What's missing? Let's use a business analogy.

When working with adults in my business coaching practice I've discovered that quite frequently they are more focused on the "technical" part of their business than on managing the overall business. An example: a restaurant owner that started out as a cook is spending his time making better and better meals, better steaks (the technical stuff), and he can't understand why no one is walking through the door. The answer is: He isn't managing "the business," his focus is on the details of production, yet there is marketing, sales, administrative tasks, and managing all of those pieces to come together profitably. He was missing the (business management and profitability stuff).

Let's use that analogy for schools. They are teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to the students, "the technical stuff." They are not teaching students how to take the tools and put them together into managing a successful life, a successful business, or even how to build a successful career. This is a whole lot like missing the "profitability" piece in a business.

Although reading, writing, and arithmetic (the technical stuff), are important, it's very important to give our kids the tools to put those tools to use most successfully, to manage those tools, to manage their lives, to show them how to plan, set goals, implement those goals, measure their progress, and then how to take what they've learned back through the process to keep making it better and better.

In my business practice about 80% of my business clients double their business in a matter of weeks and it's usually from them learning that missing piece. It took me 30+ years to figure out some of these things. And most of my clients are struggling with life, and with business because they don't have those skills. Just think what it would do for our kids if they learned those skills as teens.

Some schools are starting to get it. When we've worked with teens in those same schools, helping the teens develop a vision for their life, develop the map of how to get there, and how they can track their paths and make corrections to get back on path, we've seen graduation rates go up 75%, kids going on to college who never even had that on their radar screen.