Clayton Christensen |

We wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to David Brooks’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. Since the Times published this set of letters recently in response to the column, I thought I’d put our letter up here. It’s below.

Dear Editor,

In his July 29, 2008 column, “The Biggest Issue,” David Brooks points to a dire problem threatening the United States’ future: lack of educational progress.

The regression that he writes about afflicts many countries as they reach prosperity. As we recount in Disrupting Class, when countries reach prosperity, the extrinsic motivation for students and educators to tackle the hard subjects like science and engineering dissipates. The New York Times reported on this exact trend in its May 17, 2008 article, “High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers.”

To bring students back into the fold and into subjects like engineering, we must allow students to learn these subjects in ways that are intrinsically motivating. One way to do this is to customize the learning to the way each student learns best—something that computer-based or online learning has great potential to do.

Brooks is right that early childhood learning is vital. The problem, however, with many early childhood programs is that unless they employ an individual surrogate parent who has the instinct and aptitude to engage in hundreds of hours of face-to-face so-called “language dancing” for each child, the programs will not work and the result will be more wasted dollars.

Sincerely,

Clayton M. Christensen
Michael B. Horn
Curtis W. Johnson

We did also have a letter published in the Washington Post today. You can read it here.

“Computer software is too rules-based. It can’t really adapt to students. You lose too much if you rely on computer-based learning.”

This is one push back we hear against the vision of student-centric learning technology that we put forth in Disrupting Class.

We have many responses, of course, but one of them is that technology always starts at the low end of performance and, over time, predictably improves to do more complicated tasks and jobs. One might not be able to envision how it will improve and what it will be able to do, but we can say with certainty it will improve.

For example, what if computers could read student emotions and adjust accordingly in the future? Sound far-fetched? It might not be.

There are many examples of cognitive tutors that are emerging that can read student emotions. According to a recent article in eSchool News, University of Massachusetts researchers received a grant of $890,419 in June from the National Center for Education Research to advance technology that uses sensors to detect student emotions.

How does it work? According to the article:

“The tutoring program uses sensors placed in a student’s seat, in the computer mouse, and on a student’s wrist to detect arousal through skin conductance, a common measure for stress response. Conductance gives researchers a clear picture of the subject’s nervous-system activity. The program also will use cameras to detect smiles and facial expressions that connote negative feelings, such as anxiety or frustration.”

Just imagine the exciting possibilities here. What other research efforts and products are out there like this? How might this revolutionize learning?

In a telling sign of the growth of and the potential for online learning, for-profit Edison Schools Inc. has jumped on the bandwagon with the acquisition of Provost Systems Inc., a company that offers online courses and online learning management tools for schools, according to a July 1, 2008 article in Education Week.

Edison will also change its name to EdisonLearning to reflect its expansion beyond its controversial management of public schools. It will be able to offer online courses to students directly, as well as through existing schools and districts. According to the article and Edison’s CEO, Terry Stecz, Edison wants to become “the preferred partner for large urban systems, states, or cities.”

The article quotes Trace A. Urdan, the managing director of Baltimore-based investment bank Signal Hill Capital Group LLC, and a longtime analyst of the for-profit education industry, as saying that although “Edison’s new direction might not be motivated by a desire to minimize controversy, it could very well have that effect.”

“They started at the much more difficult end of the spectrum, and now they’re moving into the less controversial, arguably easier end,” Urdan said in the article. “It’s getting away from the idea of, ‘We’re here to do what you do better than you do’ and into, ‘We’re selling you something you need and don’t have.’”

This insight is a classic hallmark of disruption—and stands in sharp contrast to Edison’s initial approach, which was not disruptive. As Disrupting Class chronicles, disruption takes a simple product that is “good enough” and offers it in a place where the incumbent in a market place, in this case public school districts, are relieved that they don’t have to offer the product or service themselves.

