What’s the ‘most pernicious cliché of our time’?
(Source: Bloomberg)
According to a new piece in The New Republicby the magazine’s science editor, Judith Shulevitz, the term “disruption” is, as the headline says, “the most pernicious cliché of our time.” That’s almost right.
Shulevitz makes important points about the dangerous errors that “disruptor” advocates make with their “almost utopian faith in technology” and insistence that “disruption” (which is always transformational, not to mention innovative) is equally useful for private and public enterprises. That includes America’s public education system. She writes that Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen, the man who coined the phrase “disruptive innovation” in 1997, has advocated that “fundamental school reform” can happen only if political and education leaders force such change on the masses because they won’t agree to it otherwise. (In other words, democracy only goes so far.)
She writes further:
Many well-meaning philanthropic disruptors have taken that advice to heart, and the results reveal something George Orwell pointed out, which is that stale phrases mechanically repeated have dangerous political effects. It is too soon to see how
Why teachers need free coffee at school
Intended or not, school reform has left many teachers feeling isolated and alone. Here’s a post on this by Hillary Greene, who has taught middle school for three years in independent, public, and public charter settings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She graduated from Brown University and completed the Shady Hill School Teacher Training at Tufts University. She is interested in teaching and teacher-education research. This first appeared in Education Week Teacher. Connect @hillarylgreene on Twitter.
By Hillary Greene
Everybody knows that a good house party, no matter how enticing the dining room, ends up in the kitchen. Surrounded by the comfort of food and drink, we relax and bond. We say things we wouldn’t say in the dining room.
Yet, in this nation that “runs on Dunkin’,” some schools appear to be cutting back on staff-room provisions as a budgetary precaution. So while Google generously—and shrewdly—provides copious amounts of first-class nourishment to its employees, teachers often can’t get a free cup of coffee.
And while a cut like this may seem relatively insignificant, I’m convinced it harms