Clayton Christensen, the leading advocate of DISRUPTION, will address the “National Summit on Education Reform,” sponsored by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence. He will speak on Thursday November 30 in Nashville, as Jeb’s group celebrates a solid decade of efforts to privatize public education. Don’t expect to see or hear about charter school frauds or the failure of vouchers to improve student test scores or the looting of public funds by virtual charter schools.
If you are going, be sure to read the debunking of disruption by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. She demonstrates that disruption is a fraud, a hoax. Even the business disruptions that Christensen boasts about were actually failures. “Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence….”
Read Judith Shulevitz’s takedown of disruption in The New Republic, and how it has emboldened those who want to destroy public education and diminish democracy. Eli Broad’s love of disruption produced the failed leadership of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.
Shulevitz wrote (in 2013):
“But when Broad’s “change agents” move into the institutions they’ve been taught to shake up, as dozens have now done, we can see how disruption, well, disrupts—not just “the status quo,” but peoples’ lives. Teachers quit en masse or are fired. Nearby schools close, forcing students to travel to distant ones. School boards divide and bicker. Parents picket. Broad-affiliated superintendents all over the country—Atlanta; Philadelphia; Rochester, New York; Sumter, South Carolina—have resigned or been forced out after no-confidence votes, corruption or cheating scandals, or, in one case, the discovery of alleged irregularities with a doctorate degree.”
Bringing a disruptor into your school district is like inviting an arsonist into your home. You will have change aplenty, but you will lose your home and possibly your family.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cross posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Master-of-Disruption-Will-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bush_Diane-Ravitch_Fraud_Fraud-170906-412.html
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See how easy it is to commit fraud and support fraud! Did you know there are FIFTEEN THOUSAND, EIGHT HUNDRED SEPARATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS in 52 states. Most people know little about their own school system.
Frauds https://dianeravitch.net/?s=fraud that are being perpetrated in the name of school reform are incredible. While the Trump circus distracts us, and the hurricanes get the media in a frenzy, the billionaires are dissecting the public schools, already divided.
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The only thing that guides the promoters of disruption in the conduct of business and education is that they don’t want to disrupt is their own class position of privilege. They want to control disruption for their self-interest. That is their only moral compass. It is a deeply selfish and dystopian philosophy of action.
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Only $599 to register.
I’d like to go and be a disruptor but can’t afford that fee.
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Duane,
Don’t pay the fee. Disrupt.
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Don’t go giving me any ideas now, Diane!
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Duane,
When did you become a rule-follower?
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I’d like to think that I follow the rule of the US Constitution in regards to equity and fairness for all.
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I’ll kick in a few bucks for a tank of gas to get you there, Duane.
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Thanks, Dienne!!
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We’ll start a GoDisruptMe page for you 😈
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Hell if I could sell about another 250 books I could break even on my Quixotic Quest to rid the world of the standards and testing regime and have enough to do the conference. Considering that I’ve actually sold 4 so far, I don’t see that happening. Oh, well tain’t the first time I’ve fulfilled the “fool and his money. . . ” adage.
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Tangential- former NFL player Anthony Gonzalez may be going to run as a Republican in Ohio’s 16th Congressional district. His prior employment was at an education technology company in the Bay Area. He’s a graduate of Stanford, which Is kissing cousins with the Hoover Institute.
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Disruption is the mantra of the hedge fund managers who are among the most amoral, craven people on the planet. Their relentless assaults destabilize their target. They are not interested in education; they are interested in extracting public funds from public schools. They don’t care about how many people are collateral damage, and they certainly are not good citizens. They always put their individual gain above the common good.
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Close to 10 years ago I said “If public education doesn’t change, it will perish.” My words ring true today. That is why the artificial charter and voucher schools have gain notariety. Although they don’t change at all, they deceive and that gives the perception of change. It’s time to make public schools the true innovator they must be. Public schools are the only ones with the talent to change the system and philosophy of education to truly meet the needs of all children.
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caplee,
I attach more significance to the billions poured into privatization than to anything that has happened in public education
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That too
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Innovation would get a ton of free publicity. Many pieces to the puzzle
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Public education has been innovating from the start. The main difference between that innovation and the supposed innovation coming from the charter/private sector is dollars spent on public relations and advertising. The private charter sector has the public sector trounced in that regard. And the fact that public schools choose to spend their money on the students and not PR is a good thing.
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Ugh. Isn’t this group of faddish people discredited yet? Give it 6 more months and they’ll all be following some other fad. I think “disruption” is past its sell-by date everywhere outside of ed reform. Stale.
It is amazing how many different ways ed reform comes up with to say “privatization”
Why not just use the original term instead of dressing it up in all these sappy words?
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Last year’s 2016 National Summit in Washington, D.C., was attended by more than 1,000 education leaders from 47 states. Keynote and general session speakers included Governor Jeb Bush, 66th U.S. Secretary of State and ExcelinEd Board Member Dr. Condoleezza Rice, education innovators Sal Khan, Dr. Todd Rose, Diane Tavenner and Dr. Angela Duckworth, and former U.S. secretaries of education Rod Paige, Bill Bennett and Arne Duncan.
