“First, I talk about how I received my indictments, and then I give the laundry list of stipulations for my probation,” says Williams-Bolar, who is halfway through her two-year sentence. The 42-year-old single mother, with an otherwise spotless criminal record, is not allowed to drink, must submit to drug tests and reports monthly to a probation officer. She had to perform 80 hours of community service and pay $800 in restitution, as well as the cost of Summit County’s prosecution against her.

“I had to do a DNA test and swab my cheek like I was a bank robber,” Williams-Bolar says. She reaches for the letter outlining the terms of her probation. “I start with this everywhere I go, because I don’t ever want this to happen to another parent.”

As she moves into the rest of her speech, her voice, already warm and friendly, slows into a smooth, practiced delivery. Her remarks are broad but forceful. She calls for an end to educational inequality and the policies that landed her in jail. She wants more choices for parents whose kids are stuck in under-performing or unsafe schools. In February, she announced the formation of the Ohio Parents Union, part of a growing national network dedicated to giving parents exactly that kind of power. In the past year, Kelley Williams-Bolar has morphed from a desperate mom to an impassioned activist at the center of one of the nation’s most talked about shifts in education reform: the rapidly expanding role of parents in shaping dramatic overhauls of public schools.

Parents are no longer running just the bake sales and attending PTA meetings. All over the country, parents are joining—or being organized by—a movement that aims to spur more competition between schools and, ostensibly, better academic results for kids. Williams-Bolar, radicalized by her brush with the law, has joined the fray.

But as a mother, public school staffer, and now an activist, Williams-Bolar’s ordeal is also a bracing case study of a system that treats high-quality education as a commodity to be earned and parceled out, instead of the public good it’s commonly thought to be. In an era when more and more struggling school districts are turning to the private sector to solve their problems, the question everyone is grappling with now is basic: Can free market principles save public schools?

Tale of Two School Districts

Before her name became a fixture in the local newspaper, and before some activists declared her the “Rosa Parks of education,” Kelley Williams-Bolar was a regular parent trying to look out for her daughters.

“I was just a mom,” Williams-Bolar insists.

She works as a classroom aide for students with special needs in Akron Public Schools, and has been employed by the district on and off in some capacity since 1992. “From Asperger’s to Downs to autism, we deal with it all,” she says. She says that helping students with disabilities comes easy to her in part because her mom did similar work, and it seems true. She still spots students past and present in her neighborhood and tracks their progress. In the parking lot of an Applebee’s, she stops a former student and they exchange warm hellos. “He’s done well for himself, he’s in college now,” she says. She talks about their educational challenges and the progress that they worked to overcome. She rattles off their siblings’ names. It’s work she plainly enjoys.

Williams-Bolar did this work part-time for years, because she was married and in school herself part-time. But after getting divorced and moving into a home with the help of Akron’s public housing authority, she had to begin looking for full-time work to support her daughters. That changed things in her life; suddenly, she wasn’t around as often to mind her daughters, Kayla, then 13, and Jada, then 9.

It wasn’t until someone broke into their home in 2006 that Williams-Bolar started considering other school options. No one was home when it happened, but it left her rattled. “I worried about their safety. I’ve got two girls and they’re growing up. I couldn’t have them walking home alone from school,” Williams-Bolar said, careful not to indict Akron Public Schools, her employer. “I had taken care of my father, and he has taken care of me. I knew that he would be home to look after the girls.”

Williams-Bolar insists she was motivated primarily by these safety concerns when she took her kids out of Akron schools, not by the district’s poor academic performance. But the difference between its record and that of the Copley-Fairlawn School District, where her father’s house is located, is stark.

For the 2010-2011 year, Akron Public Schools met state-prescribed performance goals on just five of 26 categories of performance—such as high school graduation rates and standardized testing scores for reading and math—while Copley-Fairlawn School District met all 26 of its state benchmarks. That same academic year, Akron Public Schools failed to meet its yearly goals for test score improvement, which are set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. It was the seventh consecutive year that the district failed.

In the fall of 2006, Williams-Bolar enrolled Kayla and Jada in Copley-Fairlawn, using her father’s address. The district’s enrollment forms are extensive. It does not have open enrollment; to go to school there a student must either reside within its borders or pay a $9,000 annual tuition. Williams-Bolar, who last year made $28,000, couldn’t afford that kind of fee. So she listed her father’s address on the forms. When it came time to renew her driver’s license, she put down her father’s address as her primary one. Eventually, she also listed her father’s address with her credit union and with her employer. Her daughters were enrolled in the district for two school years, from 2006 through 2008.

