How did cheating become normal in America’s schools?

“No Child Left Behind has created a culture in which people will do anything to keep their jobs,” says Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University and a leading critic of corporate-inspired school reform. “There are states that have gamed the systems, there are districts that have gamed the system, there are people who have gained the system.”

President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind in 2002, spelling out a reform movement blueprint and unleashing an escalating set of benchmarks compelling teachers to deliver ever-better student scores. NCLB mandates high-stakes standardized testing to monitor student achievement and aggressive intervention into schools that fall short: making Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, became a matter of a school’s — and increasingly teacher’s — survival.

Test results have been used as the pretext to fire teachers and force schools into becoming privately managed charters, even though research has shown that corruption-prone charters are not, as a whole, better, and are often much worse than traditional public schools. And the testing mandates have proven to be a bonanza for for-profit education companies like Pearson and Kaplan (the latter is owned by the Washington Post Co.), which produce tests and materials to drill students in preparation.

And the pressure to raise scores continues to build. NCLB requires districts to achieve the impossible goal of demonstrating that all students are proficient in reading and math by 2014. Unsurprisingly, school districts nationwide are set to fail this mandate. The Obama administration, meanwhile, isn’t offering much of a helping hand. Its Race to the Top initiative uses billions in federal dollars to encourage states to incorporate “student achievement” in evaluating teacher quality. And Obama has conditioned waivers for NCLB’s 2014 deadline on implementing more Race to the Top reforms — such as removing barriers to charter school growth and, once again, evaluating teachers based on student test scores.

This year alone, Washington, Colorado and Connecticut have passed laws requiring the inclusion of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. In March, New York legislators acceded to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to base 40 percent of a teacher evaluation on “student achievement.”

In Los Angeles, one well-regarded teacher at a low-income school committed suicide after the Los Angles Times posted his low “value-added” score online. The New York Times, though it faced widespread criticism and acknowledged the data’s shortcomings, followed suit in February and published individual teacher test score data online. The New York Post, for its part, did what could be expected and personally attacked one teacher, by name and photo, as “The Worst Teacher in the City.”

Major figures in the corporate school reform movement — like erstwhile New York chancellor and current Rupert Murdoch advisor Joel Klein and former D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee — have built their gold-plated resumes atop spectacular test score gains that closer inspection has shown to be, potentially, illusory.

In Washington, USA Today uncovered possible widespread cheating that took place during Rhee’s tenure. Rhee, who basked in the klieg light glow of the docu-propaganda film “Waiting for Superman” and invited PBS NewsHour to tape her while she fired a principal, has refused to speak to its reporters.

According to New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip, Washington’s investigation has been a superficial one: “Investigators spent five days at eight schools.” In Atlanta, the nation’s canary in the test-cheating gold mine, “the state deployed 60 investigators who worked for 10 months at 56 schools.”

Indeed. The full extent of cheating nationwide is hard to gauge. In both Atlanta and Philadelphia, it was aggressive reporting and not government oversight that brought bubble-test malfeasance to light. There is often little government regulation at the state or school district level. And the federal government, for its part, requires testing but does not require any oversight to identify cheating.

The recent spate of scandals began in 2008 when the Atlanta Journal Constitution uncovered suspicious, and nearly statistically impossible, levels of improvement at a few Georgia schools. In 2010, Gov. Sonny Perdue finally ordered an in-depth investigation: Cheating was alleged at nearly half of Atlanta’s schools.

The Philadelphia Inquirer first uncovered potential cheating at Roosevelt Middle School in May 2011. One month later, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook discovered a 2009 state study suggesting that cheating could be far more widespread: 89 schools statewide, including 28 in Philly, had been identified for suspicious test scores. More schools have since been identified.

In March, the Journal Constitution went on to expose cheating nationwide in a stinging, in-depth  investigation: About 200 school districts, it discovered, have “test scores … [that] resemble those that entangled Atlanta in the biggest cheating scandal in American history.”

Cheating was concentrated in urban and rural districts, which tend to educate a high number of poor students. 

“A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy,” they found. “Some school districts and states have taken an apathetic, if not defiant, stance in the face of cheating accusations in recent years.”