Generally this happens as entrants target “non-consumption,” places where consumers have literally no other option, so the incumbents weren’t planning on offering them something anyway. As we argue in this book, this is precisely how and where online learning has gotten its start.

And there’s evidence that school districts are thrilled to be offering the options and moving more courses online. Just look at my previous post that quotes representatives from the LA and Chicago school districts if you want evidence. These are among the biggest and most troubled school districts in the country, and clearly they enjoy the disruptive approach of online learning.

Are people seeing other organizations make a similar pivot in the learning space?

Here is a link to information about Senator John McCain’s education plan. 

For the part about virtual learning, see in particular the last three paragraphs. I’ve copied them in below from his press release. I am curious to get people’s feedback and thoughts per my last post.

Senator McCain’s support of this online learning medium and recognition of the potential here is very encouraging. The last bullet point below is something he didn’t mention in his speech but is particularly intriguing given Senator McCain’s stated desire in his speech to make sure struggling students are no longer stymied from getting the funding for tutoring that they need by the established system in which they are currently stuck.

• John McCain Supports Expanding Virtual Learning By Reforming The “Enhancing Education Through Technology Program.” John McCain will target $500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students. These courses may be for regular coursework, for enhancement, or for dual enrollment into college.

• John McCain Will Allocate $250 Million Through A Competitive Grant Program To Support States That Commit To Expanding Online Education Opportunities. States can use these funds to build virtual math and science academies to help expand the availability of AP Math, Science, and Computer Sciences courses, online tutoring support for students in traditional schools, and foreign language courses.

• John McCain Will Offer $250 Million For Digital Passport Scholarships To Help Students Pay For Online Tutors Or Enroll In Virtual Schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider. Providers could range from other public schools, virtual charter schools, home school parents utilizing virtual schooling resources or district or state sponsored virtual schools. The Department of Education would competitively award the funds to a national scholarship administrator who would manage the student applications, monitoring, and evaluation of providers.

Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President, just finished delivering a speech at the NAACP convention. He spent a good part of the speech talking about the need to reform and improve public education.

One paragraph in particular caught my attention, as it’s all about virtual and online education. According to his Web site, he said:

“We can also help more children and young adults to study outside of school by expanding support for virtual learning. So I propose to direct 500 million dollars in current federal funds to build new virtual schools, and to support the development of online courses for students. Through competitive grants, we will allocate another 250 million dollars to support state programs expanding online education opportunities, including the creation of new public virtual charter schools. States can use these funds to build virtual math and science academies to help expand the availability of Advanced Placement math, science, and computer science courses, online tutoring, and foreign language courses.”

I haven’t dug through the details of this yet as it just caught my eye, but this isn’t the first time Senator McCain has talked about computer-based learning. Clearly he has caught on to the disruptive innovation that is beginning to enter so many of our nation’s school districts and that we chronicle in our book, Disrupting Class.

I’m not sure yet what the proper role for the federal government should be in online learning, but talking about it and making everyone aware of it is a big step forward in bringing this innovation to the market at large so all students can benefit from its exciting potential.

I’d love to hear from people about what they know about the proposal, whether they think it’s a good idea, what they would have the federal government do for online learning in an ideal world, and so on.

In a Slate article, Ray Fisman writes about “why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.” The title of the article is “The $100 Distraction Device”, a thinly veiled slap at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, originally known as the $100 Laptop.

The article does ultimately reach a subtler conclusion. Merely having computers doesn’t necessarily improve academic performance. For the readers of Disrupting Class, you’ll already know that we agree. Far more important is how computers are used and implemented into people’s lives.

The article builds on personal anecdote as well as new research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches, who had access to a great situation from a research standpoint from the Euro 200 program that gave poor families vouchers for computers in Romania.

Fisman also recounts the billions that the federal government spends on helping to equip schools with computers. The result from this, as our book and Larry Cuban has documented, is not much improvement. The union study that I blogged about earlier reaches the same conclusion.