By the time Williams-Bolar was indicted for this act, and later sentenced to 10 days in jail, her mug shot had been splashed across TV stations and newspapers for months. Her name would stay in the media for many weeks more as the nation erupted in shock over her case.

Williams-Bolar became a lightning rod for education reformers of all stripes. Petitions were set up by online organizing groups like Moms Rising and Color of Change, and together with one organized by a Massachusetts woman named Caitlin Lord garnered 180,000 signatures calling for Gov. John Kasich to pardon Williams-Bolar. The Taiwanese tabloid news animation group Next Media Animation even documented her story in one of their popular videos—something that Williams-Bolar is bemused by to this day. After being released from jail, she flew out to Los Angeles for a brutal taping of the Dr. Phil Show.

Williams-Bolar recounts all of this while sitting on the front stoop of her home more than a year later. Her life as a parent, and now an activist, is a far cry from the loud headlines her prosecution attracted. As she talks, she’s interrupted by a neighbor who’s amusing his toddler son by rolling his pickup truck in reverse, then neutral, then reverse, then neutral and back again. Together, they roll up and down the driveway, to the boy’s unending delight. Williams-Bolar and the father chat a bit, and the child’s silly, drooling grin is too precious to turn away from.

These days, say “Kelley Williams-Bolar” in Ohio and she represents a whole lot more than this affable neighbor. Most folks know who she is and at least a bit about her case, more if they have strong opinions about what she did for her daughters. Since being released from jail, she’s tried to keep to herself. She says that her political activism has made her unpopular on her job, at Buchtel High School. Still, she moves with ease throughout her community. She is at home in Akron, but fighting to move past the memories of her case.

Williams-Bolar’s attempt to ease her family from Akron to Copley came at precisely the wrong time. Copley-Fairlawn had been waging an aggressive war against parents who committed this kind of school residency fraud. The state consistently rates the district as “excellent,” which is the second-highest evaluation among six possible ratings. That makes it a popular magnet for parents all over the county. To its administrators and many of its parents, people like Williams-Bolar are thieves, literally stealing their “excellent” schools.

Copley-Fairlawn deployed a range of tactics to root out illegal enrollments. Among other things, the district hired private investigators to track parents, which is a common move for school districts taking a hard line on enrollment. In San Francisco, administrators did a similar thing, and forced offending parents to pay the cost of the investigation. In Washington D.C., City Council Chairman Kwame Brown introduced a bill last year that would set up a hotline for parents to report commuters who drive in from out of state and drop their kids off at D.C. schools.

School residency fraud is common, but criminal prosecutions are rare. Still, when they happen, they tend to happen to people like Williams-Bolar. Last year Tanya McDowell, a Connecticut parent who also happened to be a poor black mom, was convicted of larceny for literally stealing her son’s education when she enrolled him in a neighboring school district. “I just want to know: When does it become a crime to seek a better education for your child?” McDowell asked at the time, the Norwalk Patch reported.

School districts have answered by repeating a similar line: their coffers are only so deep, and because so much of public school funding comes from local property taxes, educating out-of-district students is an unfair burden for actual residents.

In 2008, Copley-Fairlawn stepped up its campaign by announcing a $100 bounty to anyone who turned in another family. Williams-Bolar remembers receiving a postcard in the mail announcing the reward to families throughout the district. “I guess it’s not just me, then,” Williams-Bolar recalls feeling. Plus, she was already deeply immersed in a process to make her daughters’ enrollment legal.

But by the time the postcard arrived, the district had been investigating Williams-Bolar for some time. A private investigator assigned to tail her kept watch outside her Akron home for months, documenting her family’s nights spent away from their father’s Copley address.

A Marketplace of Reforms

This past March Williams-Bolar packed her probation letter and headed off to speak at a Connecticut school reform rally. It was to be her most high-profile event as a newly minted education reform activist. The event was aimed at parents advocating Gov. Daniel Malloy’s reform agenda, which is rooted in a school choice model that deregulates public education, and it had drawn education reform celebrities. Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor who found national fame by carrying the mantle of aggressive school reform, was there. Gwen Samuel, founder of the Connecticut Parents Union, helped organize it.

Williams-Bolar remembers the rally only in hazy, nervous moments. “I had to talk to myself onstage. I said, ‘Look. You’re here for a reason. Get yourself over to the mic and say what you came to say.’ ” The Hartford Courant reported that around 75 people were in the crowd that day. “People told me afterward that I brought people to tears, and I was like, ‘Did I?’ I don’t even remember seeing anyone in the crowd.”