Poverty and the underfunding of poor schools are the greatest obstacles to academic achievement. No Child Left Behind, while doing nothing to alleviate poverty and too little to direct extra funding to poor districts, put these systems under the heaviest pressure to show testing gains.

“Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat,” writes Winerip.

Likewise, (almost) never before have so many private interests had so much opportunity to profit. Testing has — much like privately managed charters (and certainly cyber charters such as the one owned by Mike Milken), vouchers and myriad unproven but expensive “learning technologies” that have proliferated over the past decade — alchemized an enormous pile of taxpayer dollars into generous contracts with private education firms that produce tests and prep students.

The profiteering from the high-stakes test regime is, it seems, also tinged with corruption: corporate education behemoth Pearson, Winerip has reported, pays for public school officials nationwide to attend lavish conferences in Helsinki or Rio de Janeiro, “meeting with educators in these places” and “with top executives from the commercial side of Pearson, which is one of the biggest education companies in the world, selling standardized tests, packaged curriculums and Prentice Hall textbooks.”

Testing companies even make money from trying to make sure that no one cheats on their tests: New York state has a $3.7 million contract with Pearson to examine test results for irregularities.

These local scandals are fueling a national movement to overturn the high-stakes testing regime, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Four hundred Texas school boards adopted a resolution asking the state to deemphasize testing and 500 Everett, Wash.,  students refused to take state exams in protest. And in the nation’s largest protest against corporate education reform, thousands in Philadelphia are protesting a plan to close schools and privatize management of those that remain open in the cash-strapped district. Groups nationwide, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and National Education Association, have signed a resolution calling on Congress to reduce No Child Left Behind’s testing mandates.

Prophets of accountability, however, have so far blamed unethical educators and proposed technocratic solutions rather than taking on NCLB.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who demands testing gains but not testing oversight, told the Journal Constitution that the “findings are concerning.” He was, however, oblivious to the investigation’s indictment of the high-stakes test regime.

“States, districts, schools and testing companies,” he told reporters, “should have sensible safeguards in place to ensure tests accurately reflect student learning.”

In New York, the New York Board of Regents in September 2011 recognized that schools rely “more than ever on state exams – to measure student achievement, to evaluate teacher and principal effectiveness, and to hold schools and districts accountable for their performance,” and so “we need to be absolutely certain that our system is beyond reproach.”

Their bold solutions? Universal exam dates for grades 3-8 and a requirement that “all teachers and administrators certify that they have received and will follow all security protocols.”

High-stakes testing imperils far more than educators’ ethical integrity. The pressure to do well on standardized tests has also eviscerated the curriculum, as I reported for Salon last fall: Arts, science, music, physical education, literature and even recess are on the chopping block as teachers are forced to spend an ever greater amount of time on test preparation. This degrades classroom learning — and, once again, the fundamental value and accuracy of the test.

“There was once a time,” says Ravitch, “when test prep was considered a form of cheating.”

The test lobby has also monopolized the national conversation about public education for the past decade, successfully changing the subject from what research demonstrates to be two central causes of poor students’ poor academic performance: the systematic underfunding of poor and property-tax reliant school districts and, of course, poverty. It’s now more clear than ever that the high-stakes standardized testing regime cheats our children in more ways than one.

From coast to coast, the incidents are as heartbreaking as they are shocking:

• In Brooklyn, NY, G.R., a 5-year-old autistic student, was traumatized when police were called to his school because he was having a temper tantrum. He was physically removed from the school by police and strapped to a stretcher, and when his family members tried to advocate for him, they were allegedly handcuffed. His grandmother’s ribs were broken in the altercation.
• In Albuquerque, a 7-year-old with autism was handcuffed by police officers called to restrain him. His “offenses” included calling other children names, knocking over chairs, spitting, and shooting rubber bands at a police officer.
• Tony Smith, a disabled student suing the Atlanta Police Department and his former school district, claims he was handcuffed to a filing cabinet for seven hours when the school investigated a crime that had taken place on campus. The officers involved, his suit argues, violated department policy and his civil rights.
• In 2010, autistic student Evelyn Towry made national headlines when she was arrested after becoming agitated because her teacher wouldn’t let her wear her favorite cow hoodie. Her Individualized Education Plan (IEP), which detailed her needs and how they should be met specifically, included a clause allowing the school to contact law enforcement in the event of disruptive behavior, though her parents report they neither saw nor approved the document.

