Seth Godin‘s post from yesterday has been rolling around in my head:

It’s not the rats you need to worry about

If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched. Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.

When law firms started switching to fax machines, Fedex realized that the cash cow part of their business (100 or 1000 or more envelopes per firm per day) was over and switched fast to packages. Good for them.

If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.

As we start 2010, the most important issue I am wrestling with: whether to continue sending my daughter to our local public high school. She’s not a typical student, and we’ve determined that less than 50% of her school day is spent in worthwhile learning (the rest is sheer compliance). An artist and musician, she is drowning under the worksheets (40 isolated algebra equations per night!), the “surprise” assignments due first thing tomorrow morning, and the minutes wasted during the school day traveling, copying, listening, and waiting.

As my kid struggles (and I know she’s not alone), I have to ask myself – is our “good enough” suburban public high school actually “good enough” anymore? Should we make the leap and find an alternative – now that one exists? Enter 21st Century Cyber Charter School … the only online PA school to make AYP in the last five years. It’s a mastery learning model that permits students to work at their own pace and is highly differentiated in the three ways that matter most (learning style, interest, readiness) . Kids who graduate from 21st CCC tend to be motivated, highly organized, and independent. My daughter attended the open house and after the presentation turned to me saying, “this is what I want. I can get my school work done quickly and take time off to write music or paint.” How can I argue?

Are there drawbacks? Sure … like I mentioned earlier – about 50% of the traditional school day isn’t bad. I worry about a teenager at home alone all day – will she really get up and focus on school while mom and dad are working? This kind of education isn’t for everyone.

And then I think of Seth Godin’s post (above). We are the “heavy users” of education. We ask a lot of our local school, and their inflexibility is no longer acceptable now that there is an alternative (and more alternatives are being devised every day). Why shouldn’t we take our tax dollars (and, I might add, our daughter’s nice “Advanced” score on the PSSA) and vote with our feet? When will the traditional “good enough” schools realize that they need to hold onto their heavy users?

I think the ship is beginning to sink …