But not everyone has been moved to tears by the controversial Parent Union movement to which Willams-Bolar has lent her story and energy. She says one of her first and most surprising realizations as a new activist has been just how polarized the school reform debate is. “You think everything is for a common cause, but it’s not. I was naïve about the conversation,” she says.

The day the announcement of her new Ohio Parents’ Union hit the local news was a hard one, she says. “The very next day at work, staff didn’t talk to me,” she recalled. “After the Parent Union was announced it didn’t take a lot to realize some of them were opposing it.”

The suite of school reform policies that dominate the mainstream discourse today, from school choice schemes and charter school expansion to teacher evaluation overhauls and the weakening of collective bargaining agreements, are fundamentally grounded in principles of market-based competition. Schools are products, teachers are laborers and students and parents are consumers.

In the case of vouchers, if parents are unhappy with the quality of the education at a school, they can pick up capital via their taxpayer dollars and move to an approved private school. In Ohio, that amounts to $4,250 annually for students from kindergarten to the eighth grade, and $5,000 per year for high school students who take part in the state’s EdChoice program. Ohio’s voucher system caps participation in the program at 60,000 students, but voucher advocates in the state point out that the program is at capacity. Parents are demanding still more options for their children.

Akron Public Schools received a “continuous improvement” designation in the Ohio state evaluations—the third from worst of six possible designations. As a result, it has been losing both students and the state money that comes with them to the voucher program. Four thousand of the district’s 23,000 students now take part in the voucher program, and the district is set to forfeit more than $25 million in state aid this year alone—money that instead has gone to charter schools and private schools.

Some schools in the district are waging an aggressive marketing campaign to hold onto, or win back, families in the neighborhood. In the beginning of the year, Akron Public Schools sent out a 12-page brochure to parents who had removed their children to advertise the district’s offerings, including open enrollment, which makes the district open to even students who don’t live within its borders, and vocational programs and stable schools. Sending out the mailer, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, cost $6,000.

Williams-Bolar says she saw the symptoms of all this in staff meetings in Buchtel Public Schools, where administrators worried about the hemorrhaging of students encouraged staffers to think of the school as a business and to treat parents and students with outstanding customer service.

“I never thought of it that way,” Williams-Bolar says, remembering sitting in a staff meeting perplexed at the idea. The thing is, Kelley Williams-Bolar, who went to ridiculous lengths to be an informed and aggressive education consumer, could well be the poster child for the problems with the paradigm.

The worry of many is that voucher programs and school choice schemes amount to the privatization of public schools. Public tax dollars are being siphoned away from institutions that have historically been considered a public good, and not a commodity. And, critics argue, even the most comprehensive research on vouchers and school choice schemes show that they don’t lead to any meaningful gains in test scores.

Yet to parents fed up with the slow-moving bureaucracy of public schools, school choice schemes have an important narrative appeal. That fact is not lost on choice advocates, who have seized on parents as the new vanguard for pushing school choice, voucher and overhaul plans. The meme of parental empowerment has become a rallying cry, and wedge; who could be opposed to parental empowerment? But the role that some reformers imagine parents filling is narrowly defined, as are the intended reforms.

Privatization and competition in and of itself is not a problem, argues Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University. Outsourcing work that is “harnessed to public objectives” can often help public entities meet people’s social needs, Henig says, and doesn’t always come at the expense of the public good. But systemic privatization can lead to the long-term weakening of democracy when private entities operate without full transparency and outside of the full visibility of the public.

“Part of the problem is the simple notion of informed consumers as distinct from informed citizens,” Henig said. “Both the government and private actors can impinge upon your sense of being able to control your life—most people need to be able to act in both realms, both as consumers and as citizens who act to exercise their rights within democratic institutions, to either create better schools or to more closely regulate private providers.”

Williams-Bolar readily acknowledges that much of this hostile, increasingly arcane debate is new to her. “It’s a bad issue. I wouldn’t know how to even begin to solve it,” she said one afternoon over iced tea. “But I do know we’ve got to stop blaming and get the ball rolling.”

She knows as well that notions of democracy can be abstract ideas to parents who are fed up with their district schools. After pulling her daughters out of Copley schools, during her prosecution, Williams-Bolar enrolled her older daughter Kayla in a public high school and her younger daughter Jada in a private middle school, with the help of Ohio’s EdChoice program. She’s happy with the private school, and doesn’t like the idea that any entity would limit her options.

“Akron Public Schools wants to keep us all here so we can suffer while they get it right,” she said. “My daughters don’t have a second chance at their education.”

