Winging It: Brown (Mothers) v. Board of Education

There seems to be a new type of racial profiling going on across America, and Black women and children had better watch their backs. As usual, the disadvantaged are at greatest risk, but the most outstanding (and outrageous) characteristic of the targeted is that they’re intent on getting a great public education.

The first nationally recognized case hit the news back in January, when Kelly Williams-Bolar, a teachers aide in Akron, OH, spent nine days in jail for sending her two daughters to the Copley-Fairlawn schools in her father’s suburban neighborhood, rather than to the sub-par school near her legal residence.

The latest arrest was made earlier this week, when Tanya McDowell, a homeless woman, was arrested as she walked to a shelter to get lunch. At the time, her small son was sitting in a kindergarten classroom in Norwalk, CT. In school documents, McDowell had listed his home address not as the van she says they were living in (how does one list that on an application, anyway?), but as a public housing complex where she had a friend.

McDowell, 33, is charged with stealing $15,686, the reported cost of her son’s education for less than four months at Brookside elementary. The amount seems high, given that the nationwide average for an entire year in public school is under $10,000, but that’s really beside the point. If convicted, McDowell faces up to 20 years in prison. And where will her son be then?

That’s the point.

Not surprisingly, legions of strangers have rallied in support of this young, single mother (as they did Williams-Bolar), despite Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia publicly deriding her as “an ex-con” with a “checkered past.”

“This is not a poor, picked-upon homeless person,” Moccia told FOX News, expressing his outrage that “somehow the city of Norwalk is made into the ogre in this.”

Again, Moccia is totally missing the point. This is not about his city, or McDowell’s character, or complex issues surrounding taxation versus representation, free will, or public education. This is about a little boy, who has as much fundamental right to the best education possible as any child of any race, religion, ethnicity or economic background anywhere in this country. Our Constitution says so.

This is about the fact that since the historic 1954 Supreme Court victory reinforcing that right (Brown v. Board of Education), we have gone about the systematic overt and covert re-segregation of our public schools leading us to the quandary that mothers of all races across the country face every day: How do they get

the best education for their children when they reside in districts with crumbling, underperforming, under-resourced schools that are little more than holding pens for children whose potential is being willfully written off by a larger society that simply seems not to care?

In response to these recent cases, Syracuse University professor Dr. Boyce Watkins has noted the maddening irony of locking up mothers over the issue of public education, lauded throughout our nation’s history as the great equalizer and the single best way out of a consuming poverty of mind, body and bank account.

The ironies don’t stop there. Connecticut is the third wealthiest state in the nation, home to many of the same Wall Street billionaires who created and have profited from our current economic crisis–the same crisis that is leading to crushing public education cutbacks throughout the country and the desperation that has local authorities assigning what limited funds they do have to sweeping their schools clean of these innocent children who live at the wrong address (and have parents who care enough to notice).

This assault on aspiration is unheard of in a society where such fudging of addresses has been going on for as long as public education has existed. My own parents used my uncle’s address, less than

two blocks away, so I could attend one public elementary school over the one our address dictated. My dad and his brother belonged to the same neighborhood association, shopped at the same grocery store, and paid the same level of property taxes, but one school was simply better than the other and my parents–both educators–wanted me to have the best.

That’s precisely what these other mothers wanted for their children. In the Akron case, Williams-Bolar’s home was repeatedly robbed, her neighborhood was unsafe, and the local school satisfied a mere 4 out of 26 standards on the latest Ohio Department of Education Report Card and had a graduation rate of 76%. The Copley-Fairlawn school in her father’s neighborhood (where he paid the appropriate taxes) met all 26 standards and graduated 97.5% of its students. Is it merely a coincidence of geography that the majority of students at the Akron school are Black and the majority at the suburban one are White? Or is this part of what Syracuse’s Watkins refers to as the willful perpetuation of “academic apartheid” in our society?

The state of Ohio has insisted that there is no racial profiling taking place, citing that 48 parents were investigated in this shakeout, two of which are Asian, while 15 are White. But only Williams-Bolar was jailed.

All except 10 days of her five-year sentence were suspended, but Williams-Bolar must perform 80 hours of community service and she’ll be on probation for three years. Even more damning, although at the time of her arrest, she was just 12 credits away from earning her teaching license, her felony conviction will bar her from teaching in the state. Worst of all though, her young daughters are left with no solid options for their education, a reality that is almost guaranteed to adversely impact their options for life.

To paraphrase Watkins, no one seems to care about these families. No one seems to care about what will become of them or the legions of predominantly Black children currently receiving a subpar education not because their parents don’t crave more for them, but because of where they live. All that seems to matter is that prosperous, successful, mostly White districts, keep these children out of their schools.

If only our education officials, our law enforcers, and politicians would be as determined in their efforts to offer every child an excellent education as they are to prosecute those whose crime is simply that they seek one, imagine how different–how much more prosperous and beautiful and united–our so-called union would be.