E51-What is it that we are trying to accomplish? Disruptive Innovations
Disruptive Innovations in High Schools
NewTech High was one of 21 out of 136 proposals that was selected for the 2026 MASA conference later this month. This is the narrative shared with the presenting team as the lead-in to the 60-minute session on rapid disruptive innovation.
Things for us to consider ahead of time.
The audience may/will be resistant. Most MASA attendees (superintendents) may not want to hear this message — it challenges facets of the systems they lead, are comfortable with and have built careers inside.
Grab the Opportunity! We are treating this as a single, high-leverage opportunity to inform this audience that the disruptive change is not just coming, but nearly complete. This is not a future hypothetical they can plan around at leisure. We may get other chances, but we also need to get people to “wake up” to the need for diffusing a new model…soon.
Implication for delivery. The message needs to land with an audience predisposed to reject or deflect it — meaning the data/evidence has to do real work (not just rhetoric). The tone is meant to be positive and warm, not alienating. What is the content that has structure and possibility, not the pie-in-the-sky end run that we sometimes feel like we're running.
Presentation Description
In 1975-1976, there were 180k juniors and seniors sitting in public school classrooms in the State of Minnesota. During the last 50 years, our standards, credits and requirements have continued to increase. Today, the number of students sitting in public school classrooms is probably in the 50-60k range. Enrollment in dual credit, homeschooling, charter schools, alternative learning schools, online schooling and workforce are among the many reasons that our classroom enrollment for 16-18 year olds has dwindled.
We keep hearing that the time has come for our schools to change in an era of artificial intelligence (AI). While this is true, there is an imperative for our high schools to radically redesign the system before these institutions face even more disruption. NewTech High is working with high schools in Minnesota on this redesign through personalization, customization and relevance.
This session will address this disruption through data, statistics and anecdotes about how high schools are already under severe disruption. Furthermore, how can we embrace this change more fully and at a quicker pace to redesign our high schools for the future?
What is the intellectual lineage of NewTech, as well as a plan!
Recently, I was reading a book that I read 18 years ago, and I'm reading names like Curtis Johnson, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn...and Ted Kolderie, Joe Graba, etc. We are blessed to be working on the heels of Minnesota giants of our national education industry...and many are still working with us in some facet. The book, "Disrupting Class" was one of those touchtone points for me as a Principal/Philosopher, and came after my study of Everett Rogers. Before that, I had read "The Innovator's Solution", also by Christensen. This book redefined innovation to me. I believe this is what is happening today. Christensen & Raynor talk about how tradition, done perfectly, is the condition in which disruptive innovations take root.
I brought this book along on this trip to try to re-engage and have been moved by the influence it had on me quite some time ago. As I re-read it, I'm also struck by the karma of its contents. It reads like a 20-year old suspended idea that is still contemporary, and largely undone.
The TCAT and NewTech High thing we are doing now was nothing I ever planned for, but also everything my work and research prepared me for. This work echoes of the time and effort in the classrooms of York-Barr, Sommers, Seashore Louis, McLeod and Alexander at the University of Minnesota. Each of them had a part in my academic influences on practice, particularly in the American high schools which I worked. Then, I would summon the shared work of people like Charlie Kyte, Jay Haugen, Jerry Robicheau, Jason Berg and Jeff Ronneberg et al, but were working on similar aspects of this same idea in different places. There was really no mechanism to bring us together at that time, but I know now that we were products of the same literature, beliefs and research.
The work and the names coming from this effort will circulate in your practice the rest of your career, like mine. You were chosen because I believe you will continue to carry the torch forward. This system, with wonderful work by so many people that we work with. Their work is not bad, it is just misguided because of the design. In its own sense, the current system was a disruptive innovation unto itself in terms of adolescence, education, and college enrollment, etc. If we study it from an academic standpoint, it has been wildly successful. The educational/ economic complex has never needed more than 20-30% of its workforce to have any advanced degree certification, but our systems were re-wired post-WW2 to educate up to 80% towards that goal. For most of this time, we would also ask the individual to pay for that education. For decades, we have had droves of people whose education did not equate in its economic value, and lo and behold, not its intrinsic value either.
In summary, training high school students for post-secondary education has been our hidden gig. Yet, it never was the best way for many of our students to learn or thrive as an individual. Through relationships and practicality, many of our people have learned to find their way (relationships, retraining or accommodation) to support their families. Today, we know this and work is being done to undo this in a way that will redefine the way we educate our adolescent students. In the Christensen vibe, many schools will not choose this, but the innovativeness of choice will force this. The system of education for adolescents in America has been under a disruptive change for decades, but the system still lacks awareness that the disruptive change is not only underway, but nearly complete.
Let's consider the past. How did we research? Personally, if I had a paper to do, I would go to the library and look at encyclopedias or Worldbook and literally copy sections to support my point. This is in an era that we are currently deeming as the "good old days". I don't think there was any higher order thinking involved. Yet, if we did that research, we were considered higher-order thinkers.
The success stories of high school are attributed in support of the effort to sustain the system. The causal connections are indirect at best. Like many innovations, the mere presence of high school education was the product of many unintended, but successful consequences. Reformers quickly realized that country school-educated youth would not survive these institutions unless there were also distractions that would keep them there like vocational education or athletics. As a simple question, how long would today's American high schools last if we removed competitive athletics from the equation? I'd recommend that we know and fear that answer. For the most part, we are the only nation that does high school like us.
We are representing so many people from our past. They are rooting for us!
Presentation Tuesday 9:40am, MASA
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