Winners and Losers

On Oct. 26, 2007, Williams-Bolar was called into a residency hearing with Copley-Fairlawn district staffers, who presented her with their evidence that she’d been stealing her daughters’ public education. They offered her a set of options, each of which included significant costs. The one that seemed most feasible was for Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward, to claim a Grandparent Power of Attorney, which is a legal designation that would name him as the girls’ guardian for the purposes of their education. A week after the hearing, Williams-Bolar filed for the change in Ohio Juvenile Court. Soon thereafter, she started receiving invoices from Copley-Fairlawn, billing the family $850 a month each for Kayla and Jada. The family refused to pay these bills.

The Grandparent Power of Attorney was eventually denied in June of 2008, because Williams-Bolar’s ex-husband didn’t sign off on the agreement. Life can be messy that way. Still, she was confident she’d attempted to handle the situation in a legal manner. The official denial came just weeks before the school year ended, and she didn’t enroll her daughters back in Copley-Fairlawn schools the following year.

Nonetheless, in October 2009, Williams-Bolar and her father were indicted for falsifying records.

“Kelley’s point was she thought she was trying to get the Grandparent Power of Attorney,” says her attorney David Singleton. “She didn’t think she should pay tuition, which she couldn’t afford anyway. She’s not a wealthy person, which is beside the point.”

Between 2005 and 2011, Copley-Fairlawn schools discovered 48 cases of school residency fraud; Williams-Bolar’s was the only case that ever ended up in court. “Every family except Ms. Williams-Bolar agreed to either pay the non-resident tuition rate, move into the district or remove their children from the school,” Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said in a statement to Colorlines.com.

“Ms. Williams-Bolar repeatedly refused to cooperate for many months, thus her case was turned over to my office for prosecution,” Walsh continued, underlining that falsifying information on government documents amounts to a felony offense. Walsh said she was compelled by the evidence. “Ms. Williams-Bolar refused the options presented to her that would have prevented felony charges.”

The Copley-Fairlawn School District insists that its hands were tied as well. In an interview with Colorlines, Superintendent Brian Poe said the district went to great lengths to resolve the issue without legal action, but was forced to hand over evidence to Walsh’s office.

Pinning down exactly who controlled the levers in Williams-Bolar’s case is difficult, as everyone seemed interested in making her a household name. After the presiding judge Patricia Cosgrove handed down her sentence, she said she hoped Williams-Bolar’s case would serve as an example to others. “I felt some punishment or deterrent was needed for other individuals who might think to defraud the various school districts,” Cosgrove told ABC.

Cosgrove spoke an uneasy truth: prosecuting Kelley Williams-Bolar seemed like an easy way to warn off others. But not every family is as vulnerable as moms like Williams-Bolar and Tanya McDowell.

Take the case of Mark Ebner, a Columbus, Ohio, parent who illegally enrolled his children in a neighboring suburban school district. Williams-Bolar’s attorney, Singleton, considers the case illustrative. The Ebner family’s primary residence was a $1 million property just outside the suburban district’s borders. When Ebner found out that private investigators were tailing him, the Columbus Dispatch reported, he arranged for a house swap with relatives inside the district—and then sued the district for spying on him. The same year that Williams-Bolar and her daughters were swallowed up by her court case, the Ebners were handily defeating the rules.

The point, Singleton said, is that school residency fraud—far from being limited to poor black parents—is an activity that parents of all classes engage in. But those with the financial means and social capital to finagle their way out of sticky situations escape the punishments and public shaming Williams-Bolar faced. Like in any marketplace, the more capital you have, the better you’ll fare.

Williams-Bolar doesn’t deny that she falsified the documents, and accepts full responsibility for what she did, but is also still confounded by the whole thing.

“They always treated [my family’s homes] as his house or my house, his house or my house,” Williams-Bolar said. “This is a family house. I help my father pay the bills, I help mow the lawn, I cook and clean for him. The girls have their own room here, I have my own room here.”

In the economy of public education, though, it’s less about squishy ideas of families and homes and more about concrete goods like houses and addresses.

“We have a community that has made it clear to us that they want to provide an education for students who live within our district boundaries,” insists Superintendent Poe. He says that he was particularly disappointed in the way the case was handled by the media. “It was being portrayed as if we didn’t care for the children. But we always sit down with families and are very open. We just want families to be forthright.”

‘I Turn No One Down’

Which is why advocates of parental power and choice all over the country are so compelled by Williams-Bolar’s story. “There are hundreds, if not thousands of Kelley Williams-Bolars in Alabama,” says Marcus Lundy, who works on workforce development and education reform issues in the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. “The intent is to try to get her to Birmingham to tell her story because her story is the story of many people who live in one area but are limited by their zip code into poor and underperforming schools.”

