“Unless I am missing Tyack and Cuban’s point, this account is in the spirit of Tinkering Towards Utopia and in fact, exemplifies one of the major principles in its presentation of the generic life-cycle of reforms: The reform sets out to change School but in the end School changes the reform. One may at first blush see a tautology in using this proposition to explain failures of reform. But to say that School changes the reform is very different from simply saying that School resists or rejects the reform. It resists the reform in a particular way — by appropriating or assimilating it to its own structures. By doing so, it defuses the reformers and sometimes manages to take in something of what they are proposing.”
Papert, S. (1995). Why School Reform is Impossible. In The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6(4), pp. 417-427.
Buy Tinkering Towards Utopia by Cuban and Tyack.