When Imanee McCoy-Meadows was growing up in Augusta, Georgia, her mom chose to lie about her address to get her child into the best public school in town.

And it paid off. McCoy-Meadows excelled in school, went on to study industrial engineering at Morgan State University, and currently works for Procter & Gamble.

Thirty years later, McCoy-Meadows is raising four kids in Greensboro, North Carolina. And once again she finds herself on the wrong side of the lines that determine who can — and can’t — attend the best public schools.

Like many African American families did after the pandemic, she and her husband decided to homeschool their kids.

She noticed that the families in her circle chose to abandon the public schools because of “the lines,”

“Because they don’t like the schools they’re being assigned to, they opt to try something different.”

Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) confessed that, when she was a child, her family moved out of the Bronx to the suburbs of Westchester County for access to better schools.

“That’s when I got my first taste of a country,” she said, “[that] allows their kids' destiny to be determined by the zip code that they are born in."

The enrollment crisis in our public schools is severe, especially in major urban districts, and one key cause is that families like McCoy-Meadows’s (and Ocasio-Cortez’s) have decided that their assigned public schools are not a good fit.

In Chicago, there are 47 elementary schools operating at less than one-third capacity, according to

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