IP

...Disruptive

But when Broad’s “change agents” move into the institutions they’ve been taught to shake up, as dozens have now done, we can see how disruption, well, disrupts—not just “the status quo,” but peoples’ lives. Teachers quit en masse or are fired. Nearby schools close, forcing students to travel to distant ones. School boards divide and bicker. Parents picket. Broad-affiliated superintendents all over the country—Atlanta; Philadelphia; Rochester, New York; Sumter, South Carolina—have resigned or been forced out after no-confidence votes, corruption or cheating scandals, or, in one case, the discovery of alleged irregularities with a doctorate degree. (That last superintendent then went to the Gates Foundation and is now in charge of Los Angeles’s school system.) “The disruption was expected to produce innovation,” writes school-reform critic Diane Ravitch in a book, Reign of Error, to be published this fall. “More typically, it produced turmoil and demoralization.”