I really enjoyed reading this book. I found the writing style approachable, even for an academic topic. It gave me a lot of insights into educational technology that I had never even previously considered. The most important question is whether any of these technologies were truly expected to disrupt the educational status quo. If they were, then author Justin Reich’s conclusions that none of them did are correct, including surprisingly accurate skill assessments.
I have never considered any technology capable of immediately disrupting and replacing any current system, including in commerce, healthcare, education, or entertainment. The promises and overhyped carnival barking surrounding a new technology have always been in my mind’s eye, a way to draw attention, curiosity, and interest. It is hard to capture the general public’s overstimulated attention to anything these days; there are just too many things constantly vying for it, too much noise. Technology needs investment to proceed, and to draw investors, it must demonstrate a solid base of users (usually the curious are first adapters of any technology), a growing market, and a wide range of possible implementations, which would lead to a potentially large market. Investors want to make money. Having a tech product that meets a need is not enough. It has to be sexy, compelling, and irresistibly useful to draw large pools of investment.
Today’s product development mentality focuses on bringing minimum viable products to the market. These products are not fully developed; they have just enough features and functionality to be usable by early adopters, with promises of future upgrades and iterations. Everyone now expects early products to be full of bugs and in need of improvements, usually suggested (for free) by early adopters’ feedback. Educational technologies also falls into this product development mentality.
Reich concludes his book by noting that educational technologies do provide real, incremental benefits over time, and I agree. I can compare my own K12 education in the 60’s and 70’s, noting the huge changes. Most classrooms have high-speed internet access and can bring unlimited resources into the classroom. These resources are not limited by editors, and the time it takes to write, publish, distribute, be bought by a school, and have a limited number of copies available to any classroom, any specific media (we had books, filmstrips, and reel movies). This sanitized much of what could be presented in a classroom. Educators would not consider these authentic, real-world resources today. Now, teachers and students have instant access to live news feeds, huge digital libraries, peer-generated media, and so much more. Educators can interact digitally with one another and their students, which brings about its own changes in pedagogy and practice. Researchers can more easily access information and share it with a wider audience, affecting pedagogy, frameworks, and policies.
These changes are possible due to the technologies’ incremental changes over time, including progressive improvement iterations, the development of synergistic adjacent technologies, the systems’ infrastructure to support the technology, and the time people (including teachers and students) need to learn and adapt the tech into their lives. It is when a technology is more developed and mature that people start to use it creatively and perhaps start using it more successfully to solve problems. I think that incremental improvements should define a technology’s success, not disruption. These incremental improvements also give educators and researchers time to study the technology’s effects, offer best-practice suggestions, and tweak pedagogy as needed.
VR devices are a perfect example of this. VR was hyped and developed for a variety of uses, but its initial iteration was focused on the huge gaming market. In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his parent company from Facebook to Meta in anticipation of the Metaverse taking over social, business, manufacturing, educational, and even medical functions, and invested heavily in R&D. The VR headsets that were produced, which were the forerunners of the Metaverse, had a lot of problems. They were expensive, initially tethered to a computer, uncomfortable, bulky, and heavy, fogged up during use, had limited battery life as wireless devices, created motion sickness, and had a minimal number of software developers who created games that people wanted to play. By early 2026, Zuckerberg pivoted away from VR entirely, including future investment, to embrace AI. The ability of VR to generate profit from investment just wasn’t there. VR’s full potential could not be realized because adjacent and overlapping technologies (batteries, hardware miniaturization, etc.) and infrastructure (software developers) were not able to make the tech work as consumers desired. I think we will see a resurgence of VR in the future when those other technologies catch up.
Though VR is considered passé now, its fad has brought incremental change. It was around long enough for people to creatively imagine how it could be used in classrooms and with populations to do things that other media could not. This was not a failure to disrupt; it was an incremental technological gain that now has to wait for other technologies to catch up for full realization. Progress is not linear. It circles back, leapfrogs, moves sideways, and sometimes backward.
Failure to Disrupt also notes that the technologies it covers have not fixed or cured inherent systemic problems in education, including equity and assessment issues, and have even created more serious privacy concerns. It has not overcome the inherent weight of a system to stay the same. But there have been incremental improvements in these areas that should not be dismissed. Technology is a tool, and I doubt any tool can fix the issues inherent to the human condition. Equity issues are a human problem that groups of people, either at best, are oblivious to or actively work to create. What tool can overcome that? But technology, over time, through incremental changes, has improved our lot, including education.
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