What If Disruption Is the Point? Understanding Portland’s School Closures in the Context of a National Push to Restructure Public Education

As Portland Public Schools considers closing up to 14 schools and restructuring many more next year through its “rightsizing” initiative prompted by declining enrollment, critics have voiced their concerns in public meetings, discussion forums, and  through news media. Community members and educators alike are asking why shifts affecting 8,000+ students must happen all at once and so soon rather than using a phased approach or alternative solutions, what specifically students will gain from the promised "well-resourced" schools, how much the plan will cost, what will happen to the empty buildings, and whether the disruption of dozens of communities, including families at receiving and restructured schools, is worth it. 

Many key questions about reasoning, process, costs and benefits remain unanswered. The lack of transparency is contributing to families experiencing significant uncertainty, with some considering leaving the city for other districts or learning options, which would cause a further dip in already diminishing enrollment. 

But what if disruption is the point? What if Portland is in the midst of a crisis that is exploitable, and those concerned about the rightsizing campaign are not ready to confront the risk of the trajectory that might follow?

What if we place PPS's rightsizing plan within the context of a national push to restructure public education and broader ideas about disruption, market-oriented reform and the use of crises to change public institutions?

One useful idea to examine is the concept of disruption theory, which has its roots in the world of business, but has also been used to underpin and advance entrepreneurial pursuits which reshape public education as we know it. What PPS may be facing is a crisis-driven disruption, in which a budget shortfall combined with declining enrollment destabilizes the existing system and creates pressure for major structural changes.

Another theory to look at in this context is author Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine," which says that a crisis can weaken resistance to sweeping policy changes, allowing reforms that would otherwise face significant opposition to be introduced rapidly.

These frameworks do not prove that PPS is pursuing a privatization agenda, or that the district’s leaders are coordinating with outside organizations to dismantle public education. They do, however, raise important questions about the consequences of restructuring on this scale. When financial pressure and declining enrollment are used to justify closing schools and reorganizing programs, the public is left wondering what alternatives were considered, and which were ruled out, and whether the process will strengthen the public system, or create conditions in which other providers gain a larger role. 

The origins of disruption theory

Disruptive innovation theory emerged in the early 1990s and was developed by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma, helped popularize the concept. The theory, meant to explain competition between firms, had reportedly influenced such high profile entrepreneurs as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Disruption theory has to do with the idea that a newcomer can enter a market through an overlooked or underserved market opening, and by improving a product or service enough, challenge or displace an established provider. In the words of Christensen et al, "Disruption describes a process whereby a company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses.”

Disruption theory gains a foothold in education

This concept gained traction among "edupreneurs" in the 2000s. One of its earliest applications to public education was by social entrepreneur Kim Smith, co-founder of NewSchools Venture Fund, which is dedicated to financing innovation, including charter schools and education technology. As the Jacobin reported last spring, "the vendors behind the push to increase technology sales to schools are, in much of the country, the same lobbies that have been pushing for charter schools for the past two decades." 

In her 2003 Philanthropy Roundtable interview, Smith described NewSchools Venture Fund's mission of supporting scalable education ventures and said that "entrepreneurs (who) create disruptive technologies and ways of doing things" can transform public education.

Smith also co-founded the consulting, research, and strategic-thinking firm Bellwether, to "accelerate the pace of educational innovation by supporting entrepreneurs." Additionally, Smith has been instrumental in incubating organizations such as The Pahara Institute, which trains entrepreneurial leaders to change how public education operates, and Rocketship Education, a national network of public charter schools serving low-income communities. Smith was also a founding team member of Teach For America, "a leadership development organization," which the ProPublica article, "How Teach for America Evolved Into an Arm of the Charter School Movement" called "an arm of the charter school movement." Smith is currently the CEO of another nonprofit she started, LearnerStudio, focused on "accelerating progress towards a flexible, rigorous, equitable, and learner-centered education system." The nonprofit's website says, "LearnerStudio sparks the change needed to reinvent American education — and ensure that young people will flourish in the Age of AI."

In 2008, Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson published Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. The book argued that  online learning and student-centered instruction could change the structure of K–12 schooling. 

