Christensen Clayton M. - Disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns

Praise 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 K12 education the powerful concept of disruptive innovation that has radically reshaped thinking about private sector innovation 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 nations 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 successfully 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, todays 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 Christensens 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 educators and policymakers can leverage innovation to achieve excellence in our schools.

Jane Swift, Acting Governor of Massachusetts from 20012003

A decade ago, Clayton Christensen wrote a masterpiece, The Innovators 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 Christensens insights just might shake many of us in education out of our complacency 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 nations 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 education can be like and how to bring it about.

Howard Gardner, Author of Five Minds for the Future

How Disruptive Innovation Will
Change the Way the World Learns

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN
MICHAEL B. HORN CURTIS W. JOHNSON

Copyright 2011, 2008 by Clayton M. Christensen. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-175910-6

MHID: 0-07-175910-7

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