Blogging Disrupting Class #12: Chapter 8 -- Forging a Consensus for Change

The previous post summarizes how The second part of Chapter 7 discusses how to improve education research by evolving from descriptive research to prescriptive research as a superior form of research. Chapter 8 discusses strategies for forging a consensus for change. If you've bought into Disrupting Class's prescription for reform in its totality or are interested to see how Christensen et al. apply their particular model of making change to public education, read this chapter; otherwise, you can safely skip it...

Chapter 8 ("Forging a Consensus for Change") is a short chapter; Disrupting Class has already made its argument about how the disruption will occur (Chapters 3-5), and the latter chapters (6-9) are about other elements of a more comprehensive strategy for enacting change. The problem is that this strategy is neither comprehensive nor coherent: the recommendation for dealing with preschool preparation (Chapter 6) is off target and far from complete; the ones for improving education research (Chapter 7) are misguided and reflect the authors' excessive dependence on achieving standardized results as a desired outcome.

This chapter's opening vignette is a long one (pp.179-182) because it introduces a complex and difficult subject: how to get people to agree on how to change education? The authors rightly note that people everywhere "disagree wildly on education," and so "it's awfully tough to manage a school or school system" (p.182). In response, the authors describe a conceptual framework designed to help form agreement. The first piece involves using "tools of cooperation" to chart the degree of agreement and recognize the situation one is in (pp.182-184). The next piece involves two "mechanisms of movement" (success; having a common language) that can "shift the position of an organization" relative to its level of agreement (pp.184-186); the third piece describes using various types of tools to move from agreement to cooperation (pp.186-191). The next section describes where public school systems are in this model (pp.186-194).

Readers who are interested in this particular model of making change or who have bought Disrupting Class's prescription for reform in its totality will want to delve more deeply into this chapter. I'm skimping on the details here because the change model is not central to the book's main argument, and its reform model broke down for me a couple of chapters ago. There are a couple of points worth noting, however:

1) The chapter's conclusion that "separation is a critical option" to achieve reform (p.194) is code for 'promote charter schools and vouchers, becuase they are the most promising tools of "separation"' (i.e., bypassing existing structures). It is around this point where I began to wonder if Christensen et al. are not really interested in promoting a comprehensive reform solution at all, but rather certain specific reforms (i.e., charter schools and vouchers) which they support. Certainly Disrupting Class IMO has failed to make the connection between charter schools and innovating education which customizing learning relative to their model. Otherwise, for example, why aren't charter schools in the vanguard of offering online courses? Why aren't most newly minted charter schools more closely linked with online course offerings?

2) There's a sentence in the opening vignette which inadvertently speaks volumes about the authors' (and many others') belief about what education should be: "Sadly, high-achieving Maria Solomon does not a school make" (p.179). The implications of this narrative detail (as I read it) are: a) in an ideal educational world, all students would be like this "high-achieving" student, and b) the task of reform is try to make an education system which makes all students like this (or at least gives all students the opportunity to do so; many such believers are willing to stop short at equality of opportunity, even though "No Child Left Behind" implies achieving equality of results).

Although this idea sounds noble, appropriate, and even unarguable on the surface, I have some major problems with it. Partly this is a semantic issue based on what "high-achieving" means. Do we want all children to be high-achieving? I think we could find a consensus about that, although when we will ever muster the cultural will and resources to work toward attaining that goal is an entirely different matter. (Especially when it comes to reaching that last 10-20% whom we have next to no idea about how to reach at present.) Do we want all children to be high-achieving in the way that (fictional) Maria Solomon is high-achieving -- school smart, high in verbal/mathematical intelligence, good grades, etc.?

My sense is that Christensen et al.'s (and many others') answer is yes, and this is the nub of the problem: trying to squeeze all students into an existing narrow model of what constitutes high achievement. A better answer is to expand the notion of what constitutes high achievement, rather than imagining or working toward a world where (for example) 100% of students know algebra or study calculus and are college-bound. Again, this relfects Disrupting Class's excessive reliance on intelligence types as the Great Customizing Construct (actually, I misspoke earlier; online course delivery is the Great Customizer).

Customize learning? Yes. More online course delivery? Of course. Take intelligence types into account? Surely. Customize learning for students' intelligence types through online course delivery to (ideally) turn every child into a Maria Solomon-like high-achieving student? Sorry, but this is not an ideal that I can buy into...

Chapter 7 (Part 2)
Chapter 7 (Part 1)
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4 (Part 3)
Chapter 4 (Part 2)
Chapter 4 (Part 1)
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
Introduction