Lundy wants Williams-Bolar to help advocate for HB 541, a hotly contested bill which would have authorized the creation of 20 charter schools in the state. It passed the Senate, but failed in the House in the waning days of the legislative session.

“If people take inventory of some of the maneuvering that parents have had to do historically to take advantage of the better school systems they would figure that there is no need to hide, to cheat, to lie, to stretch the truth when all they’d have to do is take advantage of parental choice or one educational option of what charter schools would allow,” Lundy says. “And everything would be above the board.”

Williams-Bolar is ready to lend her time to campaigns like Lundy’s—and to any and everything that just may get the “ball rolling,” as she put it. “I don’t say no to anything,” she says. “I turn no one down.”

But her activism is something she has to juggle along with other basic struggles to keep her family afloat. Last week, Williams-Bolar’s father, who Summit County also prosecuted, passed away in prison from complications related to a stroke he suffered in January. Williams spent much of his jail time hospitalized, and had just a month left in his yearlong prison sentence for unrelated fraud charges that arose during the fight with Copley schools.

In September of last year following an international outcry amplified by multiple groups’ online organizing campaigns, Gov. John Kasich, who is a proponent of school choice and voucher schemes, went against the recommendations of the Summit County prosecutors and the Ohio parole board and reduced her convictions from felonies to misdemeanors.

In her father’s living room, she keeps her pardon certificate in the center of the mantle. “I consider these my freedom papers,” Williams-Bolar said. Prior to his passing away, she planned to move back in with him at his Copley Township home so she could be there to take care of him during his transition. Now with his passing, her plans are up in the air.

She still sees her future as an uncertain, but hopeful swath of new possibility. This month the family will celebrate Kayla’s high school graduation. Jada, Williams-Bolar’s younger daughter, is headed to a private high school next year and will qualify for tuition help from Ohio’s voucher program. Williams-Bolar spent months preparing an application to the exclusive Catholic all-girls’ school in Akron, and when the acceptance letter arrived she was decidedly happier than her daughter, who wanted to go to a co-ed high school. The tony girls school is tucked away on a verdant campus, and is a top-performing school.

“I told her even one year here will help set you up for good things to come down the line,” Williams-Bolar said. “I told her, ‘You’ll see.’”

That last sentence stayed with me. I have been researching what’s been happening to recent law school graduates, and it’s no exaggeration to describe the situation as a growing catastrophe. The statistics are shocking:

Approximately half of the 45,000 people who will graduate this year from ABA-accredited law schools will never find jobs as lawyers. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next decade 21,000 new jobs for lawyers will become available each year, via growth and outflow from the profession.)

Most of those who do find jobs will be making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year.

People currently in law school are going to graduate with an average of $150,000 of educational debt. This debt will have an average interest rate of 7.5 percent, meaning the typical graduate will be accruing nearly $1,000 per month in interest upon graduation. Unlike almost every other form of debt, these loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

In short, one out of every two law graduates will not have a legal career, and most of the rest will never make enough money to pay back their educational loans. This means they will either have to rely on other sources of income (spouses, extended family) to service their debts, or they will have to go into the federal government’s new Income-Based Repayment program. This program will keep people in debt servitude for 25 (soon to be reduced to 20) years, during which time the balance on their loans will grow, making it almost impossible for them to qualify for mortgages and many other forms of consumer debt. Finally, the debt – which for many law graduates will have grown to more than $1 million – will be discharged, meaning, of course, that taxpayers will be left to pick up the tab.

All this adds up to a completely unsustainable system – one in which the cost of acquiring a law degree no longer bears any rational relationship to the benefits the typical graduate can expect to receive from it. In this regard, the economic disaster that legal education has become is merely a particularly stark example of the increasingly absurd financial structure of higher education in America.

How did we get into this mess? The basic problem – one that goes far beyond the growing crisis inside America’s law schools – is a product of two related myths. The first is that educational debt is almost axiomatically “good debt” – that is, the sort of debt that will generate a positive return on investment. The second is that the market for higher education is rational and efficient.

For generations now, Americans have been told that it always makes sense to invest in higher education for themselves and their children. This belief was so strong that it had three unfortunate consequences: It convinced politicians and taxpayers that there was no good reason to subsidize public higher education (if people were going to enjoy such a good return on an investment why should the government subsidize it?). It encouraged colleges and universities to adopt a business mentality, which increasingly led these institutions to make revenue maximization their top goal. And it led the purchasers of higher education not to ask hard questions about whether what they were buying was worth the price they were being asked to pay for it.

