Failure to Disrupt
Considering how much time and intellectual and actual capital is invested in education technology every year, it’s incomprehensible how little the entrepreneurs, investors and second-order spectators actually know anything about the history or daily use of technology in education.
Very few understand, as examples, that education simply isn’t susceptible to disruption the way some markets may be. They miss that truth because they don’t understand that education isn’t a market or, at a minimum, they misunderstand what is being bought and sold in it. They likewise routinely and predictably miss that, in nearly every example, what they are building and investing in is not new but recycled, having failed to disrupt, democratize or scale education many times before.
It’s why I’ve joked for years that my dream job is reviewing education technology pitches and helping venture capital investors save their money. I’d be happy with 10% of everything I save them. Now, though, edtech investors and corporate architects and columnists can save even the money they’d spend on me.
Instead, they can just read “Failure to Disrupt,” the new book by Justin Reich, Director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT. Or, better yet, read just introduction and conclusion. Those 30 or so pages may be the most important read for anyone in, or even thinking about being in, edtech.
In a few dozen pages, Reich lays out the embarrassing cycle of copied ideas, massive hype, enormous wasted funding and the unmet promises of edtech — why so many innovations and companies find only dramatically downsized and incremental uses, leaving education fundamentally not disrupted over and over again.
In one example Reich quotes Thomas Edison in a 1913 interview, “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools,” Edison said. “It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our schools will be completely changed inside of 10 ten years.”
More importantly, Reich underscores that the timelines and promises fade, but the ideas don’t go away. Reich notes the 2011 highly popular and influential TED talk by Salman Kahn, the founder of Kahn Academy. The breakout idea may sound familiar. His signature talk was titled, “Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education.” Kahn became a media and funding darling and, Reich writes, landed on the covers of Wired, Time and Forbes.
But after Khan opened an actual, physical school, Reich quotes Kahn in an overlooked interview from 2019 telling District Administration magazine, “Now that I run a school, I see that some of the stuff is not as easy to accomplish compared to how it sounds theoretically.”
Everyone saw the hype headline. No one saw when reality hit - when, as Reich put it, “soaring vision met the complex reality of schools [and] disruption and transformation gave way to accommodation.”
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before.
Another example cited by Reich is Sebastian Thurn, one of the fathers of the MOOC - the massive, open, online course that was likewise supposed to revolutionize and democratize education. The hype was so intense that the New York Times famously declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC.” But by November of 2013, Reich quotes Thurn saying, “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines and, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product.”
History has borne this out. As most know now, MOOCs did not deliver. They certainly did not disrupt. And on and on.
Throughout his book, Reich also correctly points out that, “When new education technologies fail to meet their lofty expectations, a common rhetorical move is to claim that not enough time has passed for the true effects … to be revealed.” As example, Reich says that “When Edison’s ten-year prediction failed to come to pass, he simply gave himself more time.” By 1923, ten years after his initial prediction, Edison was predicting the obsolescence of textbooks “in 20 years.”
Reich also helpfully cites some more recent prediction flops. “In 2008,” he starts, “Clayton Christenson, with colleagues Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson, published Disrupting Class, a book about online learning and the future of K-12 schools. They predicted that by 2019, half of all middle- and high-school courses would be replaced by online options, and ‘the cost will be one-third of today’s costs, and the courses will be much better.’”
Similarly, as I and others have written, when the same group predicted in 2011 that half of all colleges would close by 2025, those who knew the history of such bold claims were skeptical. But the headlines followed anyway. The realization has not. Even their subsequent, “more measured prediction with more nuance” that, “the bottom 25 percent” of colleges, “will disappear or merge in the next 10 to 15 years” has yet to materialize, more than seven years after it was made.
The point is not to dunk on the numerous bad predictions of disruption or creative destruction in education. It’s that, as Reich eloquently and diligently outlines, these misses, these failures to disrupt were, and are, completely obvious.
“Much of what Khan Academy discovered by 2019 about computer-assisted math instruction, after more than $100 million in philanthropic investment,” Reich wrote, “could have been found in academic papers published in the 1990s.”
Likewise, knowing the history of college distance education, the radio and public TV course programs, would have made it clear that MOOCs and other online programs were not going to disrupt much of anything.
Even with all this, Reich is optimistic about the power of data and technology to move education forward. He just sees it happening incrementally, in subtle nudges here and there instead of through the headline-grabbing reforms that so many breathlessly, baselessly predict.
He offers questions educators and investors and entrepreneurs should ask about any “new” education technology or promise. Reich also underlines important dangers such as that, no matter how much they are intended and designed to do otherwise, most education technologies actually accelerate existing gaps in privilege and access — exactly what we’ve seen happen during this recent reliance on education technology during Covid-19.
Failure to Disrupt is a full must-read for the education-invested as well as the education-interested. Those who don’t at least read the open and the close are, as the saying goes, condemned to repeat history. And continue to waste their time and money.
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