What Can Disruptive Innovation in Education Look Like?

A disruptive innovation: an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances.

When we look at industries other than education, like the finance, hospitality, and automotive industries, they are constantly being disrupted by more efficient, and arguably more effective, systems built with the innovative technologies of today. Airbnb, Uber, and Turo are just three of many. What do these three all have in common? Not only are they all highly successful startups valued in the millions and billions of dollars, they also rely heavily on the sharing economy.

As our nation’s public K-12 education system continues to struggle with systemic issues, including teacher retention, disruptive innovations may be exactly what our education system needs to improve.

“Successfully introducing sustaining innovations is vital for any organization to be successful; a sector without sustaining innovations stagnates” (Horn, 2014)

How can the K-12 education industry be disrupted? How might the sharing economy be leveraged? Where are the “Airbnbs of education” hiding?

Some argue that charter schools serve as the disruptive innovations in education, but I’m not sure if that’s really the case. When charter schools in isolation are trying out new pedagogical approaches and practices, this only lies within the walls of those specific schools. Of course, those ideas, if proven successful, can be replicated in the future at other school sites, but that’s not really the point. The point is that not every child, teacher, or administrator can even have access to the potential of utilizing the practices and trials at the same time that those “disruptive charter schools” are. Education needs disruptive innovations that every child, teacher, and administrator can have access to from the very beginning to filter out the mediocre, and bring to the top the best practices and innovations.

Michael Horn (co-founder and Executive Director of a think tank dedicated to improving the world via disruptive innovation) makes a good point in saying that, “disrupting our K–12 schools or our public school districts is impossible today because there is no non-consumption of education in this country, but helping our schools use disruptive innovation to disrupt the classroom — the way they arrange teaching and learning — is possible”.

Let’s take a closer look at a highly successful company that has been cited as a disruptive innovation: Airbnb. Airbnb has rapidly taken off as a company now valued at $25.5 billion. Compared to the outdated timeshare or hotel booking systems of the past, users have an efficient platform that leverages the sharing economy to make it easy to find a short-term renter and/or rental. If I’m an interested user, I don’t have to deal with tough barrier entries to get involved — like having to live in a specific school district or enter a lottery system to take part — I just need to simply create an account.

Let’s revisit the definition of a disruptive innovation and tease it apart to see what it might look like in the education sector:

A disruptive innovation: an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances.

What is an existing market in the education sector that’s ripe for disruption that could leverage the sharing economy?

Curriculum publishing companies.

42 of the 50 U.S. states are apart of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, as pictured above. Image used from Academic Benchmarks.

Currently, K-12 schools and school districts across the U.S. pour millions of dollars into curriculum publishing companies, including the “big three” established market leaders: Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin. More specifically, as the United States’ K-12 education reform movement to push for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) marches forward, there has, and continues to be, a torrential amount of money poured into the development and implementation of CCSS-aligned curriculum. Based on a detailed report done by Henry Burke, seven years of the CCSS initiative will cost our nation $7.1 billion dollars.

Although there hasn’t yet been a disruptive innovation in the K-12 curriculum publishing world, some school districts have already taken action in opposing these market leaders. Arizona’s Vail school district no longer forks over a huge chunk of their budget to curriculum publishing companies, instead they’ve developed a system to collect “instructional materials the way a teenager creates a song playlist, taking digital content from various places, often for free”.

“We are not beholden at all to the big textbook publishers,” says Superintendent Calvin Baker. “We used to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in the textbook cycle, but we don’t do that anymore.”

An idea for disruptive innovation in education:

What if we could leverage the sharing economy in education , like Airbnb has with rooms, to disrupt the current prevailing curriculum publishing market forces to help improve K-12 education?! In a nutshell, I’m thinking that instead of pouring millions of dollars into curriculum publishing companies to build content for teachers, why not divert that money and resources to the teachers who are interested and qualified enough to do so?

How might this work? I’m thinking that it would require:

1. An efficient and easy-to-use platform.
2. All teachers will have access to the platform.
3. Content-publishing guidelines will need to be developed and agreed upon.
4. Professional development/training opportunities related to curriculum development will be provided to interested teachers.
5. Any teacher will have the opportunity to develop content on the platform.
6. Teachers are being paid to develop content on the platform. Additionally, every time a teacher’s developed content is used, that teacher receives equitable remuneration.
7. Just like Airbnb, Uber, and Turo, a rating system would be established whereby the users (including students and teachers) who have used the content would consistently provide feedback. This holds the content developer and the content users accountable. With this system, teachers are receiving feedback to constantly improve their practices, and this feedback is coming from other teachers… talk about collaboration!
8. Once a large enough content library database is developed from the network of dedicated teachers, naturally the content that is most highly ranked/rated will be valued higher and used more often, just like these Airbnbs are.

Teachers spend countless hours lesson-planning and developing curricula on their own already (according to the OECD, secondary teachers spend an average of 280 hours/year lesson planning), so why not turn this into an opportunity where we can more properly support and leverage our teachers for the work that many of them are already putting in? With the technological capabilities of today, it is far more than possible for us to provide a beautiful space for educators across the country (and even the world) to grow, learn, collaborate, and problem-solve together to be apart of a movement and network to improve K-12 education for all.

The fact that massive K-12 education curriculum publishing companies even exist anymore is a little perplexing to me. Thanks to the internet, we have endless and constantly changing information at our fingertips. Anyone who has access to the internet can be empowered to use that information. In public schools across the United States, there is now at least one computer for every five students, and access to affordable high-speed internet is continuing to grow for “even the most remote and rural schools”.

The established curriculum publishing market leaders are ripe for disruption. Our teachers can be empowered as the key players by simply leveraging a model that already exists: technology and the sharing economy.

As a company, Comprendio looks forward to being apart of this exciting opportunity. We whole heartedly believe in the value that educators can bring to the table, and it is a large part of our mission to ensure that teachers are empowered with the proper tools necessary so that they can create quality content, collaborate with other educators, and grow professionally, which we believe can ultimately help improve K-12 education for all.

Lizzy Schiller is the author and serves as Comprendio’s Director of Community Operations.