In 2009, Smith's article "Innovation in Public Education: Problems and Opportunities" explicitly distinguished disruptive from sustaining innovation. It argued that outside organizations can create new structures and ecosystems that fundamentally change how education operates. Smith wrote: 

Disruptive innovations are those that break with current practice to serve a new population of customers (or serve an existing population in radically different ways) and, in so doing, create entirely new architectures and ecosystems – such as the shift from horses to automobiles. Meanwhile, sustaining innovations are generally improvements within the existing architecture of the current system – such as moving from gas-powered to hybrid cars. In order for public education to better meet the needs of all students, it must better embrace not only the steady sustaining innovations that are needed, but also the truly disruptive innovations – many of which will come from people and organizations outside of the traditional system – that will lead to a fundamental change in the way the system looks and works, and ultimately to dramatic improvement in outcomes for the children who have so far not been served well.

By 2009, disruption theory was being explicitly applied to proposals for fundamentally changing the structure of public education. Smith's writing illustrates how concepts developed to explain competition between businesses were being used to promote disruptive innovations that expand alternatives to traditional public schooling and, in some cases, displace it. Over time, a documented network of overlapping organizations, shared personnel, and market-oriented ideas emerged to advance this broader vision of educational change, including models that shift enrollment, resources, and decision-making away from traditional public school systems.

What is the shock doctrine?

In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein argues that corporations and global elites intentionally exploit public disorientation following major crises such as natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks, and economic crises to push through unpopular free-market economic reforms in a process called "shock therapy." Such sweeping reforms include mass privatization of public services, deregulation, severe public spending cuts, removal of protections for workers or consumers, and the sale of public assets to private entities.

When crises become opportunities for restructuring

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein documents numerous examples of disaster capitalism carried out through "shock therapy." One such example was the rapid transformation of the public school system into a predominantly charter-operated system in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina caused devastation and displacement in the summer of 2005. Klein argues that the disaster created an opportunity to advance school privatization that had previously faced political resistance.

In New Orleans, a natural disaster was followed by a second, institutional disruption in the form of a major expansion of charter schooling and a restructuring of public school governance. Together, these frameworks offer an important lens for examining different aspects of this process: Klein shows how a crisis can weaken resistance to sweeping policy changes. Christensen explains how a new model can displace an established one by initially serving overlooked populations. Smith's application of disruption theory to education explicitly envisions outside organizations introducing innovations that lead to “a fundamental change in the way the system looks and works.”

PPS is not operating in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and there is no evidence that its leaders are coordinating a plan to privatize public education. But the comparison is useful for a different reason: New Orleans illustrates how a crisis can accelerate structural changes when the policy mechanisms and political networks needed to implement them are already in place. In Oregon, the concern is what happens to public school buildings after closure, how charter schools can access those facilities, how public funding can flow to alternative providers, and whether existing policy proposals could make such changes easier. The question is not whether Portland will repeat New Orleans, but whether the disruption now underway could create openings for changes that would otherwise face greater resistance.

The mechanism of support behind disruptive innovations in public education

Co-founded by Kim Smith in 2010, Bellwether is one of many think tanks which provides research to help legitimize, analyze, and advance the policy infrastructure for expanding educational options available to families. It offers strategic planning, financial modeling, policy analysis, organizational improvement, and leadership coaching. Its work includes school redesign, district and charter-network expansion, performance management, instructional systems, and executive coaching. 

Bellwether's research and consulting work operates within an education-reform ecosystem that includes school-choice expansion, charter-school development, and more flexible approaches to delivering publicly supported education. Its August 2026 report, Rapid Field Analysis report, "Structural Signals: What State Legislative Action Reveals About the Future of Education," documents how policy changes in multiple states are altering the relationship between district enrollment, public funding, and access to educational services.

The report gives us a glimpse into the evolving national school choice landscape. It discusses patterns the organization identified across the 2026 legislative session while tracking 130 K-12 bills which passed at least one legislative chamber in the following two areas: "funding portability, meaning the ability of public dollars to follow a student to whichever school or program they pick, and provider expansion, making it easier for new kinds of schools (charters, microschools) to open."

The report points out that the debate surrounding school choice has generally narrowly focused on vouchers and parent-directed spending accounts, but learning options have been expanding through other means. The report states: Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and vouchers "get most of the attention in school choice debates, but open enrollment reforms, extracurricular access bills, and transcript acceptance requirements are all pushing in the same direction. Individually, none of them amounts to a structural shift, but together they chip away at the idea that a child has to be enrolled in a specific district school to use what it offers."

Bellwether's work simultaneously advocates for and supports the expansion of schooling options beyond conventional school choice toward an ecosystem of flexible learning options, including open enrollment, charter schools, private-school choice, education savings accounts (ESAs), and “learn anywhere” policies.

