The Education Gadfly Weekly

Interdistrict open enrollment allows students to attend public schools outside their district of residence. It is among the largest and most widespread of school-choice efforts in the United States but often flies under the radar in policy discussions. In Ohio, over 70,000 students open enroll into schools outside their district of residence. However, despite the large scale, relatively little is known about the operation of open enrollment and the outcomes of students who participate in it.

This first-of-its-kind analysis, conducted by Ohio State University professor Stéphane Lavertu and Deven Carlson of the University of Oklahoma, uses statewide data to examine who uses open enrollment and how open enrollees perform academically.

The report yields the following findings:

      1. Consistent open enrollment is associated with modest but positive test-score gains

      2. African American open enrollees appear to make substantial gains

      3. Open enrollment throughout high school boosts the probability of on-time graduation

This is invaluable new data for a little-understood but heavily-utilized program. We urge you to download the report to learn more about what works for open enrollees across Ohio.

To see if your district participates in open enrollment, click on the image below to access a searchable, interactive map of Ohio (to scroll side to side, use the small arrow at the bottom of the list of icons) :

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In a provocative headline, a recent Wall Street Journal article proclaimed that “Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City.’” The piece profiles Kenton, Ohio, along with several other towns across the nation that have recently suffered population losses, sluggish economies, and surging substance abuse. The sudden interest in communities like Kenton is not surprising, given that President Trump rode a wave of rural and small-town support to the White House.

Long a neglected realm of school reform, rural education is also capturing more attention. Collin Roth and Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty point out that rural students in the Badger State post some of the lowest ACT scores and highest college remediation rates; this mirrors data from Ohio. A recent study from the Rural School and Community Trust notes that nearly half of rural students are low-income (eligible for subsidized meals) and often have limited opportunities to take Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Meanwhile, a 2014 report from the U.S. Department of Education documents the challenges rural schools face recruiting and retaining teachers and securing parental involvement.

Of course, there isn’t a single cure-all that can elevate education in sparsely populated areas. Yet interdistrict open enrollment done well tackles some of the challenges presented by rural education.

Parental choice

One issue facing families in rural areas is a lack of school options. Charters and private schools—commonly found in more densely populated areas—are rare in rural communities. In fact, Ohio’s restrictions on where charter schools can locate leads to very few setting down roots in non-urban districts. By permitting students to attend schools in another district, open enrollment is one of rural students’ few options. That’s a benefit to families seeking schools that better meets their kids’ needs—they are not limited to just their “home districts.” Our recent study on open enrollment in Ohio found that families in these areas are indeed availing themselves to this form of choice—about two thirds of open enrollees statewide reside in rural and small-town locales, amounting to roughly 40,000 pupils statewide.

Advanced or specialized offerings

As mentioned above, students in sparsely populated areas may not have the same access to rigorous coursework as their urban or suburban peers. Lack of scale is almost surely behind this problem. For instance, a small, rural high school might only have a few students who have an interest in, or are prepared for, the rigors of an AP course. As a result, their district may not offer the course because it’s cost prohibitive. In a similar vein, rural districts might have only a handful of students interested in specialized courses or extracurricular activities, such as computer programming, orchestra, school newspaper, or theater. Under open enrollment, advanced students or pupils with “niche” interests could transfer to nearby a district that does have such offerings. Of course, it may also be true that no districts in the vicinity have the offerings that a student seeks (online course choice might help in some circumstances).

Competition

Because state dollars travel with interdistrict transfers, open enrollment can help stimulate healthy competition between districts. This can energize districts to sharpen their own educational services, either to attract non-resident pupils or to retain those already living within their boundaries.  As one rural Ohio superintendent commented several years ago, “Competition drives innovation.… I would like to see incoming open enrollment become more competitive, which will only further promote student achievement through parent and student motivation.” Without open enrollment—and few other choice options available—rural and small-town districts would enjoy near-unfettered monopolies over educational services in their jurisdictions. (Parents can still make residential moves or homeschool; and online charters are an option in some states as well.) While districts may find this arrangement convenient, it’s less ideal for students and families.

Transportation

One of the major challenges of rural schools is efficiently bussing students across vast but sparsely populated areas. Transporting pupils living in isolated areas creates logistical and financial burdens for students’ districts. Naturally, long commutes also burden students. Interdistrict open enrollment can help solve this dilemma in certain cases. Consider a student who resides thirty miles from her zoned school but just a few miles from a school run by a nearby district. With interdistrict open enrollment, she can actually attend her closest school. While her parents may need to drop her off at a bus stop within the neighboring district or to drive her to the school itself, those burdens may be less than traversing the long distances to her zoned school.[1] This would also alleviate the cost on the home district to transport students in remote parts of their jurisdiction.

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Ohio’s rural school districts deserve high praise for participating in open enrollment, as do Buckeye legislators who, since 1989, have allowed this program to exist under state law. While our recent study doesn’t offer conclusive evidence of test-score gains for rural or small-town open enrollees (some analyses detect a small boost), the benefits discussed above suggest that open enrollment can be a valuable tool to enrich the educational experiences of non-urban children. Other states should likewise see that interdistrict open enrollment is an option in their sparsely populated communities. In the days ahead, finding ways to unlock more opportunities for children living in rural areas should be an important priority for school reform. Open enrollment is a good place to start.