Do they deliberately exclude public school parents and teachers when they’re “reinventing” the public education system they didn’t attend and don’t send their children to, or is this an oversight?
A “movement” to “reinvent” public education that excludes 90% of people who are actually INVOLVED in public schools- only a think tank could come up with something so ridiculous.
Gosh, I wonder what the best and brightest have planned for our children. I hope it’s better than the cheap online math videos they were selling last year.
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Chiara,
Let it not be forgotten that Joel Klein and Condi Rice were leaders of a group that issued a statement saying that public schools were so awful that they were a threat to national security. The only way to save the nation, the panel report said, was 1) privatization via charters and vouchers; and 2) adoption of the Common Core.
I responded here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/do-our-public-schools-threaten-national-security/
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Will any of the Best and Brightest mention the unfashionable “government schools” that serve 90% of children?
Other than as a burgeoning market for ed tech product, I mean. We get that our schools are big buyers. Can’t survive on just charters! Have to roll out product to the masses!
Jeb likes online learning for the lower and middle classes. It’s much cheaper to stick the lower classes in front of a screen than provide health insurance for teachers.
I bet Jeb had a human being as a teacher. Why doesn’t he want my son to have one?
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Chiara,
“I bet Jeb had a human being as a teacher. Why doesn’t he want my son to have one?”
Answer: You do not have $$$$$…want to keep the rest of us DOWN TRODDEN. They have theirs and want more … GREED plus plain selfish and mean. The RICH think they are royalty and want slaves. Who wil do their work?
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Clayton Christensen’s ideas as interpreted by others for K-12 education are not original but part of the ritual promotion of tech as always better than human judgment and teacher collective bargaining as collaboration gone wrong.
Here is an example of actual disruption, mislabeled “Partnership for Educational Justice.” Begin quote from Politico, today.
By Caitlin Emma | 09/06/2017 10:00 AM EDT With help from Kimberly Hefling, Mel Leonor and Benjamin Wermund
EXCLUSIVE: GROUPS TEAM UP TO MAKE BIGGER MARK: Two reform groups are teaming up to drive change in state education policy by using the courts. The nonprofit 50CAN is joining forces with the Partnership for Educational Justice, a nonprofit founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, which is known for lawsuits targeting state policies the group says allow ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom. The partnership will allow 50CAN to get involved in litigation for the first time. And it will allow the Partnership’s small staff to draw on 50CAN’s policy expertise to better determine where lawsuits might be successful.
The Partnership for Educational Justice will retain its name and pro bono legal help, but 50CAN will serve as PEJ’s fiduciary board. Both organizations will continue their push against teacher tenure laws in three states – Minnesota, New Jersey and New York – and may look at litigation on other issues, like school funding.
“50CAN has never done any impact litigation work, so we see an opportunity to provide the backend support for their work in a way that helps them go further,” said 50CAN CEO Marc Porter Magee. “I really think the next set of successes in education reform are going to come from these kinds of collaborations.” Ralia Polechronis, executive director of the Partnership for Educational Justice, said “the beauty of a partnership like this is that PEJ can take advantage of the policy expertise that 50CAN has at a very local level.”
The Partnership for Educational Justice has yet to prevail in lawsuits aimed at ending teacher tenure policies in Minnesota, New Jersey or New York. And the organization suffered a setback Monday when the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld a dismissal of its lawsuit, The Star Tribune reports. Porter Magee said the lawsuits aren’t intended to bring about quick change, but are “long-term commitments.” End Quote.
So there it is, plain as day. “Successes in education reform” is defined as getting rid of teacher tenure laws. All wonderful things in education flow from this “long term commitment” to end collective bargaining among teachers.
Drive down the cost of labor by marketing tech for de-personalized learning, pay the least possible for human teachers. Teachers who will just have to get used to working at low pay without continuing contracts and erratic “on call” schedules.
Notice that teaching is also a profession dominated by women and that this effort, launched by a woman of great privilege, is marketing the legal challenges to teacher unions paid for by the “Partnership for Educational Justice.” So far, the only measure of educational justice is that the anti-union, anti-teacher have failed in the courts.
Campbell Brown and her 50Can friends are supporters of injustice for teachers. Why not just sue every union, including those for first responders, for firefighters, for police officers, for nurses, for all of the workers in civil service positions? Perhaps they will.
For the time being 50CAN will work for union-busting only for teachers.
IN case you did not know, 50CAN is an umbrella organization that enlists state and local foundations to campaign for privately managed charter schools and to close “failing” public schools so charter schools can expand.
In 2016, 50CAN merged with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst to push for charter schools, and the five week wonder “Teach for America” temps passed off as if well prepared teachers, and other schemes to demolish public schools and teacher unions…not merely disrupt them. So these three groups– StudentsFirst, 50Can, and The Partnership for Educational Justice are now working in concert, as partners, to destroy public education and treat teachers as disposable temps as if this agenda is a matter of securing “educational justice.” Let’s call it a good example of Trumpianism with alt-fact labeling of the whole “partnership” effort.
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In the case of so-called education reform, Disruptive Innovation is just a euphemism for Smash and Grab.
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