmer of light? Be still my heart! Thanks Regina, I’ll look for the article. I just remember all the glaring headlines of “The turnaround schools” featured weekly.
It’s a living.
One of many gems from the historian Jill Lapore.
” Innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.”
The promotion of books by economists and aspiring business gurus is amazing. So is the rapid and uncritical uptake of the typical fare in these books–slogans, bullet lists, case studies, tunnel vision, any posturing that might be branded as a theory.
When people ask me about innovation and art education, they usually expect some easy-to-repeat justification for teaching art in this era where this word is “hot stuff” even it the concept is rarely examined. I almost always disrupt the expectation of happy talk.
Among innovators with some training in art and hope for fame I just start with Adolph Hitler. We have freeways from a prototype developed under his leadership. We have suburbs from another prototype–planned communities with homes completed by a driveway and garage for a Volkswagen–people’s wagon. We have also a massive campaign that combined ridicule with artistic censorship and every imaginable technique of aesthetic persuasion to muster support for a utopian agenda. That agenda also, of course, included the Holocaust.
Many readers of this blog are engaged in trying to disrupt the propaganda campaigns launched by people who care less about students, teachers, and public education than making profits, ensuring that schools are segregated, and by all means necessary infused with an ethos that is “strictly academic” and “rigorous” and measured by “impacts.”
Propagandists want “the American people” to believe that teachers are untrustworthy, uninformed, unfit for their jobs, ineffective, need to be micromanaged, and also subject firing if they fail to produce expected gains in test scores–euphemistically called “student growth” and treated as equivalent to “teacher effectiveness.”
If there is a proper place for disruptive innovation in education it might begin with criticizing this language and related jargon of the day Much of it has been imported into education from economists. The econometric turn in education has brought with it an insidious disruption and corruption of speech that fails to address the humanity of students and honor forms of education that are likely to inspire them.
“This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “
Will they offer a “Doctor of Disruption” degree (DoD?)
How about a “Master of Disruption”? (MaD)
A “Bachelor of Disruption”? (BaD?)
Business schools (especially Harvard) produce such world-class “science”. I can see the Nobel committee will have to add a Nobel Disruption Prize (awarded for what is judged to be “Great contributions to the disruption of the human race”
Personally, I think “disruption” is a perfect name for education reform — and “disrupters” for the ones engaged in it. They are like the kid at the back of your class who is always trying to disrupt the lesson.
They never add anything of value. Just noise.
Touché!
From the census bureau:
“The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations.
“STEM graduates have relatively low unemployment, however these graduates are not necessarily employed in STEM occupations,” said Liana Christin Landivar, a sociologist in the Census Bureau’s Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch.
According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. About 26 percent of physical science majors; 15 percent of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors; 10 percent of psychology majors; and 7 percent of social science majors were employed in STEM.
At 9.1 million, the college major with the most graduates was business, while multidisciplinary studies was the major with the smallest number of graduates at 275,000.”
We have A LOT of “business” graduates in this country, which may be why we try to cram everything and anything into a business framework.
Anything Arne Duncan says, IMMEDIATELY go and check it with either the census dept. or the labor dept. They have real numbers 🙂
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/employment_occupations/cb14-130.html#.U8MO7NuJ3bI.twitter
Interesting. I also just ran into this article:
The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture
I spent 10 years working as a programmer in the high tech industry (not in Silicon valley but in the Boston area,which has many similarities) and have seen quite a bit of the “I’m better, smarter and more creative than everyone else on the planet so you should bow down before me” mentality.
These folks have a very warped sense of their own worth and have a particularly bad habit of thinking that simply because they have been successful at one thing (programming a computer), they are necessarily good at (indeed experts at) and knowledgeable about everything.
Gates has this mentality in spades (watch what his former partner Paul Allen had to say on 60 Minutes), which is what allows him to come charging like a Bill into a china shop waving his Common Core tail around and snorting that he — and only he — knows how to “fix what is wrong with education” (with the implication that teachers know nothing and should just shut up and be happy if they are able to retain their job through the good graces of His Holiness and his hackolytes.
And there is actually a very big irony involving some of these folks. They are not even very good at programming. Some of them are actually “hacks”, producing software that is buggy, is hard to use, and crashes a lot and is generally a disorganized mess (ring any bells?)
I’d actually put Bill Gates in the latter category. — with the hacks. And I am hardly alone in that regard. I’ve worked with some of the cream of the crop in the programming business and many of them referred to Microsoft with condescension (calling it Microslop, for example).
Yes. Microsoft never innovated, just exploited. Genius opportunists. It was all about that stock price and the carrot of options..
I, too, worked a couple decades in software engineering and security. Every newly minted techie thinks they will be the next Jobs or that hoodied guy at Facebook. Chronic NIH (not invented here) was an epidemic with complications from acute hubris. Most burn out or are promoted to the highest level of their incompetence. Terrible management practices abound. Our design meetings were general p&$$&^@ matches to see who could out think the next guy (there are VERY few women in software engineering) with the most complex, convoluted cranial creation.
wdf1
What a great article!!!!! Thanks for sharing it.
I read this article after Ms. Lepore was named “Truthdigger of the Week” and wrote a blog post (http://waynegersen.com/2014/07/10/disrupting-disruption/) that incorporated a comment I left on Truthdig.
“My take: “disruptive innovation” enables large swaths of our population to ignore the problems of poverty and government underfunding. It makes intuitive sense to people who’ve witnessed radical changes in their personal use of technology that disadvantaged children should be able to pull themselves out of poverty if they learn how to take advantage of these technological advances and that government service providers, like the innovation-resistent corporations, NEED to be disrupted and replaced by nimble and forward thinking private sector start-ups. We’ve substituted our faith in each other and our faith in the government with faith in technology.”
But as I noted in the post, I DO believe public education needs to take greater advantage of technology going forward and I DO fear that if we fail to do so we may drive more and more engaged and/or technologically savvy parents out of our system and into non-public charters who may ultimately figure out better ways to integrate technology and personal face-to-face instruction.
What public education and especially children in the public schools need is not creative disruption, but creative stability. Learning takes place in stable environments. Children need stable environments to learn. Disruption (closing schools, firing teachers, rapid teacher turnover, test flavor of the month) all have costs in terms of children learning. I explored the concept of “creative stability” here:
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2014/05/creative-stability-better-plan-for.html
“Disruptive innovation,” “creative disruption”–oxymoronic (especially moronic) voodoo
words meaning, simply, disruption and chaos. There is an excellent book that I referred people to several months ago on this blog (written, I think, by someone w/the last name Oliver–? It’s a recently published book, so one should be able to find it.) It’s about how the business world runs itself, using such idiotic methods, how they do NOT work, & yet meeting with denial from corporate heads & other administrators (you know, the Einstein definition of insanity). STOP.THIS.NOW.LEAVE OUR KIDS ALONE!!!!!