A few weeks ago, Amy Chua made headlines as the nefarious Tiger Mother — the woman would drove her kids to excel at music and academics, at the expense of a social life, self esteem, and creativity. The drama unfolded. Poor kids. Poor misunderstood mom who was terribly exploited by the media. She was even a feature at the stupid Davos conference.

The real Tiger Mother isn't a petite law professor in a snooty neighborhood. The real Tiger Mother is Kelley Williams-Bolar.

Williams-Bolar was jailed last week for fudging the residency of her children, so they could attend a better public school in her ex-husband's district. The stupidity of the sentencing is one angle of the story, but I want to talk about the crime of forcing people to attending failing schools.

Williams-Bolar lived in a district with a failing school. She risked everything, because she knew that a better school would give her kids a better shot at life. If I'm not happy with my local school, I can move or send my kid to a private school. Maybe people don't have those resources. They are forced to attend crappy school and their children suffer.

Tim Burke wrote,

If you must sentence someone, sentence the legislature in Ohio. Sentence the superintendent in both districts. Sentence the idiot bureaucrats who use attendance or some similar metric to set the funding of schools, giving them an incentive to demand enforcement of these kinds of policies. If they’re not guilty, no one is.

In the much maligned and compromised NCLB, there was one section that said if a school fails to make adequately progress three years in a row, then students would be eligible for school vouchers to use at the school of their choice. I'm not sure how many states implemented that section of the law and how many children benefited. Research for another day. But I'm a hundred percent supportive of the vouchers for failing schools plan.

NO CHILD SHOULD BE FORCED TO ATTEND A FAILING SCHOOL

Why do we have these unfair residency requirements for education?

Of course, a lot has to do with the fact that schools are funded locally, and local people want their money used on their own kids. But there's more that. It's also about race.

In Ohio, they passed a voucher law several years ago, but the voucher plan was confined to the boundaries of Cleveland. The Republican state representatives from the suburbs wouldn't pass a state-wide plan. Why not? Because they didn't want the black kids from Cleveland going to their school. They didn't want to deal with urban problems in their kid's science lab. They didn't want to bring down the test scores from the school.

That's why education reformers say that schools are the next civil rights movement.