A new report by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) examines how varied “open enrollment” policies are across America.
Open enrollment allows students to transfer from their assigned school to another public option, either within their district (intra-district) or outside (inter-district). Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have laws permitting open enrollment, but these vary widely. For example, Connecticut has mandatory open enrollment in four cities but voluntary arrangements statewide, while Vermont makes inter- and intra-district open enrollment mandatory, but only for high schools. Alabama, Illinois, Maryland, and North Carolina are the four states that lack open enrollment policies.
The report attempts to make sense of this multifarious landscape with a two-page table summarizing open enrollment policies for each state, as well as brief overviews of how the policies account for student transportation and how transfer requests can be prioritized if demand exceeds available space.
Transportation can be a limiting factor for students seeking to take advantage of open enrollment, but of the thirty-five states with laws addressing the issue, most push the responsibility to parents, while some states like Arkansas and Massachusetts require the districts from which students are transferring to provide transportation in certain cases, such as when students are leaving low-performing schools. If transfer requests exceed school capacity, most states require schools to hold lotteries, but twenty-eight states and D.C. either permit or require districts to prioritize certain groups of students. Most commonly, these favored groups include siblings of current students and children of school employees, but can also include a number of others, such as those attending low-income schools.
All of this remains fluid, however, as states continue to make changes to their policies—including the six that did so in 2016 (Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Tennessee). Uniquely, Nebraska’s open enrollment policy now requires districts to define the maximum capacity for each school, so administrators cannot retroactively adjust the numbers to deter or encourage transfers. And Florida made the most substantial changes, shifting from a voluntary system to mandatory open enrollment, both intra- and inter-district, and prioritizing transfer requests for “children of active-duty military personnel, children in foster care, students living in the school district boundaries and children transferring because of court-ordered custody changes.”
The report concisely summarizes the status of open enrollment policies nationwide and should help voters and policymakers recognize possible strategies to improve open enrollment policies in their states. It does not, however, evaluate which of the many strategies improve student outcomes; there remains little scholarship out there that does. Therefore, the jury is very much still out on the effects of these policies, and more research is needed. Those of us at the Fordham Institute plan to help fill the vacuum with a study about open enrollment in Ohio, due out this spring. Stay tuned!
SOURCE: Micah Ann Wixom, “Open Enrollment: Overview and 2016 legislative update,” Education Commission of the States. (January 2017).