Cases like these, of students trapped by school policies rarely designed to deal with the nuances of their diagnoses, are growing – and the situation is further clouded by race, class and social factors. These factors can determine what kinds of evaluations, interventions and treatments are provided to students with disabilities or suspected disabilities, and they ultimately decide whether children are able to successfully complete their educations or fall by the wayside.

Race, Disability, and Discipline in Public Schools

The increased use of law enforcement to deal with behavioral issues in schools gained heightened attention this year when Salecia Johnson, age 6, had a temper tantrum in her principal’s office and was handcuffed and detained by local police as a result. She was so traumatized by the experience that she has trouble sleeping at night – and she’s not the only one.

Such situations are growing extremely common across the United States, with school districts calling on police to handle routine disciplinary infractions rather than dealing with them on their own. Many have adopted harsh zero-tolerance policies, where infractions are handled with a one-size-fits-all model, regardless of age, ability or the larger context in which the infractions took place. These policies can effectively set some students on the path of what the Florida ACLU calls a school to prison pipeline – and, notably, many of the victims of this system, such as Salecia, are minorities.

Racial disparities when it comes to school discipline are well-established in the United States; students of color are twice as likely as their white peers to be subject to out-of-school suspensions, according to the Department of Education’s 2012 Civil Rights Data Collection. Yet often, there’s more to these cases than meets the eye, because many of the minority students who find themselves harshly penalized also happen to be students with disabilities, many of them undiagnosed.

Annie Linden is a former teacher who taught in districts primarily composed of low-income students of color, and she still participates in the preparation of Individualized Education Programs. In an interview with AlterNet, she noted that many of her former students showed signs of cognitive disabilities that went undiagnosed, sometimes due to parental fears about deportation or concerns that their children might be removed from school. The data suggest that these parents were right to be afraid: Students of color are already at a higher risk of expulsion, and disability can compound that risk.

Studies in individual states lend support to the critical importance of discussing race and disability together in the context of school discipline; this is particularly important given the considerable funding disparities between white and nonwhite children when it comes to disabilities like autism. Students of color are generally less likely to be diagnosed with disorders of these kinds, making it still harder to provide them with the support they need in educational settings.

When Disability Meets District Policy

Even without counting the many children with undiagnosed disabilities in schools today, we know that the overall number of disabled students in our public school system is on the rise. Increasingly, school districts are tasked with educating students with a wide range of intellectual, cognitive and emotional disabilities, rather than physical disabilities, as in prior decades. In theory, our ability to identify these disorders earlier than we could in the past should ensure that students get the support and access they need to succeed in school, including individualized education when it is appropriate. But in practice, the rise in disabled students is crunching school districts terribly, as funding for these students has not at all kept pace with the rise in diagnoses. As a result, many schools are now hard pressed to serve their students’ educational needs and deal with disciplinary issues.

As funding for special education drops and available staff members dwindle – and as disabled students with behavioral problems are increasingly mainstreamed in response to changing thinking on disability education – discipline is becoming a large problem in a growing number of mainstream classrooms. In response, some districts have decided to bring out the heavy guns for handling disruptions associated with disabled students; from outbursts in class to tantrums in the hall, the new go-to solution in many districts is to call the police.

In addition to calling on law enforcement, Disability Rights Oregon notes that there has been an uptick in the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, as well. The organization points out that these practices appear to disproportionately target disabled students and can be fatal in some cases.

Last month, 16-year-old Corey Foster died after police were called to restrain him. Though Foster’s disability status is unclear, he was attending a school for at-risk youth that included a number of students with disabilities, and his fellow students say restraint is a common disciplinary tactic.

In Jackson, Mississippi, students at an alternative school are routinely handcuffed for discipline infractions, and many of them have emotional or intellectual disabilities. Such treatment of disabled students is not uncommon; the Judge Rotenberg Center, for example, has been under media scrutiny for years due to practices like shocking autistic students. And a study on the use of restraint in Texas schools has indicated a looming “crisis in special education” as growing numbers of disabled students are restrained by their teachers, sometimes unsafely because these teachers had never been trained to perform such techniques appropriately. These cases involved school staff, not law enforcement, but they are part of a larger pattern of criminalizing disabled students that has been criticized by disability rights organizations.

