Clayton Christensen |

CNN.com published a piece by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn today, June 2, 2009, on the recent federal stimulus funds for education–and on what the proper role of the federal government should be in in transforming our schools. You can read the commentary, “Don’t prop up failing schools,” here. Let us know what you think by commenting on the article, and we can also continue the conversation on this blog as well.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that roughly $5 billion of the $19.5 billion in E-Rate funds committed to schools and libraries from 1998 to 2006 were never spent. This article from eSchool News does a good job of summarizing.

For those who don’t know, the E-Rate program helps schools and libraries pay for Internet connectivity. If roughly 25 percent of funds over that period were not used, does that indicate that schools don’t need the funds?

Far from it. Many schools lag in their Internet connectivity, and of those that are hooked up to high-speed connections, many don’t have enough capacity to handle large groups of people online at the same time. This of course limits the ability of online learning to transform education into a student-centric system as we write about since it limits how robust and dynamic an online learning experience can be.

So why would these funds not be claimed then? There are a few reasons, which range from the fact that the applicant’s needs changed or they needed fewer dollars than they applied for to the fact that the sheer complexity and bureaucratic red-tape in the program often caused people to leave money on the table—or, speaking from what I’ve heard on the road—not apply.

This suggests a few things. First, as we think about sending more funding down for broadband, we ought to figure out ways to first use funds already allocated for the cause.

Second, we can learn some valuable lessons from North Carolina’s work with E-Rate. The state of North Carolina saw that many smaller districts would not apply for the E-Rate funds because of the bureaucratic red tape and they just didn’t have the time or manpower to devote to it. As a result, the state stepped in and helped the districts apply for the funds, which has helped North Carolina extend broadband across the state to get every school online.

This effort of course also suggests that the process for applying for funds for broadband needs to be simplified.

And lastly, the federal government should push districts to install the bandwidth necessary not just for today’s needs, but also in anticipation of tomorrow’s. This might include installing wireless and extending that access to the broader communities, not just the school buildings, for example. When we invest in infrastructures of change today, we should do so with an eye toward the future, not just the present.

Attendees at the Milken Institute Global Conference this past week were privileged on Tuesday to hear from three Nobel Laureates—Gary Becker, Roger Myerson, and Myron Scholes—over a fascinating lunchtime discussion.

At some point, Michael Milken, who was playing the role of moderator, brought up the topic of K-12 education. Becker in particular made some interesting points, including some pontificating on how vouchers would improve our schools.

Regardless of your viewpoint on that, it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider reasons why vouchers and many other reforms have not pervaded and transformed public education, and why we have instead only been “tinkering toward utopia.”

One explanation could have come from Becker’s right in Myerson, an expert in game theory. Game theory helps us to predict what others’ corresponding actions will be if we take a certain action. We can use it to predict whether certain paths of reform are likely to be successful or instead to meet with such fierce resistance that they stand little to no chance of succeeding.

Game theory accounts for the power of entrants to beat incumbents through a disruptive strategy—where they use asymmetric motivation to their advantage. By offering a product or service that does not make sense for the incumbent to offer, the entrant creates a situation where the incumbent’s motivation is not to do what the entrant is motivated to do; rather the incumbent is motivated to flee “up market” and cede more and more ground to the disruptive entrant.

This helps to understand why vouchers and charters themselves are not disruptive and have not swept in to transform U.S. education. We write about this in the current issue of the School Choice Advocate in our article, “The Transformative Properties of School Choice.” By attacking players in the established public-school system head on, vouchers and charters do not create asymmetric motivation, as many established players are highly motivated to fight them (although these attempted reforms may pressure the system to improve itself and help pave the way for true disruptions, even if they themselves don’t ultimately win the day).

A few lessons from economics could have helped predict that.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Obama made education a cornerstone of his remarks—and properly so given the urgent need to improve education in this country. Obama also made a point of saying that it isn’t enough just to give education more resources; schools also need more reform. This echoes a piece that Clay and I authored last week. Obama elaborated that offering preschool options isn’t enough, for example. We have to continue to improve them, he said, as well as cut “education programs that don’t work.”

We hope that concrete action follows this encouraging rhetoric. One thing we remain worried about is that the money in the stimulus package targeted for schools will be used to fund a continuation of the status quo. This is borrowed money. Charging education isn’t the same thing as changing it. Budgetary crises sometimes compel us to adopt disruption—which can lead to wholesale transformation of a system to something that serves many more people far better and far more affordably.

A point that Obama also touched upon in the speech is the fact that the price of tuition for post-secondary education is higher than ever. This is a big problem. But as we’ve pointed out in many posts on this site (here and here, just to give two examples), the solution isn’t to subsidize tuition to expensive colleges through scholarships or loans. If we do that, all we’re doing once again is charging education, not changing it. We haven’t made the system any less expensive; someone is still paying for it.

Industries only become more affordable through disruption. We need teaching universities and online universities to take more market share with a more affordable model to bless the lives of many more people. Subsidies will only delay the transformation to models like Andrew Jackson University and StraighterLine.

Fred Barnes interviewed Jeb Bush for the Wall Street Journal’s weekend interview, and in the article Barnes reveals what Florida’s former governor is reading at the moment on his Amazon Kindle—Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

This is yet again another flattering moment for us, but the whole interview is worth reading. As Barnes says it, “[Bush is] an unorthodox Republican who latches onto reform ideas wherever he finds them.”

