The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

Parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts says this story in the WSJ.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates. Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students. Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.