A CONNECTICUT mother faces charges of fraud because she lied about where she was living in order to get her son into a better public school. The mother is black and the school she had enrolled her son in was largely white. So intense is the drive to prove the deliberate denial of education to blacks that the mother, Tanya McDowell, is hailed as a hero. Peter Applebome reports in The New York Times:

The tale outlined outside court by the defendant’s supporters had a heartbreaking story line — a child tossed out of school, a homeless mother charged with felony theft for the crime of sending him to a better school than the one available to her, the inequalities that define America’s schools.

The boy was not tossed out of school. He was asked to leave one school and attend another. His mother, as Applebome later notes, also faces serious drug charges, suggesting that the boy’s most pressing problem may have nothing to do with his education, and she was not homeless. And “the inequalities that define America’s schools” are not due to unequal funding, as Applebome later states. They are due to differences that are both innate and cultural.

A recent report by Jason Richwine for the Heritage Foundation on “The Myth of Racial Disparities in Public School Funding” rebuts this widespread assumption. Richwine writes:

[E]ducation spending per pupil is broadly similar across racial and ethnic groups. To the extent that funding differences exist at all, they tend to slightly favor lower-performing groups, especially blacks. Since unequal funding for minority students is largely a myth, it cannot be a valid explanation for racial and ethnic differences in school achievement, and there is little evidence that increasing public spending will close the gaps.

It is understandable that the mother in question would want her son in a different school.  Schoolteachers and officials in black neighborhoods don’t possess the authority to control the serious misbehavior that interferes with basic learning. Also, due to family breakdown and fatherlessness –  social collapse that has been encouraged by whites –  these schools often deal with sheer chaos. It is understandable that this mother would want her son elsewhere though she has no legitimate right to send him to the other school. But, given that she was arrested in November and charged with possession of 60 bags of marijuana and 14 bags of crack cocaine, there is ample reason to reject her portrayal as heroic mother figure.

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