Jefferson Review

	Jefferson Review
	"Your Liberty is Our Interest"	November 18, 2002
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Central High School Protests Firing of Principal -- And Why Don’t Families Protest When Private Businesses Fire Their Managers?

By Pat Pending

This past week, we learned that Jefferson County Schools fired Harold Fenderson, the principal of Central High School. On Wednesday, there were protests at the school by students, parents, and others, who like Fenderson’s work and want to keep him on as principal. The school system says that Fenderson was fired for mismanagement and poor oversight, while the protesters say he is a great principal and the firing was unfair and racially motivated.

Why do we see this kind of protest over the firing of the manager of a school, when we never see such a protest over the firing of the manager of a private business?

The reason we see protests over the firing of a school principal, while we do not see similar protests over the firing of a business manager, is that the school is a force-based business, while private businesses are voluntary. The families whose children attend Central High School are forced to pay taxes to support the school, but they have no say over who the principal is or how the school is run, and they have little choice in what type of school their children will attend. On the other hand, if these same families are unhappy with services offered by private businesses, they have many choices. If they don’t like the way one restaurant operates, they can choose another. If they don’t like the way one dentist serves them, they have dozens more from which to choose, and so forth.

If these families had choices in schools as they do with private businesses, Fenderson could open another school, and the families could follow him there. Instead, they are trapped.

A couple of years ago, there was a lawsuit concerning the use of racial quotas in determining which students could attend Central High School. In trying to comply with a previous court order, the school district limited the enrolment of black students at Central High in order to stay within the court-ordered racial guidelines. Some black families wanted their children to attend Central High School, but they were prevented from attending due to the racial quotas. The court ended the old court order, deciding that racial quotas should no longer be used in determining which students could attend Central High School. This made Central High School the only high school in the district that was majority black. Again, if there were freedom and voluntary choice in schools, we would see many different options for families, and families would not have to file lawsuits or stage protests to obtain the kind of education they wanted for their children. Instead, they could simply vote with their feet and their pocketbooks to select the type of school they wanted for their children, just as they now select their doctors, restaurants, and grocery stores.

In another part of the state, we have seen families keeping their children out of school to protest the fact that the school was allowing a gay rights group to use its facilities for meetings, while prohibiting the posting of the Ten Commandments. Again, if there were freedom and choice in education, the families could peacefully choose which school they wanted to support and would not be fruitlessly spending their time and energy protesting.

When everyone is forced to support the system, there is no way to be fair to everyone. Someone is always going to be forced to support something they oppose and prevented from supporting something they favor. Hence, we see these numerous protests and jockeying for power, which is good for newspaper and television revenues but very bad for most humans.

In the end, in a force-based education system, the taxpayers lose, the teachers and administrators who really want to do a good job lose, and the families and children lose. Instead of fighting to have Fenderson reinstated, the Central High School families might consider the possibility that they might better serve their children and future generations by helping Fenderson found his own private school and by sending their children there, getting themselves and their children out from under the government education monopoly.