In response to these reports, the National Disability Rights Network has called for an end to restraint and seclusion in US schools, and along with that comes a radical need to rethink the use of law enforcement in the management of disabled students. Police officers are typically not provided with specific training in working with disabled children, let alone handling the de-escalation of a situation where a disabled child is frightened and potentially reactive. As public safety officers, their primary professional goal is not to provide disciplinary support in schools except in special circumstances – and routine discipline is not a special circumstance.

Clearly, the use of police officers to assist with school discipline is out of proportion to the need, and yet it persists. Some school districts, such as Evelyn Towry’s, mandate a law enforcement provision in IEPs, which allows the school to call police officers to assist with discipline problems, often under a vague mandate that could involve anything from an episode of extreme violence to stubbornness in the classroom. Others districts may strongly advocate for it, or push for frequent review of disabled students to determine if such a clause should be added. Rather than focusing on handling behavior before it gets out of control, districts are handing their students over to third parties when the going gets rough – and disabled students are the ones paying the price for those decisions, often finding themselves suspended for extended periods of time over behavior they cannot be expected to control.

Teachers Struggling in Understaffed Environments

So why the push to outsource discipline? Blame austerity measures again, which, on top of poor disability funding, have hit a number of districts hard. That’s a recipe for frustration, and sometimes danger, when it comes to providing a safe and educational environment for disabled students. Teacher Alicia Maude Wein from Guildeland High School in New York explained to AlterNet via email how her classroom support had radically decreased:

[Before], it was me, a co-teacher with a literacy/special ed degree, and three additional adults providing support — 5 adults every day to the 18 kids. This year, after 2 rounds of deep budget cuts (in a relatively affluent suburban district), it’s just me.

Overwhelmed by conditions like this, teachers struggle to keep order, and Wein says she understands why districts might be tempted to turn to outside options:

I think similar circumstances (or worse) could be lending to the desperation that would sway some districts to call in outside supports like law enforcement (as grim, disrespectful and embarrassing as that notion is) when things get out of control in the classroom.

She noted that her district is generally supportive, promotes mainstreaming of disabled students, and works with students, staff and parents to create a productive environment, even under the stress of budget cuts. The same can’t be said of all districts, though, and in some cases the various pressures can create an explosive mixture: When staff without training for handling disabled students encounter autistic students mid-meltdown, for example, they may not know how to respond, and they could end up traumatizing students in an attempt to impose order.

This lack of teacher and staff training is a serious matter for both teachers and students; Wein herself pointed out that she’d taken just three credits in Special Education 15 years ago – and yet today she is faced with teaching and managing a classroom of disabled students. As the Michigan Education Association warns :

Because school personnel are not trained to work with children whose violent behavior stems from a disability and where the possibility of injury is discounted by the District, they daily face a situation they are ill-suited to handle without suffering injury, both physical and psychological.

Without the support they need to deal with disabled students and the training they need to effectively and humanely handle their behavior, there should be little surprise that so many teachers and administrators are allowing law enforcement to deal with these issues instead. But as Vicki Soloniuk, a pediatrician who works with disabled children and helps their parents to advocate on their behalf, pointed out in a conversation with AlterNet, the turn to these punitive measures can actually enflame a disabled student’s behavior rather than defuse it.

She explained that children with cognitive disabilities often have difficulty adjusting to new situations and strangers, so when an outside party like a police officer is called in, these children may experience extreme emotional distress. This can manifest in kicking, hitting and screaming – a fairly typical response among cognitively impaired children, but certainly unnerving if you have no training in dealing with such behavior.

“We tell our children to stay away from strangers,” Soloniuk said, “and then we don’t understand why they react poorly when the school calls in an outsider, someone a student has never met.” Like many school districts in the United States, the district Soloniuk works in responds to incidents like these by isolating the child involved, a mistake which can create even more behavioral problems. Soloniuk notes: ”The school hides a 7-year-old with autism alone in a classroom all day, and when they bring him out once a day, he starts flapping and stimming, because he sees all these kids around. So the school responds by saying, ‘He can’t handle it’ and locks him up again.”

