Table Of ContentPraise for Disrupting Class
Clayton Christensen and colleagues describe how disruptive technologies will personalize
and, as a result, revolutionize learning. Every education leader should read this book,
set aside their next staff meeting to discuss it, and figure out how they can be part of the
improvement wave to come.
— Tom Vander Ark, President, X PRIZE Foundation
In Disrupting Class, Clay Christensen brings to K–12 education the powerful concept of
“disruptive innovation” that has radically reshaped thinking about private sector inno-
vation and business change. He considers the glancing impact that technology has had on
classrooms, explains why this is so, and what it will take to reengineer our nation’s schools
for the 21st century.
— Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute and author of Common Sense School Reform
American school districts are pressed by policymakers demanding achievement, by students
wanting relevant learning, by teachers looking for a professionally rewarding career, and
by taxpayers hoping for some improvement in productivity. If they are to respond suc-
cessfully to these challenges, the path Clayton Christensen maps out will be the way.
— Ted Kolderie, Senior Associate, Center for Policy Studies
Christensen, Horn, and Johnson argue that the next round of innovation in school
reform will involve learning software. While schools have resisted integrating technology
for instruction, today’s students are embracing technology in their everyday lives. The
question is whether the next innovation, truly individualized instruction, will occur inside
or outside public education. This book offers promise to education reformers.
— Kathleen McCartney, Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Clayton Christensen’s advice has helped scores of major businesses. Here he applies to public
education his theory about how organizations should respond to disruptive innovation . . .
[and] shows boards and superintendents why they, too, need to “run two businesses in
tandem,” and explains how they can do that.
— Ron Wolk, Founder and former editor of Education Week
Disrupting Class gets directly to the point of how $60 billion was spent over the last
two decades putting computers and learning software in schools with no effect on student
achievement . . . concisely explains how to create learning organizations needed for future
generations.
— William G. Andrekopoulos, Superintendent, Milwaukee Public Schools
As a former education policymaker and a continued advisor to education companies, I have
felt frustrated by the seeming intractable challenges in transforming our public schools.
This book tackles that frustration and proposes a road map and sound advice for how edu-
cators and policymakers can leverage innovation to achieve excellence in our schools.
— Jane Swift, Acting Governor of Massachusetts from 2001–2003
“A decade ago, Clayton Christensen wrote a masterpiece, The Innovator’s Dilemma,
that transformed the way business looks at innovation. Now, he and two collaborators,
Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, have come up with another, focusing his ground-
breaking theories of disruptive innovation on education.”
— David Gergen, U.S. Presidential Advisor
“Clayton Christensen’s insights just might shake many of us in education out of our com-
placency and into a long needed disruptive discourse about really fixing our schools. This
will be a welcome change after decades in which powerful calls to action have resulted in
only marginal improvements for our nation’s school children.”
— Vicki Phillips, Director of Education, Gates Foundation
“Full of strategies that are both bold and doable, this brilliant and seminal book shows how
we can utilize technology to customize learning. I recommend it most enthusiastically.”
—Adam Urbanski, President, Rochester (NY) Teachers Association,
and vice president, American Federation of Teachers
“Finally we have a book from the business community that gets it. A must read for anyone
thinking and worrying about where education should be headed.”
— Paul Houston, Executive Director,
American Association of School Administrators
“After a barrage of business books that purport to ‘fix’ American education, at last a book
that speaks thoughtfully and imaginatively about what genuinely individualized edu-
cation can be like and how to bring it about.”
— Howard Gardner, Author of Five Minds for the Future
Disrupting Class
How Disruptive Innovation Will
Change the Way the World Learns
Clayton M. Christensen
michael b. horn • curtis w. johnson
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San Juan Seoul Singapore
Sydney Toronto
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Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction 1
Randall Circle High School 19
chapter 1:
why schools struggle to teach Differently
when each student learns Differently 21
chapter 2:
making the shift: schools meet society’s jobs 43
chapter 3:
crammed classroom computers 71
chapter 4:
Disruptively Deploying computers 89
iii
iv CONTENTS
chapter 5:
the system for student-centric learning 121
chapter 6:
the impact of the earliest Years on students’ success 147
chapter 7:
why so many students seem unmotivated 159
chapter 8:
improving education research 183
chapter 9:
organizing to innovate 205
Conclusion 241
Index 249
Acknowledgments
“Isn’t Disrupting Class an unsettling title for a book about the
schooling process?” one of our friends recently asked. The title
conveys multiple meanings, and that’s why we chose it. The
principal message is that disruption—a powerful body of theory
that describes how people interact and react, how behavior
is shaped, how organizational cultures form and influence
decisions—can usefully frame why our schools have struggled
to improve and how to solve these problems. We hope that our
readers will come to see through what we present here that
disruption is a necessary and overdue chapter for our public
schools.