Fisman concludes that if children have computers on which they just play games to the detriment of work, they will perform poorly in school. If they do academic work with them, of course they might have different results. Marc Prensky and others might take issue with this, as they see tremendous educational value in some video games.

The bigger point is merely giving computers to people or cramming them into classrooms will just waste more money and not help poorer students. Merely handing out the OLPC across the developing world won’t help.

But as readers of our book and this blog know, there are many ways computers can have tremendous impact if used correctly. If the OLPC program is used not as an ends, but instead as a means, it could have exciting results to produce a disruptive outcome that leapfrogs the U.S., similar to how so many developing countries leapfrogged the U.S. in cell-phone adoption. To do this, the OLPC must be used as a portal to connect students to engaging learning opportunities through enriching interactive software. If done correctly, we might see that although computers don’t help poor kids, computer-based learning does.

One of the biggest questions I am often asked is, “Can online learning benefit minority students or those who struggle most to learn in school?”

It’s asked because one of the easy examples of non-consumption where online learning has taken root is for Advanced Placement (AP) and other advanced courses. The assumption that drives the question is that where we need to improve outcomes isn’t for those at the top; it’s for those who are dropping out, not learning how to read, and so on.

An article in eSchool News titled “Panelists: Online learning can help minority students” begins to answer the question quite well.

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for the Chicago Public Schools, and Themy Sparangis, the chief technology officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, along with Ray Rose, director of programs at MentorNet, were the panelists in a Webinar that the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) hosted on the topic. Their conclusion? Online learning can be a big benefit to underrepresented student populations.

And it’s a benefit in precisely the places we’d predict: areas of non-consumption, including for dropout recovery, for kids in juvenile detention centers, where school courses don’t have enough enrollment, and for schools that don’t have enough educators to teach a specific subject. Online courses help in the latter two cases to ensure equitable access for all students, Sparangis said.

As Jackson said, “Online can be an alternative to school if either you physically cannot attend school or if a traditional classroom setting does not fit your specific needs. With online learning, a student can finish their high school degree, make up credits, and enrich traditional curriculum.”

Interestingly enough, out of all the high schools in Illinois that use online learning, a predominantly Hispanic high school has the highest online learning pass rate.

The panelists went on to explain how online learning is often more rigorous than regular classroom learning and, in their experience, how students often have the same if not better learning outcomes, as measured by state tests. Classes can be more individualized, have increased assessment and monitoring, have interactive options, and provide a host of online resources for students.

In our view, this is just the beginning of a truly student-centric learning experience for our children. The disruptive innovation of online learning is planting itself in these footholds for students who otherwise would have no other course option and are not well served, and as it increasingly does so, it will also gradually improve. As it does so, it will benefit students who have struggled traditionally in schools far more than anyone else.

An April article in eSchool News titled “Schools mull needs of adult distance learners” discusses the growing demand from adults to take online courses.

This is a classic area of non-consumption. Many adults would like to have some form of ongoing education for any number of reasons –- to gain new skills for a future job, for general enrichment and curiosity, and so on — but often there have not been good options to fulfill these jobs. Most colleges have historically been tailored for the 18- to 22-year-old demographic, for example, and it’s hard to attend a school full time if you need to work or have a family. Night school often is not a satisfactory option.

With its convenience of allowing a student to take it any time, any place, and at any pace, online education is stepping in to fill the need. According to Capella University Vice Chairman Michael Offerman, the average student at Capella is 40 years old –- which shows there is a big untapped market here. As further proof of its power, Bill Gates recently told NBC’s Tom Brokaw in a June interview that he takes online education courses –- and finds them very useful.

As Offerman writes in his blog, “Despite clear changes in the demographics of American higher education, public discussion and public policy consideration are still based on the tradition of the 18-year-old going directly from high school to full-time, on-campus study.”

We’re just at the beginning of seeing how the Internet can revolutionize learning. Disruptive approaches to learning such as targeting adults will help improve the medium and push the conversation forward.

