I am going to be blunt: schools have reached their highest level of incompetency. Think about it. How long would your business last if you consistently drove 30% of your paying customers away? That’s the national average of school dropouts. Even worse, in our large cities 50+ percent are driven away. And horror of horrors, schools are getting paid for doing this. No matter how poorly schools are doing,public funds keep flowing in. If we were to take away compulsory attendance and tax support, our schools would either shape up or get out of business.

Why are schools doing so poorly? It’s because they are so far outdated that they are no longer relevant. We are in the era of participation, interaction, and collaborative ownership; however schools are still operating as if they were 19th and 20th century factories with a bureaucratic command and control management system that encourages micromanaging and incompetency.

None of that works in this new era and that’s also why most of our highly competent new teachers quit after two or three years in the job. And kids are finding that they can learn tons more of relevant information through the participatory democracy of the Internet.

Any organization that wants to be sustainably successful n this era needs to be democratically run. Already there are over 10,000 organizations in the world that operate as employee collaboratives. In such organizations everyone is a steward of the organization’s well being, everyone is a servant to all others, and everyone is appreciated for their part in the whole. Schools are diametrically opposite of this and thus schools are really dead places that are being kept alive by wrongheaded out-of-date thinking. To make schools relevant for this era they must function in the dominant modes of this era: participation, interaction, and collaborative ownership.