When There Is No Place To Go

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously described the importance of the frontier--the line demarcating  a relatively settled eastern part of the North American continent from an unsettled, wide open west with plenty of free land. To Turner, the frontier served as a "safety valve" allowing for the diffusion of social unrest into a zone of opportunity and escape. Turner articulated this thesis in a paper given at the American Historical Association meetings in 1893, the year the U.S. Census Bureau announced the "closing of the frontier." With this closing, Turner reasoned, the United States had lost its safety net with all the limitations this implied.Congested independent school markets where demand for seats greatly exceeds supply (New York and Hong Kong come to mind; perhaps Singapore to a lesser extent) have no safety valve. Unhappy parents and teachers--of which there are always some in every school--cannot escape by moving to another school. Rather, they stay and stew, thereby creating social unrest for heads of school. In short, when "addition by subtraction" is not an option, everything becomes more tense. Because not everyone can get along.