How far will you go to get educated?

This provocative article on NPR, powered by The Root, considers the cases of two parents, both of whom lied about their addresses in order to get their children into good school districts. The question remains: is their behavior acceptable, and if not, what does this say about education in the U.S. and the effort that low-income parents must make to give their children a future better than their own?

Helena Andrews, author of the article, argues strongly against the school districts that hired a private investigator to trace the fraudulent documentation of two of their students. Now the students' mothers, one in Ohio and the other in Connecticut, owe a total of $45,000 in penalty fees and tuition. Tonya McDowell from Connecticut is homeless; she used her father's address on her six-year-old son's registration documents to get him into a decent school district. Kelley Williams-Bolar from Ohio has two young daughters living with her in a crime-ridden neighborhood. She, too, forged documentation to send her girls to a better school in a different part of town. Now, both mothers must deal with heavy financial penalties and the possibility of having their children withdrawn from schools that may have given them a future.

What is the issue here? With impending school budget cuts all over the nation, it's interesting to learn that schools are shelling out thousands of dollars to pay private investigators, who, in turn, rat on their own students. The parents are being punished, but the students, who have had no say in the matter, are the true victims in this dangerous bureaucratic game. We live in a country where the quality of our schools is determined by tax dollars, not social equity laws or merit awards. And now, instead of protecting students whose families are fighting to keep them in decent schools, we pile on lawsuit after lawsuit, making the idea of social mobility a growing myth, never a reality.