Via Eduwonk by way of DFER, the story of Yolanda Hill, a Rochester mother of five who has been shackled and thrown in prison for enrolling her children in a good school system:
Greece [school district] officials hired a private investigator to look into Hill’s claim that her children lived with their grandmother. According to his report, over four months this school year, Hill was seen driving her kids each morning from her home on Morrill Street [in an adjacent disrtict] to her mother’s home, where they would board buses for various Greece schools. The school district says that the education provided for the children due to the filing of false paperwork was worth $28,000.
This makes perfect sense when we start with a society that’s unusually and increasingly stratified by income, with residential patterns to match, and say “Hey, let’s draw lines around our gated enclaves of privilege and create school districts that look exactly the same!” In a decent society that takes educational opportunity seriously, it’s utterly insane.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When I was in 6th grade, my parents decided that our school district was not right for me, and endeavored to send me to an adjoining one – but they had to pay a tuition bill to do it.
Since schools are primarily paid for by real estate taxes on district residents, it is perfectly reasonable that they are intended only for the children of residents. If she wanted her children in that district, she had a few legal choices: have them actually live with their grandmother, pay out-of-district tuition as my parents did, or move into the district. But what she was doing is generally regarded as theft of services, I believe, and no more justifiable that breaking into a neighbors house to get her children better clothing or food.
$28,000 for two kids? That’s not half bad, maybe her district should hire them to run their schools.
I am also very disheartened by the way that our good schools carve out special districts for the privileges and leave everyone else out. This creates a problem that spans generations and is getting worse. Unfortunately, I can’t condone a mother breaking the law to get her kids into a different district. Fair or not, she is receiving an unfair advantage by sending her kids to a district other than the one she lives in. There are other ways to help her children that would set a better example for them as well.