The current system of residential assignment carries a lot of baggage. It also forces families into boxes where their largest investments (i.e., homes) are intrinsically tied to a single public school. This structure lacks the flexibility that should be afforded to students and their parents, especially as K–12 education is a deeply personal experience. Students aren’t just taught the three Rs at school, education shapes student’s views and introduces them to new ideas. This requires significant trust between families and schools. If it fractures, then students should be able to pursue their education at other public schools. More pragmatically, it can block students from learning options not available in their assigned district or trap them in schools where they feel bullied, unsafe, or alone. No one wants this for children.
Ideally, if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t design a school assignment system based exclusively on residential assignment. This is where the vision of a boundaryless education system arises. But the tie between home ownership and public K–12 education isn’t going anywhere in the short term. Pragmatically, well-designed open enrollment programs can weaken the rigid barriers imposed by residential assignment. These policies let students transfer to public schools with extra seats available, which means that resident students are never displaced from their assigned schools by transfer students. This is the case in all of the 16 states with universal open enrollment laws on the books.
The bones of a good open enrollment law
Reason Foundation’s seven open enrollment best practices create a model open enrollment policy. Together, these provisions seek to balance true local control (families’ decisions about the public school that’s best for their kids) with the communal local control often associated with public schools.
Under a strong open enrollment law, districts with available capacity must admit transfer applicants, ideally through a randomized lottery. These capacity limitations, often set by districts themselves, wouldn’t require districts to admit students if it would require them to build new facilities, hire new staff, etc.
Robust open enrollment laws also ensure that districts can’t stop students from transferring to other public schools. Weak policies in California, New Hampshire, and Mississippi let districts cap the number of students transferring out of their districts (if districts can’t stop students from leaving to go to private schools, the same logic should be applied to cross-district transfers).
What does this mean for neighborhood schools?
In many states with robust open enrollment laws, public schools remain a cornerstone of a community. The latest Gallup polling shows that many families are still satisfied with their public schools, suggesting that most students would remain in their current schools. Plus, open enrollment data show that these programs tend to scale up gradually, giving districts plenty of time to respond to fluctuating enrollments.
For example, data from Wisconsin’s program show that it scaled up incrementally, growing from 2,400 (0.29 percent of public school students) to 62,000 participants (8 percent of public school students) over the course of 27 years. Similar data from West Virginia and Kansas indicate similar trends, where just 0.6 percent and 0.3 percent of students transferred to public schools in other districts during the programs’ first year of operation.
This means, contrary to many district administrators’ fears, that robust open enrollment laws don’t lead to chaos. In fact, we have good data from multiple states showing that districts can successfully operate even when student mobility is high. For example, 103,000 Arizona students (13 percent of students enrolled in the state’s traditional public schools) transferred to districts other than their assigned ones. On average, data from the 14 states with strong cross-district open enrollment laws show that 6 percent of these states’ public school students use these programs.
In sum, open enrollment is a step toward a boundaryless education system, giving students more flexible education options when extra seats are available. This increases public school accountability as families can vote with their feet and helps many students attend schools that are a better fit regardless of where they live.
