Mother charged with felonies for "education theft". "Where do you live kid?"

Kelley Williams-Bolar "stole free education" source

Micheal Flaherty’s piece in this weekend’s Wall StreetJournal is interesting.  It tells of Kelley Williams-Bolar a parent from Ohio who spent nine days in jail after being convicted on two felony counts of grand theft.  What Ms Bolar stole was education, public education.  She is one of the millions of people who use a relative or friend's address in order to send their children to a “better” school outside of their own community.

The conviction threatened to derail Ms Williams-Bolar’s efforts to get a teaching credential until Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, reduced her charges from felonies to misdemeanors.  Flaherty and Kasich are big supporters of privatizing education and are moving in like foxes in the henhouse to use Ms Bolar’s case to push their privatization agenda. 

There is a crisis in public education of course.  Public education, like a postal service or transportation or health care, should be a public service.  As we wrote the other day, we reject that the postal service is losing money; it is simply spending it on the people it serves.  A postal service should not be a business and we reject the idea that it has to make profit or that expenditure on education has to bring a dollar return.

One way that workers and especially minorities and the poor whose children are being abandoned by the state, get their children a better deal is to use another address and enroll them in another district as Ms Bolar did. According to Flaherty, parents in Kentucky, Connecticut and Missouri have been arrested for education theft. Enrolling their children in “better” schools outside of their districts.

So a government literally run by a gang of thieves called members of Congress is pursuing this type of crime aggressively.  We must have respect for the “Rule of law” now, mustn’t we.  According to Flaherty, school districts are hiring special investigators to follow children home from school to determine their “true” residence. Some are using a service, Verifyresidence.com that, Flaherty points out, provides, “The latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape and document” these children as they go from their homes to school. “Anonymous tipsters” can receive $250 checks for reporting students they know are “out of district”

This is what the private sector does, creates a climate of fear, turns one against the other, divides race against race, gender against gender in order to facilitate their rapacious quest for profiteering.

I don’t know much about Flaherty but he is for the privatization of education.  Like Ohio’s Kasich, he will use the failings of an education system and Ms Bolar’s individual efforts to overcome it as a means for propagating the myth that privatizing education is the solution. Public education was not a priority of the capitalist class until the need for workers to read and write, follow written instructions and fill  our role in the industrialization of society.  For the capitalist class, public education like a postal service is money out.  Public funds also tend to reduce opportunities for private capital in the marketplace and, education is a commodity for them.  Like social security, they want in.

The functioning of public education cannot be planned by bureaucrats whose interests lie in the perpetuation of inequality and who are wedded to the market.  The resources we need to educate our children and the future generations must be determined not by the paid pimps of Wall Street and their flunkies in Washington but by those who use this vital public service, students, parents, teachers and our communities.

I am not an educator so I do not have all the answers as to what will work and what doesn’t.  I do know that I would transfer the massive amounts of funds used for the US war effort to social needs.  The trillions that corporations are sitting on and refuse to inject in to society in a constructive way and who the politicians say have to be “coaxed” to do so, I say we take under workers control and management and allocate that wealth which is the product of our collective Labor in a way that serves social needs not the bank accounts of 1% of the population. The "occupy" movements springing up all over the country can hopefully be the starting point for running political candidates, and the formation of an independent working people's alternative to the two parties of Wall Street.

Flaherty’s column is aimed at using the plight of Ms Bolar and other workers and poor people.  Kasich is also using Ms Bolar’s plight opportunistically, his policies are tantamount to violence against workers and the poor.  Solving the crisis in education is relatively simple----class sizes of fifteen, no more, would go a long way in that direction as would control over curriculum through committees of teachers, students, parents.  If people there is such thing as a "better" school" what is it doing that makes it "better?"  When we know, copy it. In short, whatever works is what we take up. Treating the education of our youth like a business does not.