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Between 2012 and 2014, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Missouri were all arrested and stood trial for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts. They were all charged with stealing education. This particular phenomenon is now so common that on either coast—and in many places in between—school districts have in the past few years begun to hire special investigators to follow, photograph, and film children as they go from home to school and back again. This surveillance helps school officials determine if all the students who show up day after day are legally permitted to attend the schools. The desire to keep poor, non-white children out of wealthy schoolhouses has even spawned new businesses. Districts in Florida, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey that did not want to spend the money to hire full-time investigators have contracted with companies promising lower-cost ways of verifying student addresses. With names like VerifyResidence.com, such companies, according to one website, provide “the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document” children going from their house to school. For school districts willing to invest even more, that company offers a rewards program that awards anonymous tipsters with $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students. The consequences for parents and students caught in this web are devastating and can include tens of thousands of dollars in fees, jail time, and felony convictions that preclude them from voting and gaining future employment.
That is what happened in the spring of 2014 when a judge in Connecticut sentenced a Black mother, Tanya McDowell, to twelve years in prison for “stealing an education” for her kindergarten-age son. Education officials in Connecticut said that her son should have enrolled in the city of Bridgeport, not the wealthy town of Norwalk. McDowell and her son were homeless when she was arrested for educational theft. They split their time between a homeless shelter in Norwalk, the home of her babysitter—Ana Marquez—in Norwalk, and sometimes, if there was no room elsewhere, in the backseat of her minivan. In order to even enroll her son in school, she used her babysitter’s Norwalk address, which was in a public housing complex. When school officials discovered that the kindergartener was not what they considered a legal resident of Norwalk, they could have simply asked McDowell to remove him from school. That is what they had done with the twenty or so other students found to be “illegally” enrolled that year. But officials decided to prosecute this Black, single, homeless parent on first-degree larceny charges that carried a maximum sentence of up to twenty years in prison.
School district officials readily admitted that they treated McDowell far more harshly than they did others because they wanted to make an example of her. They didn’t want their community to be seen as welcoming to other parents who might want to provide their children with an education to which they were not entitled. In that regard, Bridgeport is a microcosm of the many cities where the migration of wealthy whites and their tax dollars to the suburbs has had devastating consequences for the people left behind. As such, this case makes clear the lengths to which some would go to make sure the drawbridge allowing access to their schools is quickly and securely pulled up behind them after they are safely ensconced on the other side. In relation to urban education, school reform, and the difficulties involved in navigating the caste-defining realities of apartheid education, this case and the situation of Bridgeport’s schools in general are a distillation of history made present and point out the urgency of our need to find solutions.
The educational impact of poverty and racial and economic segregation on Bridgeport—Connecticut’s largest city—has been evident since at least 1961. At that time, in a series of articles lamenting the lack of focused attention, financial support, and viable public policy solutions from state and federal officials, the reporter noted, “What frustrates us is that in this crowded, un-planned, unlovely city, there is so much to be done that no one can tell where to start.” Another article published later that same week in 1961 reported that when state educators came to Bridgeport to evaluate the local high school, they praised the teachers but chastised the city for a lack of financial support, specifically noting that “students were forced to pay for their own books, science equipment, globes, and maps.” The officials reported, “This situation makes a mockery of a free public education,” concluding, “If Bridgeport were a poor community in a poor state in a poor nation, this condition might be more easily understood.” Bridgeport’s schools in the 1960s were only beginning their transformation into an abysmal state; the trickle of whites moving out to other towns and cities with their tax dollars was not yet the rushing river it would become a few decades later.
However, since 1960, Connecticut has, in a sense, warehoused its poor in this one city surrounded by towns that are among the richest in the nation. By the 1990s, 20 percent of the residents and a quarter of the children there lived in poverty. As is so often the case, poverty breeds other ills. According to pastor Kenneth Moales Jr., a former school board member, “In the city of Bridgeport, we have 18 schools that are failing. Of those, 13 have been failing for over 10 years.” The children in Bridgeport are educated in a system with few students who are white or wealthy. It is a school system long understood to be a failure. With that history as context, it is easy to see how a homeless Black mother might risk everything to ensure a quality education for her child, as well as easy to understand the reasons why authorities would struggle mightily to keep her out. If she were allowed to stay, others might follow. The fears on both sides are as much about policy as they are about economics. However, economics is the driving force.
