More developments on the story of the Ohio mother who lied about her address so her kids could attend the school she wanted them to attend, now with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's ‘morally unacceptable’ comments thrown into the mix.
Some historical perspective: Living or pretending to live somewhere else is a fairly standard family tactic to improve schooling. Eighty years ago, some African American parents in the South would send their teenaged children to live with relatives in cities (either in or out of the South) so they'd have a chance of attending and finishing high school at a time when dozens of counties in every state had no high school available to African Americans. If you expand this concept a bit to general manipulation to pick schools, white parents fleeing desegregation either volunteered or were pushed to use so-called "freedom of choice" policies in the 1960s to avoid desegregating schools. (Onetime Atlanta Superintendent John Letson admitted in court some years later that school staff advised white parents of one elementary school how to fill out the forms in the mid-60s when the school was about to be desegregated.)
Advocates of charter schools are among those crying outrage over the disproportionate punishment of the mother in the Ohio case. We have a long history of fragmented jurisdictions with tight turf protection. Part of the reason for that border-guarding is the perception that "our" taxes would go to educate "their" kids, from the historical funding of schools with local property taxes. (That doesn't explain everything: I suspect you'd see similar dynamics in California, where all property taxes are routed through the state before being redistributed by various formulae.) So is the problem that the mother lied about her address, that the school districts in Ohio are teeny-tiny, or that there is no interdistrict choice in Ohio? Oh, wait. Interdistrict choice doesn't appear to be one of the options discussed.
Given current law, I don't think the Ohio school officials were in the wrong in referring the case to a district attorney: the parent lied with the explicit aim of securing resources she would not otherwise have had access to, and that's generally called fraud. Whether the prosecution was too zealous is a different question, but does anyone really want schools to look the other way when there is clear evidence of cheating, whether by students, employees, or parents?
Update: Tim Burke has the best argument in favor of non-enforcement, one I am sympathetic to, up to a point. Here's the reason why his analogy is unpersuasive: the children involved had access to schooling, if not what the mother found acceptable. [2/2: The following sentence is factually inaccurate; I confused the mother's father, who lived in the district where the children had been attending, with the children's father: In addition, she and the children's father could have made arrangements to share custody, and the children could have been legal residents of the preferred school district.]
I know of an instance where someone used the mailbox on a vacant lot they owned to send a kid to a different high school, and another where the kid took up “residence” with a non-custodial parent toward the same end. As long as mail doesn’t get returned, all is OK.
The difference in these cases is that they were still in the same school (taxing) district so they were paying for the schools regardless of which one they attended. I gather this person did not pay taxes in the district the kid attended.