By Dwight Jones

As a former K-12 teacher and administrator, I understand why district leaders bristle at the phrase “disrupting education,” especially when those calling for la revolution do so from the safety of their think tank or nonprofit. It’s not that I disagree with their premise. In the U.S., school as we know it is failing students, the workforce and society writ large — with glaring inequities that, thanks to COVID-19, we can no longer afford to ignore.

But even the best ideas for “reimagining our schools from the ground floor up” can come off as exhausting and a bit naive to those of us who have spent considerable time inside classrooms. When is this upheaval supposed to take place? Mid-semester, as kids prep for standardized tests that determine how much money their schools receive? Over the summer, when burned-out educators simply want to reimagine themselves sleeping past 6:30 a.m.? Though well intentioned, these thought leaders usually offer heavy doses of idealism in their work, but skimp on practical details for dismantling structures that have been in place for a century or more.

So it was with a heavy dose of skepticism that I picked up From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School for Every Child, which proposes radical changes to how we educate the populus. Author Michael B. Horn is co-founder and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which advocates for new education models that, in addition to being pedagogical sound, have the potential to supplant the current system — much like Airbnb disrupted hospitality or Uber disrupted transportation.