Disrupting Class

The book Disrupting Class (Christensen, Claton; Horn, Micheal; Johnson, Curtis –McGraw-Hill, 2008) reflects aspects of the comprehensive “student-centric” solution that we address in Approaching 100% by 2014. It presents a compelling case about how and when disruptive innovation might cause our education system to reach a student-centric tipping point.

“At some point, administrators, school committees, and teachers unions will recognize that even without explicit administrative decisions ever having been made, student-centric learning will have become mainstream. The substitution curve analysis in Chapter 4 suggests that this will happen in approximately 2014 when online courses have a 25 percent market share in high schools”
(Christensen, p143)

The projections by Christensen and his colleagues may be plausible. However, there are factors not included in the Disrupting Class analysis that may accelerate or decelerate such a transition. What we can say with some degree of certainty is that the shift to a student-centric model is inevitable, and will be required to approach the goal of 100% of learners achieving a minimum level of competency on core standards.