In its May 7, 2008 issue, Education Week writes about Innosight Institute and founders Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn’s book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Click here to read it online.
The article details the book’s case for how online education is emerging as a disruptive force in America’s public schools. This disruptive innovation could overturn the prevailing monolithic teaching model — a model that exists because of the interdependencies from forces such as the textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment.
Paul D. Houston, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, based in Arlington, Va., is quoted as saying the application of disruptive innovation to education will “force people to get out of the box to look at solutions.”
And Adam Urbansky, the president of the Rochester, N.Y., affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and an AFT vice president, calls the book and the approach “brilliant” in the piece.
Innosight Institute will take the research from the book as a starting point to help foundations target “innovations that will have an impact on the structure and performance of schools,” Christensen says.
He goes on to say, “Whenever an industry gets disrupted, people always consume more, because it’s more affordable, it’s simpler, easier to access, to customize to what they need,” he said. “What a wonderful thing, that we would consume more education.”