Bellwether's official Our Partners page explicitly lists Chiefs for Change among the organizations it has worked with. Chiefs for Change is a leadership development organization whose goal is "transforming education and expanding opportunity for all students." PPS Superintendent, Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong, is a member of this group, which focuses on preparing and supporting superintendents and state education chiefs to drive transformational change. As the Jacobin article, It's Tech Versus Teachers as Strike Looms Over LA Schools, by George Kates argues, there is a concerted effort by groups such as Chiefs for Change and the Broad Foundation to build a class of public school administrators whose approach to public stewardship is increasingly shaped by private-sector partnerships, philanthropic networks, and market-oriented models of education reform. 

What's wrong with disruptive innovation?

There is no dispute that traditional public education does not consistently meet the needs of all students. Understaffing, low pay, and teacher burnout are just some of the myriad issues facing the institution. However, to transform public schools into places where educators are valued and students truly centered takes community effort, not a free-market, for-profit takeover. As the spring 2026 Jacobin article points out, public schools are a public responsibility, not a business venture. Education does have to be responsive and evolve with the times, but the word innovation has been co-opted by venture capitalists and proponents of privatization.   

What "shocking" impacts could the rightsizing process have in Portland?

Several things could follow or accompany mass school closures in Portland. These are just a few possible negative consequences: 

1. Since PPS is projecting a $65.2 million structural deficit for 2027-28, deep staffing cuts will likely be on the table. In the article, "Wrong (and right) lessons from Chicago’s school closures," senior research fellow, Vladimir Kogan, at the conservative think tank, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that "the reason closures produce such savings is that even massively under-enrolled schools require a minimum complement of teachers to offer a viable education program." Kogan has written that consolidating school buildings "reduces the number of teachers by eliminating half-empty classes," and that "school closures cause teacher employment levels to decline by between 5 percent and 10 percent in the affected districts."

2. Enrollment and capture rate could decline further. One analysis found that Chicago Public Schools had lost about 32,000 students in the five years following the 2013 closures. A report found that from 1990 to 2015, Detroit’s population declined by 34%, while enrollment in Detroit Public Schools fell by 73%. The report also found that almost all of the overall decline in Detroit’s education market was coming out of the district’s share of enrollment.

3. Charter-school expansion could follow. Detroit Public Schools offers an extreme example of charter school proliferation after school closures following the district declaring a financial emergency in 2009. This led to the Michigan's governor appointing an emergency financial manager, displacing much of the elected school board's authority. During the 2009–11 emergency-management period, one study which argues that "Detroit and its traditional public schools have been hit hardest by neoliberal restructuring," found that 59 schools closed and 21 charter schools opened. These changes occurred alongside declining enrollment and a worsening deficit. What happened in Detroit demonstrates how a district can lose enrollment and market share while charter schools expand. Charter school enrollment in Oregon has already been rising, increasing from 24,205 students in 2011–12 to 44,718 in 2024–25—an increase of about 85%. The state actively supports new charter development. ODE provides prospective founders with guidance on forming nonprofit organizations, developing proposals, securing a sponsoring district, and obtaining approval to open and receive public funding. What is the problem with charter schools? In Oregon, all charter schools are public and sponsored by school districts. However, they receive public funding outside the direct governance structure of conventional district schools, and operate under charter agreements, not elected school boards. This impacts transparency and accountability. Furthermore, most charter-school employees lack employment protections due to not being unionized (though efforts are underway to help unionize charter school educators in the state). Lack of union representation can contribute to high turnover, lack of support, and schools hiring less experienced teachers, often without teaching licenses which all charter school teachers are not required to possess (In Oregon, Oregon law generally requires charter-school teachers and administrators to be licensed or registered, with a provision allowing at least half of the combined teaching and administrative FTE to be licensed by the commission. non-virtual public charter schools, at least one-half of combined teaching and administrative staff FTE must hold an Oregon teaching or administrative license).

4. Increasing number of families may choose other forms of schooling. The rising national trend of alternative modes of schooling is only gaining momentum, and with it, increasing support networks. Microschools, for example, have grown in popularity. They serve a small number of students and operate as homeschool cooperatives, learning pods, private schools or charter schools. Startup networks and accelerators have formed to help founders with training, business operations, and launching microschools. The National Microschooling Center's 2026 analysis found that half of the surveyed microschools had families receiving funding from state school-choice programs. Though there is no evidence that Oregon currently has a statewide program that directly funds ordinary private microschools, small scale public charter schools do receive public funding through Oregon's statutory funding system.