In classic disruptive fashion, according to the article, at the moment adult online education works best for the more motivated students, just as K-12 online education does. But over time, we can imagine it improving. Providers are fashioning it to be student centric. If the technology is honed in this foothold market in this fashion, this could have a big payoff for K-12 education down the line if providers transfer the relevant portions of what they learn from serving adults.

Worries over the United States’s economic competitiveness in the future come from all quarters. In his op-ed titled “Taking On The World” in the April 5, 2008 Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone makes an interesting argument about how much stiffer this competition will become as more people in the world become true players in the consumer global economy over the next few years.

In his words: “Ultimately, our strongest competitive advantage is the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the American people.”

Malone then suggests several things the government can do to encourage further entrepreneurship and retain a competitive advantage for the United States.

One of his suggestions revolves around education. He says: “Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Why shouldn’t kids, wherever they are taught, have access to the same teaching tools, and take classes together in classrooms in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, etc.? The curriculum should be increasingly non-linear as well: Why, when mom and dad are multitasking jobs at their laptops at Starbucks, are classrooms still bastions of rigid hours and even more rigid schedules?”

It’s a compelling point and echoes many of our own conclusions in Disrupting Class. Many of the leading education progressives have been thinking along these lines and asking these same questions, too, for some time.

One of the best questions often unasked is how can we move forward toward this vision? It is not at all clear the federal government is the best point of leverage here.

Heeding the lessons of disruption by using Web-based programs and so forth to compete against non-consumption is how. This is one of the theses in Disrupting Class, particularly about how to transform schools themselves, but as Malone suggests, there is a whole part of this equation that does not occur inside classrooms.

Marc Prensky often speaks of this. One of his central points is that some of the biggest and most exciting zones of non-consumption are in what he calls “after school.” He’s spot on. As the Kauffman Foundation has observed, education entrepreneurs introducing exciting new ways to learn on the Web and through games would be well advised to think of markets outside of K12 schools to make a meaningful impact. By targeting these zones of true non-consumption, they won’t have to serve the legacy jobs for which schools were built. These legacy processes and priorities are what make true innovation so hard.

We’d love to hear from people about any zones they see that are being transformed by these disruptive innovations outside of school and how these innovations take root and operate—and then how they might transform the six-plus hours children spend in schools, too.

According to eSchool News, a June 10th report released by the two teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), show that after a decade of investment in technology, teachers still don’t feel comfortable incorporating it into their lesson plans.

Although educators have plenty of access to computers and the Internet and teachers use it quite a bit for administrative tasks, they don’t believe they have the proper training and support to use it for instructional purposes. There are also some complaints, particularly in urban areas, that the computers are outdated or there are not enough of them.

The fact that technology is not widely used in instruction of course is not news. Larry Cuban has documented this. The NEA/AFT study confirms what our book says as well.

We are certainly on the same page as the NEA and AFT presidents when they say that technology must play a much bigger role in our schools. Computer-based learning has the potential to provide students with a student-centric learning experience that is customized for the ways in which they learn and would be far more intrinsically motivating as a result.

Although lack of training or insufficient technology may be problems, the real problem is in the mindset over where technology should be used and how.

The lessons from our studies of innovation are that if you want an innovation to transform a market, you can’t implement it by cramming it into the mainstream of an organization. That organization will always co-opt the technology into its existing processes to just do what it does better.

Hence, teachers use technology to improve their ability to do administrative tasks. Implementing technology to carry out instruction, however, doesn’t fit the mold so easily. After all, we couldn’t expect a teacher to say, “Children, today is a great day because have this computer that will deliver the instruction, and you don’t need me for my lesson plans anymore.” It’s simply implausible.

On the other hand, if you look at places where there aren’t course offerings—such as for credit recovery programs and in alternative schools—technology is making a big impact and transforming schooling. Just keep your eye outside the mainstream, and you’ll see something very different—and very exciting—happening.