Disrupting Gaps (a draft for peer review)

On May 15, 2009, the New York City Chancellor of Education announced the launch of NYC21C (now called iZone), which is a research and development initiative intended to strategize a city-wide plan to make 21^st century teaching and learning a reality in the city’s fourteen-hundred plus schools.  Several NYC Department of Education offices are collaborating for this initiative, including the Office of New School Development, the Division of Instructional and Informational Technology, and the Office of Strategy and Innovation.

The vision for iZone comes from various sources, including consultation with business leaders worldwide.  In addition, one noteworthy book called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton Christensen et al., of the Harvard Business School, has also been consulted to guide the iZone initiative.  Chancellor Klein provides a public blurb for the book.  Klein writes:

Provocatively titled, Disrupting Class is just what America’s K-12 education system needs–a well thought-through proposal for using technology to better serve students and bring our schools into the 21st Century. Unlike so many education ‘reforms,’ this is not small-bore stuff. For that reason alone, it’s likely to be resisted by defenders of the status quo, even though it’s necessary and right for our kids.  We owe it to them to make sure this book isn’t merely a terrific read; it must become a blueprint for educational transformation (np).

What’s more, the chancellor has cited the book as one of the main works influencing his own approach to urban education reform (Green, 2008).  In addition, the book’s concepts and language pepper the iZone literature. Innovation is a key concept and word to the authors of Disrupting Class, the subtitle of which places much emphasis on “disruptive innovation” (np).

It is more than reasonable to say that Disrupting Class, along with other sources, influences the way in which initiatives like iZone are enacted all over the country.  It is a book written from a business/administrative vantage point.  In the upper left-hand corner of the book’s back cover is the word “business”, clearly directing the bookseller where to shelve it.  The book does indeed raise important questions for educators.  However, the book also has a blind spot which must be identified and addressed so that the efforts of education reformers consulting the book can adjust their own systemic course of action.  The blind spot I speak of is most evident in the seventh chapter called “Improving Education Research”.  Next, I suggest that this circumvention of educational research leaves in its wake major gaps in Disrupting Class.  These gaps suggest three hasty assumptions underlying the book: 1) the hasty assumption that teachers can’t be taught to integrate technology into their classrooms; 2) the hasty assumption that innovative teaching and learning is simply a matter of outsourcing academic content to distance learning companies; 3) the hasty assumption that adolescents’ use of technology means they can simply learn from it.  Finally, I offer suggestions for New York City’s iZone initiative to address the gaps in these authors’ argument.

Gaps in Class

“So many talented, committed people,” the authors begin, “work so hard to improve public schools and yet get disappointing results because the research they follow is preliminary and incomplete” (161).  The short seventh chapter of Disrupting Class builds a case that educational research is well-intentioned but less than useful.  They argue that much of education research doesn’t go far enough in its work because it emphasizes description, not prescription.  It fails to show causality.  The same kinds of causal relationships that exist in the observable world—like gravity’s effects or the breaking point of metals (both are analogies used in the book)—should be observable in educational settings if the research is done properly.  The goal is to achieve a quality of educational research that allows administrators and teachers to reliably predict what will and won’t work in school reform.

To be clear, the book’s general idea that some educational research is strong and some is weak is hardly contestable.  More contestable, however, is the casualness with which they dismiss educational research as a whole.  For instance, in support of their claim that educational research is simply limp, the authors include a footnote at the end of the chapter’s opening paragraph.  The footnote seeks to show support from scholars outside the paradigm of business management and begins as follows:

There is a host of articles that criticize education research from vantage points different than ours.  One such study by the National Academy of Science evaluated educational research and found that it had “methodologically weak research, trivial studies, an infatuation with jargon, and a tendency toward fads with a consequent fragmentation of effort.”  Other scholars point out that these research studies are often too narrowly focused on pedagogical or curricular factors with no reference to the underlying culture and its effective (174).

But, in fact, the quotation above is taken completely out of context.  The full quotation (Atkinson & Jackson, 1992) tells a different story.  It’s worth quoting at length as it reveals an important gap in Disrupting Class with regard to its view of educational research.  I’ve italicized the quotation from the excerpt above to emphasize its intended context:

The undistinguished reputation of education research is also partly attributable to some of the work.  There has been some methodologically weak research, trivial studies, an infatuation with jargon, and a tendency toward fads with a consequent fragmentation of effort. The committee, however, does not share the widespread negative judgments about the contributions of research to the reform of education.  Our review of research-based programs to improve teaching, strengthen curricula, restructure institutions of learning, and assess and monitor the progress in US schools has convinced us not only that research can improve education, but also that it has been demonstrably useful (20).

As is plain to see, the quotation that Christensen et al. use omits crucial words like “partly” and “some”.  They start the quotation right after a pivotal qualifier and stop the quotation right before the authors’ admission that they don’t “share the widespread negative judgments about the contributions of research to the reform of education.”   The paragraph says the opposite of the authors’ contention: it says that there are some who say educational research is weak, but they themselves don’t agree. The authors of Disrupting Class fail to take seriously and treat rigorously educational research that might support or contradict their own ideas.  When one looks at the educational research they do cite in footnotes, it represents only a cursory glimpse of some educational specialties.  The studies aren’t scrutinized and don’t appear to deeply inform the authors’ ideas and recommendations.

The above is a draft of a certification exam and article I’m writing.  Please comment with questions or possible works to check out… -TLL