Chapter 2

Changing Roles for Education

Christensen suggests that education has been coping with two significant disruptions over the last 25 years--disruptions that were formalized in one report (A Nation at Risk, 1983) and one legislative act (The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 2002).

(If you old enough to remember...what was the phrase in A Nation at Risk that struck you most strongly? If you are too young to remember, go online and read the document (the authors deliberately kept if brief so it could be easily read). What struck you most strongly?)

(Given what you know now, compare the effect of the two disruptions.)

A disruption is "a specific type of innovation" (p. 44) that renders previously valued improvments less relevant, and elevates previously unimportant dimensions of a product to prominence. At this stage, it isn't totally clear what a disruption is, but Christensen proceeds to explain further.

Disruptive Innovation Theory

In this section, I am going to unpack Christensen's Figure 2.1 (p. 46) to focus on his key idea of disruption.

The figure on the left re-creates what Christensen describes as the "back plane" in his Figure 2.1. The green dotted lines represent the performance improvement in a product that customers can actually use.

Some of the improvements that car manufacturers (for example) pack into their models are beyond the reasonable use requirements of buyers. I watched a recent PBS Nova special in which the "Car Talk guys" set out in search of the "car of the future." Along the way, they visited a car show where a "household" truck with a 500-HP engine was on display. Ray did a good impression of going ballistic about how no-one at this level could possibly have a need for a 500-HP engine in a truck.

The green dotted lines represent the performance improvement that customers can actually use. There are three of them to indicate that different types of customers could be "power" users (the top green dotted line) with higher performance demands than others, and so forth.

But car companies will continue to make improvements to increase our incentive to buy new cars. These are what Christensen calls sustaining innovations (chairs in vans that swivel so little tables can pop up, more cup holders...). The incremental improvements sustain our interest in buying a new car, but, more importantly, by "selling" new cars, these improvements sustain the economic viability of the car company. And some sustaining improvements are useful (for example, folding seats in vans). (Discuss an example of a sustaining innovation in a service industry.)

Christensen suggests that the companies the win the battles of sustaining innovation are already the industry leaders. (How does Apple currently fit in with this idea? Or do you have a better example?)

The technologies in the original back plane are typically complicated and expensive: they are appropriate for users with a lot of money and a lot of skill. Remember, very few could afford/drive/use the very first cars/computers/cameras. But what potentially happens is along comes a disruptive innovation.

A disruptive innovation is NOT a sustaining innovation. The product that is a harbinger of a disruptive innovation is actually is not as good as what is already available. So existing customers don't want it. But because it is cheaper, or easier to use, or..., it appeals to a new group of "nonconsumers." Christensen signifies this by drawing a "front plane of performance" in Fig 2.1.

And because this new disruptive innovation product is a step down in what an existing manufacturer views as "quality," existing manufacturers have a hard time engaging with it.

Now we are into new territory in which the "entrants" nearly always win. Christensen gives the figures on p. 48 to illustrate why a "bottom line" financial approach would support an existing "back plane" manufacturer's not getting involved in the disruptive innovation.

Disruption rarely involves an instantaneous change. It took many years for the personal computer market to impact the business market. But slowly the disruptive innovation improves (by means of sustaining innovations) to the stage where consumers in the back plane start to move to the front plane. At this stage, it is "shut the gate."

Why don't back plane companies see the approaching train?

Asymmetric motivation

It is not that the back plane companies fail to see the disruption coming. It is that they lack the financial motivation to dedicate sufficient resources to deal with the disruption. Investment dollars will always go to tomorrow's sustaining innovation rather than a potential disruptive innovation.

I have often wondered about the Sarich orbital engine, which was invented in 1972 in Australia. It held the promise of being more efficient, with fewer parts, requiring less lubrication, etc. The patent for it was bought by Ford, and the development of the engine has never dealt with the technical cooling problems that apparently plagued it. What might "go to the moon" motivation have done with this idea? (This sounds like "conspiracy theory." Haven't there been occasions when accepted practice and knowledge have "trumped" some potential disruption?)

Of course, Ford's best customers wouldn't have been attracted to this new-fangled engine, whereas a 500-HP... Christensen calls this "asymmetric motivation." It's a very logical, commonsense way of dealing with the "return on investment" approach that makes good financial sense.

And asymmetric motivation is precisely why Kodak "missed" the digital camera revolution, despite the fact that a Kodak scientist did the early work on CCDs (charge-coupled devices; the heart of digital photography).

The vertical "performance" axis on the above graphs represent improvements that consumers will pay more for. Disruptive innovations ask consumers to (initially) pay for less.

Public Schools

In the public sector, the vertical "performance" axis in the above graphs is replaced by "importance to society," or "political priority." (Hopefully, these two axis label are synonomous!)

The traditional school is in the "back plane," but society/politicians has/have evolved its/their view of what it's important for schools to do. Society has moved the goal posts, so now there is a "front plane," but the same organizational structure is being asked to deal with it--a situation where asymmetric motivation is going to come into play.

Changing the goal posts

Christensen proposes the following "big picture" of the changing goal posts for the public education monopoly.

Job 1 (Founders): Preserve the democracy: basic education universal; elite group to lead from elected emminence.

Job 2 (20th century): Prepare everyone for work--in addition to Job 1. Typically, in the private sector, a new company would be created to deal with this situation. Because of the monopoly protection, there was no alternative supplier, and schools changed gradually to accommodate the new job. As numbers in high school increased, diversity in course offerings kept pace with greater diversity in academic ability among students. In other words, schools made sustaining innovations.

Two shocks in the 1950s promoted change (Brown and Sputnik), but neither was disruptive. Schools just moved further up the sustaining trajectory: languages, AP art, AP music, more sports, and even for girls.... "Schools became complex and expensive as they offered a(n) historically unmatched array of offerings" (p. 57).

Job 3 (A Nation at Risk): Keep America competitive. Japanese companies disrputed U.S. counterparts (Canon/Xerox, Sony/RCA, Tokyo/Detroit), and international comparisons of educational systems were unflattering. The political response was to measure what is coming out of the schools. "Virtually everyone had to focus on the core academic classes and take the same tests" (p. 60).

With the shift to a new performance measure, in the private sector, a rash of new providers would emerge---but in this case, there were no nonconsumers (the monopoly thing again). But is had made it hard for the existing organizational structures to adapt: "tantamount to giving them a demonstrably impossible task" (p. 61).

Yet, the schools have succeeded! Christensen suggests that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores have trended upward between the 1980s and 2004. (What do you think of his rationale on p. 62?)

Job 4 (NCLB): Eliminate poverty--by making sure that every child in every demographic attains proficiency. This job is not far removed from what schools were intended to do, but it's emphasis on outcomes represents a disruption.

(Contrast the genesis of different demands from the political/societal fields with the way challenges in education have arisen from the advent of new technologies.)

(Is there another way to move to a student-centric classroom, other than "through the adoption of computer-based learning" (p. 64)?)