Clayton Christensen on Education|Evolving’s influence on his own thinking about K-12 Education^*

“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 education. I’ve practiced it 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.”

^*From the Acknowledgments section of “Disrupting Class,” McGraw Hill, 2008