The Bridgeport public schools spend around $8,000 per pupil each year. That number is far less than what is spent in wealthy districts in Connecticut and elsewhere. A 2014 New York Times data analysis of wealth and school achievement found that Bridgeport’s sixth graders were lagging nearly two grade levels behind their Norwalk peers just fifteen miles away. Also in 2014, the U.S. Department of Education found that Connecticut spent 8.7 percent less per student in its poorest school districts than it did in its most affluent ones. It was not alone in having skewed spending priorities, nor has the trend abated. In 2016, nine states had large disparities between what they spent in wealthy districts and in those that were poor: Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. When asked about his views regarding how these choices impacted the education of poor children, former secretary of education Arne Duncan said, “Children who need the most seem to be getting less and less. Children who need the least seem to be getting more and more. There is something unfair, educationally unsound and . . . frankly . . . un-American in what is happening.” The truth of his assertion about how American or not it is for the wealthy to hoard educational funds for their own children and deny them to poorer students of color is, at the very least, up for debate. However, what we know for sure is that Tanya McDowell was charged with “stealing” $15,686 in educational services for her son. That is the amount, almost double what is spent in Bridgeport, that Norwalk schools spend per pupil each year.
Despite the fact that there had previously been no penalty for so-called theft of education, the Norwalk school board president, Jack Chiamonte, in answering the question of why they seemed so intent on prosecuting this one woman, replied, “There has to be a penalty for stealing our services. Right now, there is none.” In setting such a precedent, perhaps school officials believed they would have an easier time scapegoating a homeless, Black, single mother. Their thinking persisted despite the fact that her homelessness should have protected her and her son. Under federal law, children can continue to attend classes in the school district where they began their education if the family becomes homeless at some later point. That made no difference whatsoever. Norwalk’s mayor, Richard Moccia, when asked to explain why the family’s homelessness didn’t lead his administration to follow the law, did not so much answer the question as restate the facts before offering his opinion when he said, “This woman . . . was using an illegal address in a public housing complex, has a checkered past and despite all the protestation that she’s concerned about her son, if she had done things right, this would have never happened.” Mayor Moccia did not specify what exactly he wishes McDowell had done more right. And she and her son were not the only casualties of the case. When McDowell enrolled her child in Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School, Ana Marquez, McDowell’s babysitter, signed a notarized statement saying the child lived in her public housing unit. In their quest to establish the inviolate boundaries of their schools, school officials passed that statement to Norwalk Housing Authority officials, who then began eviction proceedings against Marquez for fraud. It would not just be McDowell and her son who would pay a high price for trying to obtain a rigorous education—one that would have been almost impossible to obtain within the Bridgeport city limits.
An average Black student in Bridgeport attends a school with five times the poverty rate of a school attended by the average white student in Connecticut. Two-thirds of the city’s children are born into families on public assistance. More than half of the neighborhoods in the city have unemployment rates reaching as high as 50 percent. These are the conditions that led to McDowell’s impossible choice about how to meet her son’s educational needs. As a result, the vigor with which prosecutors pursued McDowell attracted national attention. The Connecticut chapter of the NAACP both hired a lawyer for her and issued a supportive statement that said, “The criminalization of parents trying to enroll their child in a better quality school simply to give their child a chance for a better life is wrong and should be resolved through civil, not criminal means.” The online petition site Change.org collected over 27,000 signatures urging an end to her prosecution. Public sentiment seemed to be moving in her favor, but then McDowell was arrested on drug charges as a result of an undercover police sting. To the extent that the national outcry over her treatment might have had an ameliorating effect on a harsh sentence, following the drug conviction, prosecutors, believing they now had the moral high ground, pressed for a speedy conclusion. They joined the drug and “school theft” cases and won the right to have them tried together. Given mandatory sentencing minimums, McDowell faced the potential of serving over twenty years in prison. Instead, she opted for a plea that resulted in a twelve-year sentence with parole eligibility after five years. While she serves her time, her son lives with his grandmother in Bridgeport and attends school in that district. He is said to suffer from frequent nightmares.
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