It is true it is more realistic to expect prospective law students to try to determine the real net present value of attending law school than to expect high school students to make the same calculation regarding a college degree. Still, in the case of law schools the ceaseless message that more higher education is always worth the cost has combined with the misleading reporting practices regarding employment and salary outcomes to produce a classic case of severe market failure: Most law students now pay far more for their degrees than those degrees are worth.

The result has been several consecutive decades of rising costs in real dollar terms. Law schools provide a particularly stark example of these trends:  A generation ago, as measured in 2012 dollars, annual tuition at Harvard Law School was $12,500 per year. Resident tuition at my alma mater, Michigan Law School, was $4,400 per year, again in current 2012 dollars. Today the respective figures are $51,000 and $48,000.

Despite the rhetoric of self-interested and/or clueless academics, higher education is not “priceless.” At some point, the cost will come to outweigh the benefit.  That point has already been reached for countless university graduates in general, and law school graduates in particular. As prospective students and their families become aware of this fact, our debt-fueled higher education bubble, like so many other financial bubbles before it, will pop.

This week, the Senate debated student loan rates, which are now at a comfortable 3.4 percent and are set to double on July 1, if nothing is done. In his most recent college tour, President Obama focused on the endangered interest rate, fully aware that Republicans would have to support the Democratic initiative, if only to avoid embarrassment. Their sleight of hand was in proposing to come up with the $6 billion by removing money from preventive healthcare programs. That, then, is how the House Republican majority voted a week earlier to pass a one-year extension of the 3.4 percent rate. Democrats had urged cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies instead of raiding health care funds. When that wouldn’t fly, the alternative became an increase in the Social Security payroll taxes of the already wealthy. The White House vowed a veto after the House measure passed. It’s now the Senate’s turn. Congress will have to reach some sort of compromise, because neither party wishes to be seen as anti-student in an election year.

So, what about educational opportunity in America?  Is it, or is it not, a priority?  We all recognize that there is wasteful spending in the budget, but Republicans in Congress routinely recommend slashing funds for education, as though the fiscal crisis can be solved by cutting social programs first. (This past week, claiming that the Democratic plan was counterproductive, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-KY, relied on the fiction that government should not be “raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.” He apparently views college graduates as dependents on government rather than future job creators.) Nothing could be more self-defeating, or hurtful to more people. Literacy programs? National writing projects? High school graduation initiatives?

They can talk all they want about Jeffersonian small government, but Thomas Jefferson stood for opportunity for young people, not a further consolidation of power among big business combinations. For millions of low- and middle-income students with admirable ambitions, a college education is the American dream. President Obama’s revelation that he and the first lady were only able to pay off their student loans eight years ago – they were in their forties – cannot but resonate with younger voters. On the campaign trail, Michelle Obama says that her husband was “the son of a single mother who struggled to put her son through school.” It’s a good narrative when you’re running against a candidate who was pretty much slotted for Harvard at birth.

Jefferson made himself quite clear. His definition of republicanism projected greater civic involvement and an expansion of the electorate, opening minds rather than opening the wallets of the privileged few to preserve their political sinecures. The Jefferson quote about a free press comes from a letter of November 4, 1823, addressed to his old friend Lafayette, the last surviving general to have commanded Continental Army troops in the American Revolution. Jefferson invoked his small government philosophy in the line that directly preceded his call for a free press:  “A rigid economy of the public contributions, and absolute interdiction of all useless expences, will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.” And then, he assured, “the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. We are, for example, in agitation even in our peaceful country. For in peace as well as war the mind must be kept in motion.”

And how is the mind to be kept in motion? In a letter he addressed to a state legislator seven years before, as he proceeded with his design of the University of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that legislatures vote “a perpetual tax” to maintain a system of schools and a university “where might be taught, in its highest degree, every branch of science useful in our time and country.” Because, as he most eloquently put it, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Yes, small-government champion Thomas Jefferson did not wish to tax citizens – except when the money was being used for public education.

Those of our time who would sacrifice opportunity for the young and shortchange students of all ages ought to heed the thought Jefferson expressed next. Taken out of context, or left to stand alone, it is a rallying cry for those who fear federal encroachment: “There is no safe deposit [for liberty] but with the people themselves,” he proclaimed. But the rest of his comment expresses the best Jefferson we know, the education champion. Liberty is never safe, he said, unless people possessed knowledge to make informed political choices; for, “where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Conservatives will certainly not appreciate one theory Jefferson put forward in the letter to Lafayette. He claimed that partisan ideologies were fixed in nature. Those of his day whom he labeled “Tory” or “aristocrat,” who wished to restrain the democratic rabble and keep the wealthy in charge, were, for Jefferson, “sickly, weakly, timid men” whose nerves could not withstand social change. Those who subscribed to his own, relatively liberal and open-minded belief in the educability of all (white) men were, he wrote, a “healthy, strong and bold” political interest.

