Most people don't realize how strange it is that school is the only institution that doesn't have to earn its customers. Think about every other service you use. A gym that doesn't help people get fit goes out of business. A restaurant that serves bad food closes. A coach who doesn't improve his clients loses them. A streaming service that doesn't offer what people want sees subscriptions cancel. Everywhere in life, organizations have to prove their value or they die. Except school.

School gets paid whether it delivers or not. It gets funded whether students learn or not. It gets filled whether people want to be there or not. Attendance is mandatory, so they don't have to worry about empty seats. Funding is guaranteed, so they don't have to worry about customer satisfaction. There's no competition, no consequence for failure, no reason to improve. That's not a sign of success. That's a sign of insulation from reality.

Now imagine if school had to operate like every other service. Imagine if students and families could choose where to go, and funding followed that choice. Suddenly schools would have to ask a question they never ask now: what do our customers actually need? Not what does the state require. Not what does the curriculum mandate. Not what have we always done. But what do the people in front of us need to succeed?

This question changes everything. Instead of delivering content, schools would have to deliver value. Instead of processing students through a standardized system, they'd have to respond to individual goals. Instead of measuring success by test scores and graduation rates, they'd have to measure it by whether people actually got where they wanted to go. The entire orientation shifts from compliance to service.

Consider what this would look like in practice. A student who wants to become an electrician wouldn't be forced through four years of algebra and Shakespeare first. They'd be connected with an electrician who could teach them. A student who wants to code would have access to computers and mentors, not just textbooks about computers. A student who's struggling with their health would find people who could help them move better and eat better, not just a semester of gym class.

This doesn't mean school becomes a business that profits off kids. It doesn't mean we privatize education or turn it over to corporations. It means we borrow the one thing the private sector does well: responsiveness. When you have to earn your customers, you listen to them. You adapt. You improve. You abandon what doesn't work and double down on what does. School has never had to do any of that because it's never faced the consequences of not doing it.

Think about how different the relationship would be between schools and families. Right now, it's adversarial. The school demands compliance; the family resists; the kid gets caught in the middle. In a responsive model, the school would be asking "what do you need?" and the family would be saying "here's what we're hoping for." That's not a fight. That's a partnership.

The private sector model works because it has to. It faces reality every day. If you don't serve people, they leave. That pressure doesn't degrade quality—it refines it. It forces organizations to get better, to innovate, to actually care about outcomes. School faces no such pressure. And it shows. We've been trying to reform education for a hundred years, and nothing fundamental has changed. Why? Because there's no mechanism that requires change.

Aligning school with real life means introducing that mechanism. It means making school responsive instead of rigid. It means treating students and families as customers whose needs matter, not as inputs to be processed. It means measuring success by whether people actually succeed, not by whether they sat through the required hours. That's not radical. That's just how the rest of the world works.

 

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