Forty-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was recently released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar’s offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring district.
Williams-Bolar has become a cause célèbre in a case that crosses traditional ideological bounds. African-American activists are outraged, asking: Would a white mother face the same punishment for trying to get her kids a better education? (Answer: No.)
Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for school choice. What does it say when parents’ options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? For me, the case struck an additional nerve. As a teacher nearly two decades ago, I taught bilingual first grade. Some of my students were in this country illegally; by my third year, a number of them also lived outside the school and district zone.
Given their substandard neighborhood options, some parents drove 30 minutes or more each way just so their kids could be in my class. I was supportive of, and flattered by, their efforts. These were good parents, doing the best they could for their families.
In this country, if you are middle or upper class, you have school choice. You can, and probably do, choose your home on the quality of local schools. Or you can opt out of the system by scraping together the funds for a parochial school.
But if you are poor, you’re out of luck, subject to the generally anti-choice bureaucracy. Hoping to win the lottery into an open enrollment “choice” school in your district? Good luck. How about a high-performing charter school? Sure — if your state doesn’t limit their numbers and funding like most states do. And vouchers? Hiss!
Williams-Bolar lived in subsidized housing and was trapped in a failed system. In a Kafkaesque twist, she was taking courses to become a teacher herself — a dream she now may never realize as a convicted felon. It’s America’s version of the hungry man stealing bread to feed his family, only to have his hand cut off as punishment.
The intellectual argument against school choice is thin and generally propagated by people with myriad options. If we let the most astute families opt out of neighborhood schools, the thinking goes, those schools lose the best parents and the best students. The children stuck behind in failing schools really get hurt.
But kids are getting hurt right now, every day, in ways that take years to play out but limit their life prospects as surgically as many segregation-era laws. We can debate whether lying on school paperwork is the same as refusing to move to the back of the bus, but the harsh reality is this: We may have done away with Jim Crow laws, but we have a Jim Crow public education system.
Consider the recent results from a test of 15-year-olds around the world. White and Asian Americans are still in the upper echelon. But African-American and Latino students lag near the bottom quartile of world standards.
Like millions of parents hoping to do right by their kids, Kelley Williams-Bolar thought that schools were the answer. She didn’t have the luxury of waiting a generation while intellectuals argue about poverty or culture. She looked at her options, she looked at the law, and she looked at her children. Then she made a choice.
What would you have done?
Kevin Huffman is executive vice president of public affairs at Teach for America.
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