Jefferson’s first priority was the intellectual elevation of those who were to succeed the founding generation — those who would sustain the values of the Revolution.  He opposed all profligate spending, but he championed education spending.  And he embraced the free press as the republic’s clearinghouse of ideas and the instrument through which political and ethical progress was insured.

For three decades the cost of attending college anywhere — public, private nonprofit, or for-profit, Ivy League school or community college — has risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation. But the sharp acceleration over the last 10 years — and particularly since the onset of the Great Recession — has stoked a new wave of widespread anxiety over an impending “crisis” in higher education. The unrelenting cost hikes also explain why government aid for college students has become such a hot topic in this presidential campaign year. Even as the government continues to print money and throw it into the breach, the hole just seems to gets bigger. Total student debt is now over $1 trillion and rising.

In fact, for some critics, access to “easy government money” is the real problem, not the solution. No less an authority than House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, explaining why he wants to cut Pell Grants and reduce the availability of government-backed student loans, claims “there is evidence that subsidized lending contributes to tuition inflation.” Just last month, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Associated Press that government loans and subsidies don’t work because “universities and colleges just raise their tuition. It doesn’t improve affordability and it doesn’t make it easier to go to college.’’

For some of these critics, the solution to higher tuition costs is to take government out of the education equation altogether; to allow the market to provide “innovative,” cost-effective alternatives to old-school brick-and-mortar-style higher education. Online learning, for example, could theoretically provide students with a cheap end-around to the existing establishment. There’s an intuitive attraction to this approach that crosses party lines. We’ve already seen the Internet wreak havoc on the music business and publishing industry by fundamentally changing the economics of content delivery. Why can’t it do the same for education?

Maybe it can, and will, in the long run. But before signaling a full-scale retreat of government from the higher education fray, it’s important to look a little more closely at the simplistic claim that “easy government money” is fueling higher costs. While there are certainly some sectors of higher education in which there is a clear relationship between student loans and higher tuitions, for the great majority of college students the problem isn’t that the government is giving them too much money. Quite the opposite: It’s the collapse of direct government support for higher education that is the main driver of higher tuition costs.

“The reality is that student debt is not rising because the government is putting more money into higher education,” says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “It’s rising because the government is putting less money into higher education.”

The first step in grappling with the rise in the cost of higher education requires understanding where students go to school. There are three main categories — public schools (which include both four-year public universities and two-year community colleges), private nonprofits (the Ivys, most liberal arts colleges, etc.), and the for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, aka “career schools”). Here’s the key statistic: Fully 70 percent of the 19 million undergraduates and 3 million graduate students enrolled in post-secondary education in 2010 attended schools considered to be in the public sector — by which it is meant that some portion of their funding comes directly from government.

The problem: The word “public” doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Direct state support for public colleges has cratered over the past 10 years, and really fell off the cliff after the financial crisis. Yes, tuitions have risen, but not by as much as state and local appropriations for higher education have fallen. Just between 2008 and 2009, for example, average tuition revenue at public research institutions increased by $369 per student, but the loss in state and local appropriations per student was $751. Similarly, at public community colleges, tuition revenue rose by $113 per student, while appropriations fell by $488. Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support.

The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants. What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs of students, in the form of crippling debt.

The picture becomes a bit more complicated when one considers private nonprofits, which don’t get government support, but where tuitions have also been rising, if at a slower pace than at public schools. There’s an argument to be made that one explanation for why college costs have consistently risen faster than inflation over many decades has to do with the built-in resistance that the education sector has to the kind of productivity increases that result in lower prices in other industries. You can’t outsource teachers to China like you can iPhones or blue jeans. You need talent to operate a full-service college, and there’s a lot of competition for the talent, and so prices keep going up. While there are some problems with this argument — such as, do schools really need to have as many administrative personnel as teaching personnel? — the private nonprofit sector is where this argument seems to hold mostly true. Generally speaking, the private nonprofits are more or less immune to the same market forces that result in economies of scale elsewhere. This is particularly true for elite schools, where astoundingly high tuition gets tremendous public attention. So what? If you’re turning away 75 to 80 percent of your applicants, what possible reason do you have for lowering tuition? Quite the opposite: Keep hiking it! The kids will continue to apply!

