Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims (review)

Ethnographer Christo Sims addresses what he calls "the pitfalls of techno-idealism," specifically, the historically-repeated dream of improving K-12 education by introducing the latest technologies—film, radio, television, or the Internet. Sims conducted fieldwork at a new Manhattan school for design, media, and technology following its 2009 opening. Supported by expert advice and millions in foundation funding, the "Downtown School" aimed to redefine twenty-first-century education by replacing passive rote learning with game-based exploration, creating, remixing, and hacking. The ambitious promise to cultivate improvisational and cooperative learners, naturally comfortable with ever-shifting technology, drew widespread attention, including a New York Times Magazine cover story.

Planners assumed digital-generation children would automatically gravitate toward the joys of geeking out; they created a private social-networking site and after-school tech-experimentation programs. New York parents in the professions and creative industries prided themselves on choosing the Downtown School, which symbolized their open-mindedness. Many sons from privileged families indeed loved tech-immersion opportunities. But 40 percent of students came from lower-income households and felt awkward without owning the latest expensive gadgets. Many opted for after-school sports and other non-tech-centered activities, as did more female students. Girls comprised only 30 percent of enrollment, an "indication that the school's disruptive new model might include inherited, but unexamined, cultural biases," Sims writes (p. 76). Many girls were adept social media users and performed well in game-design courses, but neither teachers nor classmates celebrated them as boundary-pushing innovators. Girls were seen as overly conformist, while those boys who ridiculed gaming assignments, cursed, or otherwise transgressed expectations were criticized (often with racial undertones) as too non-conformist.

Well-off parents expressed encoded concerns about enrollment of low-income students of color, and a panic over bullying fed demands for zero-tolerance policies. Punishments that disproportionately hit high-achieving minority students led many to transfer out, which critics rationalized by labeling them "a bad fit" for groundbreaking education. To stabilize conditions, teachers marched students between classes, "retrofitting the project with the very techniques of discipline and control that were common at the conventional schools against which they had defined their project" (p.96). Game language became a façade covering regular grading, timed tests, state-standard curricula, and Taylorized worksheets. Several times a year, the school interrupted regular classes for special projects allowing greater student autonomy, which Sims calls "sanctioned counterpractices." By highlighting those occasions as representing the school's radically innovative nature, reformers, educators, and parents could reaffirm their moral goal of disrupting education to create a cutting-edge, socially-just alternative, even as everyday classroom management actually increased inequities and paternalism. Sims concludes that their idealism "seemed impressively immune to the forces that repeatedly thwarted their efforts … [and] helped sustain and spread the project's reputation as an innovative model of reform that could and should be emulated" (p. 17).

Sims interprets the Downtown School story as illustrating the limits of "techno-philanthopism," in which technological determinism leads optimists to fixate on novel breakthroughs as the secret to revolutionizing schools and other major institutions. Crisis inevitably results when plans ignore complex political and economic realities, Sims suggests, but rather than learning from history, reformers simply re-frame the challenge by seeking the next technological miracle. Thus, he concludes, "their collectively lived fictions are maintained, repaired, and renovated despite round after round of often disappointing setbacks" (p. 11).

Sims's analysis offers intriguing thoughts about what happens when different perspectives on education, reform, and technology clash, complicated by bad assumptions, economic inequities, and social biases. His case study links to recent patterns of wealthy high-tech wizards seeking to change the world by deploying their ideals of disruptive innovation, global interconnectivity, and gamification, while others debate the human impacts. Sims's book could have gained depth by exploring such important dimensions. His look at "techno-philanthropism" does not...