Reviewed by Michael S. Jones Illinois State University
United States Educational technology, or edtech, has long been heralded as the equalizer of public education with the hopes of increasing students’ learning and promoting equity and inclusion. Reich argues that edtech is simply the latest innovation to struggle with “basic obstacles that time and time again have tripped up the introduction of large-scale learning systems”(p. 6). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education differs from what might be considered a traditional edtech review. Instead, it criticizes our educational system and the remnants of its collision over different stakeholders’ visions and goals. It asks the reader, if edtech is a tool, can it repair what is broken in our educational system? Many themes of this book can be summarized by his use of Ellen Lagemann’s quote, ‘“One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost”’ (p. 24). In contrast to Dewey’s social constructivism, Reich argues that current educational policy embraces Thorndike’s “instructionism” approach, which uses best practices and standardized testing to “fill the pails” of our students through the science of learning.