Of course, deserved or not, our culture places a lot of value on a degree from an elite institution, which further maintains their ability to charge as much as the market will bear. The same is not true for the rapidly growing for-profit sector, which has burgeoned in size over the last 15 years despite not delivering much that anyone values.

One out of every 10 American college students now attends a for-profit school. And there is absolutely no question that those schools’ entire business model is built on the availability of student loans. Eighty to 90 percent of for-profit revenue comes from government aid — and it would probably hit 100 percent if not for a government regulation capping the total percentage of revenue allowed to come from government aid at 90 percent.

“It’s very, very clear,” says Carey. “The for-profits set their prices to whatever the maximum federal loan limit is. They charge as much money as students can borrow. ”

As has been amply documented, the for-profit sector also does a horrible job of actually educating students. For-profit students are more likely to drop out and much more likely to default on the debt they accumulated while failing to get a degree.

The dependence of the for-profit sector on government money poses a bit of a conundrum for Republicans who decry “easy government money,” because ideologically, Republicans are big fans of the for-profit sector, and fight hard to keep it free of government regulation and oversight. Yet it is precisely here that the system is most screwed up. When profit is the goal, and government looks the other way, students are the losers.

One informative, market-based method for comparing public, private and for-profit schools, suggests Lauren Asher, the president of the Institute for College Access and Success, is to look at the “net price” charged by institutions. Posted tuition rates don’t actually give a very clear picture of what a college actually costs to the person writing the check. The “net price” subtracts whatever grants are provided to the student directly by the school or government from total tuition (but does not include student loans).

The most recent data is eye-opening. The net price of attending one year at a four-year public school in 2009-2010 was $10,175. At a private nonprofit: $16,672. And at a for-profit school? A whopping $23,771. In fact, says Asher, the data indicates that in the last couple of years, the net price of attending public schools has held even and in some cases declined slightly, despite tuition hikes. Asher says that even as state appropriations plummet, schools are finding ways to cut costs and plow whatever cash they have available back into aid for low-income students. The data seems clear: If you’re looking for a bargain, your best bet is still state-supported education.

So what does all this mean in the big picture? In a perfect world, the easy answer would simply be to restore direct government support for higher education. There are still clear economic rewards to getting a post-secondary school degree, making government support of education a good investment for future economic growth and prosperity.

Unfortunately, in the realpolitik of today’s revenue-constrained, tax-averse governments, that simply isn’t politically feasible. Way back in 1978, California pioneered the future that we all currently live in when voters passed Proposition 13 and severely restricted the ability of the state to raise taxes. As a nation, we’ve voted with our taxpayer wallets: We are no longer willing to fund massive direct investments in our future.

Carey holds out hope for alternative providers of education that leverage the Internet’s huge advantages to provide instruction at low cost. Although some of the for-profits, most famously the University of Phoenix, have already been conducting classes online for years, they aren’t doing so with the goal of lowering costs for students, but rather to maximize their own profits. They’re essentially exploiting the Internet to deliver product as cheaply as possible on their own bottom line, but charging top-line prices to consumers that force massive borrowing.

There’s a clear role for government to play here, says Carey, both in restricting the abuses rampaging through the for-profit sector and in realigning incentives that constrict student and educational facility flexibility. For example, he notes, you can’t get a student loan to take a single calculus course from whichever professor might specialize in delivering the best online calculus course in the world. There’s no current way to get government aid for mixing and matching credits from different educational providers that can ultimately be assembled into a full degree.

Carey points to new, free online education initiatives from MIT, Harvard and Stanford that promise to revolutionize the education business by offering high quality at extraordinary low costs. These elite institutions pose no threat to their own operating model — there will always be plenty of students seeking the validation of a brick-and-mortar degree from Harvard, but they carry massive potential to destroy, or at least severely constrain, the for-profit model of education. We may one day look back at the current era and wonder how in the world the for-profit schools ever got away with charging such huge fees. And of course you won’t need a student loan to pay for a free online circuit engineering course put together by MIT.

How close that future might be is anyone’s guess. For now, you can’t get a transferable college credit from the MIT/Harvard initiative — exactly the kind of problem government needs to help solve. But for now, as Republicans and Democrats continue to squabble over how to pay for low interest rates on student loans or how much money to put into the Pell Grant program, we should remember that the real story here isn’t how much students are borrowing, but how little government is doing to help.

That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”

“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.

When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.

No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.

Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?

As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.

For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.

Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.

In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.

Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.

But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?

These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.

Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.

Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.

But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.

Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.