Further, we say disrupting class with some intent. For some,
class will mean social class. To you we would say that, for too
long and in far too many ways, our system of schooling has
best served those who hail from homes where parents were
themselves well schooled and who support their children with
adequate resources and experiences. Class also is the venue in
which most of our attempts at education take place. In many
ways, what goes on in these classes profoundly affects social
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
class, for good and for ill. Our nation has embarked on a com-
mitment to educate every child. No nation has ever sought
to do that. The societal stakes in improving our schools are
high.
Managing innovation successfully has been the primary
focus of my research and writing at Harvard. I’m a teacher, the
husband and son of teachers, but I’m not an “expert” in edu-
cation. I’ve practiced it for sure, but until we began writing this
book, I hadn’t studied education. Nearly a decade ago, however,
representatives of a national network of school reformers called
Education Evolving—men such as Ted Kolderie, Joe Graba,
Ron Wolk, and Curtis Johnson, who had played pioneering
roles in the chartered school movement—visited me with a
proposal: “Clay, if you’d just stand next to the world of public
education and examine it through the lenses of your research
on innovation, we bet you could understand more deeply how
to improve our schools.” Kolderie’s arguments about schools’
institutional capacity for change and Graba’s refrain that,
“We simply cannot get all the schools we need by trying to fix
the ones we have,” compelled me to accept their invitation.
I thank these pioneers, who have dedicated their lives to the
improvement of our schools, for persuading me to join the
movement.
The Harvard Business School is an extraordinary place for
teachers to learn because in the case method of instruction,
the teacher asks the questions and the students do the
teaching. Some brilliant students—including Iris Chen, Trent
Kaufman, Dan Dellenbach, Eleanor Laurans, Gunnar Coun-
selman, Allison Sands, Josh Friedman, Emily Sawtell, and
Ethan Bernstein—applied what they knew of innovation to
the problems of public education and as a result taught their
teacher masterfully. Sally Aaron, Will Clark, Scott Anthony,
and Michael Horn selflessly postponed their business careers
for an extra year after graduation to stay at HBS to work with
me to peel off the layers of the onion one by one to discover
the root causes of why, despite the talent and energy that so
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
many administrators and teachers have thrown into the fight,
our schools improve begrudgingly at best.
I never know how little I know about something until I try to
write cogently about it. And I never know how complicated a
problem is until I try to distill it and teach its essence to others
in a simple (as opposed to simplistic) way. This project thereby
quickly taught me that I knew very little about a very complex
problem. As we’ve wrapped our arms around the problem piece
by piece, however, patient and forgiving friends have invited us
to speak at their seminars and conferences to test the validity
and usefulness of what we’d been learning. Others volunteered
to criticize drafts of the papers that culminated in this book.
These friends include Dennis Hunter (Applied Materials
Inc.); Anoop Gupta and Stephen Coller (Microsoft); Dusty
Heuston (Waterford Institute); Tom Vander Ark (X PRIZE
Foundation); Gisele Huff (Jaquelin Hume Foundation); Steve
Seleznow (Gates Foundation); Gregg Petersmeyer (America’s
Promise); Christopher Kellett and Thomas Payzant (Boston
Public Schools); Justin Cohen and Susan Cheng (District of
Columbia Public Schools); Peter Holland and Anne-Marie
Mahoney (Belmont Public Schools); Leslie Feinzaig and Tim
Huse (Innosight); Utah State Senator Howard Stephenson
and Massachusetts Representative Will Brownsberger; Pro-
fessors Don Deshler (University of Kansas), Paul Hill (Uni-
versity of Washington), and Øystein Fjelstad (Norwegian
School of Management); Dean Kathleen McCartney, faculty
members Chris Dede, Bob Schwartz, and Karen Mapp, and
students such as Leland Anderson at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education; Harvard Professor of Government Paul
Peterson; Professors Dutch Leonard, Stacey Childress, and
Allen Grossman (Harvard Business School); and friends Tracy
Kim, Stig Leschly, Matthew Matera, and Marc Prensky all
generously gave of their time, talent, and experience to help us
improve and refine our ideas.
Accomplished author Sugi Ganeshananthan helped us bring
our perspectives on public education together and to life by
