Your education is not an equal opportunity
- Chaltain cites cases of parents lying about residency to get children into better schools
- He says quality of kids' education shouldn't be determined by where they live
- Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is May 17th
- Chaltain calls public education system "still separate, and still unequal"
Editor's note: Sam Chaltain is a Washington-based writer and educator and author of "We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America" and "Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education."
(CNN) -- Should your ZIP code determine your access to the American dream? Or is the U.S. Constitution's guarantee to provide "equal protection" a principle we have silently agreed to uphold in theory -- but not in practice?
I'm starting to wonder after reading about Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother facing felony charges for lying on her 5-year-old son's registration forms so he could attend a better school. McDowell's story is painfully reminiscent of Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Ohio mother who made a similar choice earlier this year -- and is now a convicted felon.
These two stories of civil disobedience come against the backdrop of an ongoing national conversation about our public school system -- and how it must be improved. They also provide an unsettling irony in lieu of the upcoming 57th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall's historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that triumphantly reaffirmed a core