They do, I was close to actually signing up 
Discourse has their own “cheers” (Discourse Gamification) and badge system, but emphasis on leaderboards is done better at first glance on Skool. I’m pretty sure Discourse can improve their gamification system to be more engaging.
Another thing is that it’s easy to spin up a private (monetized) community on Skool. In Discourse you either have to pay CDCK or be tech-savvy enough to start a free (or low-cost) community. Effectively making the barrier of choosing a platform favored towards Skool - if the target audience is the masses.
Let’s not forget educational content, schools, courses. It seems Skool[1] has a out-of-the-box way of publishing courses - nothing crazy where Discourse can improve, as this comes very close to doc-categories with a % progress bar above the navigation menu 
Thinking about the name, it seems their main focus is educational communities
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