Bush makes some thought-provoking points throughout the piece. He says rightly that education should move beyond Carnegie units to a mastery-based system. This is one of the most promising things online learning can bring, and it is something that should be embedded in policy for all online learning programs. He also recognizes the potential of online learning to move us toward a customized, student-centric system:

“‘It’s not based on seat time,’ he says. ‘It’s whether you accomplished the task. Now we’re like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don’t have a flourishing education system that’s customized. There’s a whole world out there that didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don’t cast young people aside.’”

Bush also praises Meg Whitman later in the piece as someone who would be a good governor because, among other things, she “lived and managed and led through the disruptive changes that are going on in our lives.”

As the governor during the initial growth of the biggest disruptive innovation in education policy in the form of the Florida Virtual School, he is probably in one of the better positions to know.

I had planned originally to blog again about higher education, but this has been a busy few days of activity around the book and its themes so I thought it would be worthwhile posting some links to the various events and presentations and offering a few brief reflections.

Clay and I gave a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute along with Jason Hwang on the 27th titled “Disruptive Innovation in Education and Health Care” (video and audio are online here). Checker Finn was on the education panel with us as well which made for a lively discussion.  Education Week’s Andrew Trotter wrote an article about the event as well.

The next day I was in Arizona where I had the opportunity to keynote NACOL’s Virtual School Symposium. This was an exciting and informative event with somewhere around 1,100 people in attendance. It’s a conference that, just like online learning, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years.

I’ve said this before, but NACOL, the International Association for K12 Online Learning, is doing some great work in this space. The organization is a great source of information and is helping sponsor useful research to further the field.

Among the worthwhile reports that I recommend highly and that you can find from NACOL’s site are the latest issue of Threshold magazine and the latest Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report (just came out on October 23rd). These reports help show that online learning really is booming and will help any reader understand what it really is.

There has been lots of activity on the Web about these events—many praising and others with insightful criticisms. One of the most interesting things, however, that I observe is the difference in conversations taking place. When you are in the Beltway or talking with people who have been in the thick of education for years, although many do see the promise online learning holds, many also don’t believe it’s happening and growing in disruptive fashion. If you are in the actual space and seeing the number of entrepreneurs and districts diving in and having successes, however, you see a very different picture. This is not necessarily surprising given how disruptive innovation works, but it is interesting.

Lastly, Scott McLeod, an associate professor and coordinator of the Educational Administration Program at Iowa State University and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), delivered a great presentation on the Web at the K12 Online Conference. His thesis in essence is that the coming disruptive changes necessitate new leadership models for schools. It’s a 20-minute presentation that summarizes some core concepts from our work and is well worth watching.

Our blog today brings us from D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein—two chancellors cut from a similar, if not the same, cloth. Klein has been a mover and shaker in turning the New York City schools upside down and pushing reform at every opportunity since he took the helm.

He has achieved a lot of change and sparked much controversy, too (and we’d certainly love to hear your viewpoints on him).

In the New York Sun on September 18, 2008, an article discussed education books that have proven meaningful and inspirational to him. And—yes, here’s some shameless self-promotion—he cited our book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. For such an influential education reform leader to mention our book is quite an honor for us. You can read about it here: http://www.nysun.com/new-york/when-it-comes-to-new-inspiration-chancellor-klein/86133/.

Some other books he cited were William Ouchi’s influential book, Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need, as well as David Whitman’s new book, Sweating the Small Stuff. The article focuses mostly on Ouchi’s book, but Whitman’s new volume is also quite interesting. In a future white paper forthcoming from Innosight Institute, I will address some of Whitman’s points.

What other education books have inspired you? Why? And what common themes do you notice in Joel Klein’s choices?

There are a lot of features right now about Michelle Rhee, the D.C. school chancellor, as she enters her second year at the helm. Everyone from PBS to the Washington Post to CNN is writing about her. Her leadership is providing an interesting case study for Chapter 8 of Disrupting Class. Take a look at the Washington Post article, “Better or Worse, it’s Rhee’s School System Now” to see why.

In our book Disrupting Class, we describe how the only way for managers to create change in an environment where there is disagreement on both what their goals are and how the world works is to use the tools of power. And to do that, they have to accumulate enough power to wield them. In a democracy, that generally isn’t possible.

But Rhee seems to be doing her best to do just this so that she can create real and lasting change (for better or for worse, as the article headline reminds us – what do others think?). Just consider some of the lines from the article:

1) “Rhee was able to move so quickly because of the unilateral power granted her by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who has staked his political future on fixing the schools, which he won control over in June 2007. Fenty (D) has given her political cover by warning agency heads that they risk losing their jobs if they tell her no.

Under the new governance system, Rhee reports only to Fenty, not a school board.”

2) ““It’s like ushering in a scary era where we don’t have a say in what’s going on,” said Jones, who chaired the Burroughs restructuring team, a panel that advises the principal. “It just feels like the people are losing their voice . . . that we’re losing a grip on democracy.””

3) “Some critics say she operates the $1 billion system like the private nonprofit she founded before taking the chancellor job — with little accountability to the public.

As she has consolidated power, she has weakened the authority of principals and instructional superintendents, administrators who oversee clusters of schools, and diminished school-based decision-making.

Asked recently by a PBS reporter whether she considers herself a benevolent dictator, she said: “If by dictator, you mean somebody who, at the end of the day, is fully comfortable being held accountable for, you know, the results and is going to be incredibly decisive about the direction that we’re heading in, then, yes.””

Now that is power.