A post I recently added to our ETEC Ning on the topic of Christensen/Horn’s “Disrupting Class” and our upcoming book club on it:

As some of you know, I have been working the past year and a half with a grant through the Hawaii community foundation titled “schools of the future”. As a part of that, we have been sharing books that we felt were provocative and discussing the need for education to transform. The foundational book for us was Tony Wagner’s “the global achievement gap). Shortly after reading that, we found disrupting class and found a great source for explaining how and why incremental change for schools was not going to be enough. Since then, I’ve had a chance to both hear and talk a bit with Michael Horn about the book, seen him in a public forum on the debate about bricks and mortar at this year’s NECC and seeing the ideas percolate through at least some of the conversations in forums like the future of education.
Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) gave a great updated view of this at NECC here

so where do I sit on this? I have come to believe that Christensen is really correct about the forces that are going to shape the relevance of education. For those of you that are not familiar with what has happened with Florida virtual school’s, with the national movement from K12.org, and others, they are providing a new model for education that is beginning to be felt by schools. Locally, Hawaii technology Academy (HTA) is showing this disruptive potential already. I really believe schools aren’t ready and struggle with students who wish to be in a different environment than traditional school.
One of the goals we set for the schools of the future grant (kudos Elizabeth Park, Mike Travis, Lisa Waters for leading their schools to successful grant proposals) was for schools that were looking at substantive change, not just dressing up traditional school. The big debate at NECC this year was whether the bricks and mortar of schools were still viable, or needed a complete reworking.
Day 2 had a public forum debate — was provocative, passionate and showed some insight into the promise and peril schools face (Michael Horn was on the panel as was Gary Stager and Cheryl Lemke). Tape video archive here.
So I do believe traditional K-12 education is in peril — both because of its inability to adapt to a new world, and because there are forces in learning that it has not been able to address. I believe to survive school must become a learning environment that utilizes what we know about learning and technology. Homeschoolers have known this for a long time — if you start by understanding the child, build rich powerful learning around their interests, use the community, mentors and experts to support their learning goals, then you end up with a powerful experience. For most of our students today, school is still just “one thing after another” 5, 6 or seven classes a day of disconnected information with little opportunity for students to explore their own interests, or event input. Recent study of classroom interaction in schools showed that in a typical day student has rare few minutes of opportunity to express their own thinking — how can that still be happening with what we know about how the brain works, and how knowledge is constructed?
so what will education be like, or more to the point what should it be like? Using the best that technology can offer to individualize and diversified learning, in using the bricks and mortar as a learning center where learners of all ages come together to work in a community under the guidance of learning experts has promise and has already been implemented in charter reform efforts with great success.
Caveat — if you didn’t see the recent article about the Microsoft school of the future failure, it is worth looking at as an example of putting the wrong things in place in the wrong order. ESchool news had an article on this recently here.