Book Review: Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education by Reich, J.

Published date01 January 2022
Date01 January 2022
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/02750740211050380
Subject MatterBook reviews
executednot to directly execute them personally or exclu-
sively. This raises a second limitation.
The book is diminished by the authorsfailure to incorpo-
rate a great deal of more public administration research and
scholarship into its framework, contentions, and claims.
Whether public administration is an enterprise, technology,
design science, art, craft, profession, academic discipline,
f‌ield of study, and/or arena of management, it has a great
deal of knowledge, insight, and perspective pertinent to the
books overall themes. For basics, Max Webers ideal type
bureaucracy features tension between hierarchy and special-
ization, Orthodox (or Classical) public administration wres-
tles the problem of combining unity of command and
substantive expertise, the Constitutional School focuses on
integration of public administration into the nations
democratic-constitutional framework, the literature on rule-
making and administrative law is essential to gauging the
depth of the Deep State phantom, and much reform and per-
formance research questions the eff‌icacy of command and
control managerial approaches. Indeed, as a technical
matter, one well versed in contemporary public administra-
tive research might wonder whether a full-f‌ledged unitary
executive on the scale of the U.S. national government can
generate cost-effective, or even just effective, administration.
Perhaps the unitary executive phantom raises the specter not
just of a presidential democracy, but one that features hope-
lessly inept administration. Certainly, that possibility is
informed by public administrative analysis and central to
addressing the diff‌icult ineluctable questionthe book
raises.
ORCID iD
David H. Rosenbloom https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0049-5624
Reich, J. (2020). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Cant
Transform Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
pp. 336 $27.95. ISBN 978- 0674089044
Reviewed by: M. Blair Thomas , Florida State University,
Tallahassee, FL, USA
DOI: 10.1177/02750740211050380
For a dozen seasons, the ABC hit show Shark Tankhas
weaved its way into the fabric of American culture in its sim-
plicity: Pitch your business to a room of four to f‌ive investors
and convince them why your company is worth a f‌inancial
investment. Success is usually def‌ined by getting an invest-
ment from a sharkand failure by the inability to reach a
deal. Occasionally, presentations are made by organizations
in the education industry such as Classroom Jams and 50
States in 50 Minutes (Both during Season 1) and STEM
Center (Season 7), respectively. Promises are made, f‌inancial
capital is provided, and post-show success is often measured
by a sustainable net-prof‌it margin usually advertised in an
update a few seasons later if notable success is reached.
Whether on Shark Tankor inside educational and
private-sector board conference rooms across the globe,
pitches are made that promise to bend the arc of education
through the latest advancement in technology, needing only
the rocket fuel of monetary investment and collective hope.
Reich explains why the arcs often resemble crash and
burns instead of shooting stars, highlighting Americas con-
servative educational institutional norms, the dissonance
between technological learning and f‌lexible learning, and
other elements that make technological breakthroughs chal-
lenging to achieve.
Written by someone with roots as a high school teacher
gone MIT researcher, the reader is presented with a praca-
demic perspective that is both informative and enlightening
for individuals that are not experts on technology in class-
rooms. Reich develops a well-researched narrative on the
current state of educational technology within classrooms,
outlining the history of educational technology. He further
explains why American society has not witnessed the break-
throughs promised by advocates and how stakeholders can
cultivate better settings for technological innovations to be
embraced and ultimately adapted. Readers are introduced
with a litany of acronyms such as MOOCs /xMOOCs and
cMOOCs (which are slightly different versions of massive
open online courses), CAIs (computer-assisted instruction
tools), and LMS (learning management systems) that seem
unrecognizable by their name but not how they are described.
Reich provides a general crash course on educational tech-
nologies, notably how they appear in todays learning land-
scape, coupled with a quick overview of the driving
sources behind them. This approach is useful for the contex-
tual understanding of the current technology in place and
why innovative changes are seemingly elusive in what
Collins and Halverson (2018) have described as the digital
revolutionin their book on how students can take advantage
of technology.
Mixed with a blend of social commentary, perhaps
Reichsdef‌ining critique of the educational technology land-
scape comes in the middle of the book when he dedicates an
entire chapter to describing a self-coined term the curse of
the familiarand observes: Schools are conservative institu-
tions in society. People tend to teach how they were taught,
and new technologies are far more likely to be bent to f‌it
into existing systems than they are to lead to major reorgan-
izations(p. 129). This observation is universal in its applica-
tion encompassing all levels of education ranging from
kindergarten to doctoral classrooms. Reich introduces large-
scale learning as a broader case study, with university presi-
dents, school district superintendents, and principals charged
with deciphering how to solve these conundrums within their
respective jurisdictions. As most public administrators will
likely claim, despite all the promises made by product and
Book Reviews 89

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