Inter-district open enrollment (OEI) is a little-discussed school choice option (and the oldest choice program in Ohio) whereby districts open their schools to students from outside their jurisdiction. Today, 81.5 percent of all school districts in the state offer some form of open enrollment, yet there has been little formal evaluation of such programs, especially in terms of student achievement. Ronald Iarussi, head of the Mahoning County Education Service Center, and Karen Larwin, a professor at Youngstown State University, looked at ten years of student-level data in Mahoning County districts that offer open enrollment and examined the achievement of students utilizing the option. This is particularly important because Mahoning County has the second-highest OEI utilization numbers in the state. Achievement was defined as standardized assessment scores on state exams (reading, math, science, social science, and writing) for grades 3–8 as well as high school. Three findings stand out: 1) Students who left their home district for open enrollment performed at similar levels as those remaining in the home district; 2) students who left their home district for open enrollment performed, on average, slightly above their peers in that new district, even if they arrived in their new district with lower scores to start with; 3) and both of these effects were amplified for students who left the very lowest-performing district in the county (Youngstown City Schools). The implication here, articulated more in a recent TV interview with the authors, is that if students perform as well or better when they move and so do their peers in both the sending and receiving districts, perhaps it is time to rethink old biases against opening district borders. Too often, discussions around open enrollment focus on funding, “winners” vs. “losers”, and other adult interests, but this report makes a compelling case that students are benefitting from being in a school of their choosing.
SOURCE: Ronald J. Iarussi and Karen H. Larwin, “The Academic Impact of Inter-district Open Enrollment in Public Schools: The Results from a Decade of Choice,” Mahoning County Educational Services Center, Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, Youngstown State University (February 2015).
