This weekend the Akron Beacon Journal highlighted parents who ?cheat? to get their kids into preferred schools, lifting up the story of an Akron woman who faces criminal charges (and 10 days in jail) for putting her kids in a neighboring, better school.
Regardless of your beliefs about school choice, doesn't a story like this make you pause? Isn't it an indictment of our education system (and our values) when parents are thrown into jail for wanting their kids to have better opportunities (and feeling like they don't have a legal, reasonable outlet to do so)?
There are plenty of people who hate school choice conceptually but who probably never confront it in reality. I often wonder if choice opponents have ever had a conversation with a desperate mother like Kelley Williams-Bolar (or lived in a failing school system themselves); have ever waited in a long line overnight with parents attempting to win the magnet or charter school lottery; or have come from socio-economic/racial backgrounds where educational opportunity and mobility were contingent on escaping the current school system in search of a better one.
- Jamie Davies O'Leary