She views such isolation as tantamount to torture and points out that it’s also ideally suited for creating further difficulties in the future because the student never has an opportunity to socialize. One way to address the issue, she says, is to get teachers and support staff fully trained; two working sessions a year, for instance, would allow everyone in a school to learn how to interact with disabled students so they can mainstream more successfully and be supported outside the special education classroom.

More Training, More Support Needed

After years of experience in the school system, Alicia Wein says she has come to feel comfortable with her disabled students, and she invests energy in interacting with them and their parents to learn more about their personalities and learning styles before entering the classroom. But not all teachers have this level of experience or the time required to give high-level individual focus to disabled students.

To begin to address these discrepancies, districts such as Wein’s are demanding that their teachers pursue more professional development, particularly when it comes to dealing with students with autism. Congress is also tackling the issue; lawmakers are currently pushing for better teacher training to help educators handle students with autism more effectively. Such training undoubtedly will be beneficial for both teachers and their students, but it certainly won’t solve the problem we’re facing entirely; even an experienced teacher with additional professional development can’t be expected to keep order all alone in a classroom of 12 students with severe disabilities.

Simply put, districts also need more trained staff on hand. Teachers handling mainstreamed classes require support to balance the needs of their disabled and nondisabled students and to make sure that every student is provided with the educational material and assistance he or she needs. Without staff support, students inevitably begin to fall through the cracks, and one consequence of that can be an increase in disruptive behavior. Overburdened instructors may fail to identify the warning signs of a tantrum or meltdown, for instance, making it difficult for them to intervene early on – before things have escalated beyond their capacity to deal with them. And even if they do spot a troubled student who needs more personalized attention, that level of engagement can often be impossible to provide in a classroom with 25 or more additional students vying for their attention. Trained staff can help mediate situations like these.

Another issue that came up again and again with educators who spoke to AlterNet was the impact of our increasing reliance on standardized testing to measure performance in the classroom. High-stakes testing creates a highly pressured environment for teachers, who are forced to focus on the tests rather than on their students’ learning needs – especially if the teachers don’t have tenure or secure positions in their districts. All students, regardless of disability status, suffer in this environment, where teachers are asked to view students not as individuals, but as aggregate test scores.

Bottom-up educational reform often focuses on teachers and blames them for the failures of the educational system. But this approach largely ignores the structural issues plaguing many districts as they fight for funding, cut student and staff services, and live in fear of the latest test results and what they mean for the school’s future. For students with disabilities, these issues are further complicated by the need to access a functional educational environment where they will be safe from harm and not at risk of run-ins with the police. In this educational landscape, it’s hard for disabled students to learn, let alone realize their full potential.

Poor training, funding cuts and increased pressure to teach to the test don’t add up to much for the most vulnerable students in our schools – or many of the other students, for that matter. “Sadly,” Vicki Soloniuk points out, “we don’t seem to care very much about our kids in this country.”

s.e. smith is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Bitch, Feministe, Global Comment, the Sun Herald, the Guardian, and other publications. Follow smith on Twitter: @sesmithwrites.

Since the emergency law was passed Friday, nightly protests have often turned violent, resulting in some 300 arrests Sunday alone. The new law requires that a detailed agenda be provided for protests of more than 50 people.

Police declared the Tuesday night protest illegal after no one provided an itinerary. “They didn’t share the route, demonstrators were wearing masks and projectiles were thrown at police officers,” the Montreal police said on their Twitter feed.

Student groups have vowed to challenge the emergency legislation in court. Rights groups say the law limits protesters’ ability to express themselves democratically.

On the eve of Tuesday’s protest, the most militant of three major student groups said it would defy the new law and call for protests and strikes to continue throughout the summer, a busy period of outdoor festivals in Montreal which draws in millions of dollars in tourist revenue.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest has refused to roll back the tuition hikes of C$254 (US$249) per year over seven years. Quebec has the lowest tuition rates in Canada, and they would remain among the country’s lowest after the increases.

The conflict has caused considerable social upheaval in the French-speaking province known for having more contentious protests than elsewhere in Canada.

“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.