5. Students at receiving schools could be negatively impacted. One Philadelphia-based study found that "the achievement of students attending receiving-schools, however, was negatively affected by the receipt of displaced students. School absences increased significantly for displaced students following closure." A 2023 analysis of school closings in the San Antonio Independent School District yielded similar results: Attendance, grades and state test scores didn’t improve after students transferred to their new schools.

6. School closures could lead to neighborhood blight and loss of crucial community hubs. School closures carry risks beyond the loss of a neighborhood institution. Experiences in Chicago and Minneapolis show that vacant school buildings can sit unused for years, deteriorate, and become liabilities for the surrounding communities. Portland has its own examples of former schools that have remained abandoned or underused for decades. Closing schools can leave neighborhoods with a large vacant building, ongoing maintenance concerns, and the loss of a place that once served as a community anchor.

What to watch for in Oregon

In Oregon, the key conditions to watch are the convergence of declining public school enrollment, school closures, and a policy environment that could make public school facilities and public funding easier for charter operators to access. 

Oregon does not currently allow a charter chain take over a district. In our state, charter schools must be organized as nonprofits. But several existing conditions could make expansion by national charter chains easier: 

1. School closures could leave publicly owned campuses vacant or underused
2. Oregon law already requires public bodies to provide information about suitable vacant buildings to charter applicants, though owners are not required to lease or sell them
3. Nonprofit charter schools can contract with private, for-profit management companies, creating a route for commercial operators without directly owning the charter
4. Oregon has an established charter-facility-access advocacy movement seeking stronger access to district buildings
5. Legislative changes to expand charter sponsors or strengthen charter access to surplus facilities could lower barriers further; and 
6. Declining enrollment and fiscal pressure can make districts more vulnerable to arguments that consolidating public schools and shifting students or facilities to alternative providers is necessary. Oregon’s 2025 HB 3215, which proposed expanding the types of organizations eligible to sponsor charters, is one example of the policy direction to monitor.

It is important to emphasize that these are enabling conditions and policy risks, but not evidence that a coordinated takeover plan for PPS schools currently exists. 

These are some important things to monitor:

• proposed changes to Oregon Revised Statutes Chapter 338
• charter school requests for closed PPS buildings
• new management company contracts, and any proposal to give charters priority or stronger rights over surplus public school property. Oregon’s current law and the 2025 HB 3215 proposal illustrate the relevant pathways

Another national development to watch is the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, slated to start in 2027. The program lets taxpayers claim a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations to approved organizations that provide scholarships for K–12 education expenses, including private-school tuition and tutoring. States have to opt in for scholarship organizations in their state to participate. Oregon's Governor Tina Kotek has stated Oregon will not be opting in, but that position could change. During Oregon's 2026 legislative session, lawmakers also considered HB 4133, which would have required the state to participate, but the bill did not pass.

photo credit: KATU

When resistance works

It is not too late to resist mass closures. The following are examples of teachers, students, and community members banding together to halt school closures and winning in recent years:

1. In October 2026, Minneapolis Public Schools has backed away from a proposal to close up to 16 schools for the following school year after widespread community opposition. The board voted against closures for next year, showing that a proposed consolidation is not an inevitable outcome of enrollment and budget pressures.

2. In 2024, students, parents and caregivers rose up against Seattle Public School's school closure plan, successfully pausing the shuttering of 21 schools.

3. In Oakland, students, teachers and families managed to stop the closures of several schools in 2023. 

 

The moment we find ourselves in

The point is not that school closures automatically produce privatization. It is that closure and consolidation decisions can shape the future of public education: where students enroll, how staff and programs are distributed, which buildings remain in public use, and what alternatives are available to families. Here, transparency matters. Before PPS makes irreversible decisions, the public should be able to examine the full costs of the proposed plan, the concrete benefits it is expected to deliver,  alternatives that were considered, and the future of the public assets affected. Families and educators should be involved in crafting a creative plan that preserves education as a public good.

The intersection of declining birth rate, falling public school capture rate, and structural budget deficit could create a situation that puts Portland at risk of a shock-doctrine dynamic taking hold. A crisis does not have to become an opportunity to dismantle public institutions. Public education remains one of the key foundations of a democratic society and it is imperative to defend it from a for-profit takeover. Other cities have done so successfully, and Portland can too.