Despite their pronouncements to the contrary, many of Ohio’s affluent suburban school districts are about as “public” as a gated community. That’s the right conclusion to draw from a series of recent events.

In late May, The Columbus Dispatch explored how some school districts in Ohio are rooting out students with “questionable residency” (my colleague Jamie Davies O’Leary also examined this Dispatch article here). For those unfamiliar with questionable residency, it refers to students who are enrolled in a school district where they claim to live, but who actually live elsewhere. In particular, the article focused on Bexley City Schools, citing arguments in favor of investigating residency claims from both the superintendent and the district’s law firm and investigators.

Three weeks later, we released Interdistrict Open Enrollment in Ohio: Participation and Student Outcomes. The report examined statewide data on Ohio’s open enrollment policy, which permits students to attend school in a district other than the one in which they live. Ohio’s policy is voluntary, which means it’s up to districts to decide whether to accept non-resident students. In total, 80 percent of Ohio’s 610 school districts allow open enrollees, and more than 70,000 students participate in the program. Participating districts and families alike have had positive experiences with the program, and the report’s data indicate that students can benefit academically from participating.

But not every district participates. The 20 percent of districts that opt not to admit open enrollees are on average larger, more affluent, and higher achieving than their participating counterparts. Non-participating districts are also clustered in the suburbs around Ohio’s Big Eight school districts. One of the largest clusters of non-participation can be found around the borders of Columbus City Schools. Bexley—the district at the center of the Dispatch piece and one of Columbus City’s more affluent neighbors—does not permit non-resident students to enroll in its schools Hence, the residency investigations.

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The “donut ring” effect in graphic form. Nearly all of the districts surrounding Columbus City Schools are closed to outside students. Bexley City Schools, entirely surrounded by Columbus, is likewise closed.

A week after our report was released, an interesting letter to the editor appeared in the Dispatch. In it, a father living in—you guessed it—Bexley highlighted the fantastic education his son with special needs is receiving from the district. “Although I enjoy the tremendous support we get from Bexley schools and the great atmosphere we get to experience here,” he concluded, “it pains me that kids growing up a mile east or west of me don’t get the same opportunities.”

It pains me, too. It pains me that so many kids are so close to high-quality schools but so far from reaping their benefits. But most of all, it pains me that in the land of equality and opportunity, thousands of children are told that their only educational option is to attend the school they are assigned to. For some of these kids, that means attending a chronically underperforming school—and the “privilege” to attend a bad school is no privilege at all. For other kids, it’s not about a struggling school—their resident district serves them well enough, but they would be served even better by another. For both populations, the underlying problem remains: Their assigned school isn’t the right fit, but the districts around them aren’t willing to open their doors.

To be clear, this isn’t about Bexley, or any other Ohio district that chooses not to permit non-resident students to enroll. For all we know, plenty of people who work for and live in these districts strongly believe that all kids—resident and non-resident—should have access to an excellent education. Districts choose not to accept non-resident students for all sorts of reasons, and they are legally entitled to do so.

But let’s also be clear that if school districts refuse to let “outsider” kids in, the least they can do is refrain from condemning the school choice options that exist for those children outside their borders. Many of the same districts that keep their borders and doors firmly closed are the same districts that fight tooth and nail against charters, vouchers, magnet schools, STEM schools, and other kinds of choice. Districts are on poor moral footing when they refuse to help serve students from other districts, and then actively oppose those who pick up the slack and do extend education options to families. If permissible borders are out of the question, then so too should be any opposition to choice. In the land of the free, families must be free to seek out what is in the best interest of their children. If traditional districts are unable or unwilling to provide it, then families must be empowered to search for it elsewhere. 

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s (CRPE) latest report asks whether public transportation can improve students’ access to Denver’s best schools of choice, and the answer appears to be “no.” Denver’s geography, diffuse population centers, and distribution of quality school seats in relation to poor students already complicate the school district’s own transportation efforts to make quality seats accessible in terms of travel time from home to school. As an experiment, CRPE researchers compared district residency and public transit route data via Google Maps Directions Application Program Interface to calculate travel times between each student’s home address and the schools to which they could have applied. The hope was to make quality schools more accessible to those who need them most—just like a parent researching such schools might do—but the results are discouraging.

Based on their analysis, CRPE finds that just 55 percent of low-income students could attend a high-performing school within thirty minutes of their home on public transit; that percentage falls to 19 percent for schools within fifteen minutes’ travel time. In other words, most low-income students would continue to face long commutes to the city’s top schools when using public transportation, despite a choice-friendly atmosphere that includes a common application and lottery-matching system that strives to give all families their most-preferred option. We know that proximity often trumps quality considerations when parents are given a choice, and extant transportation options in Denver and other large cities do very little to change the balance.

In the end, CRPE’s researchers conclude that it would be easier to move good schools to the students (a huge leap based on these experimental findings) than to move students to good schools in a reasonable amount of time by using existing modes of transportation.

But hold up a sec. This experiment was conducted using existing data—including modes, routes, timing, and extant bell schedules. While that might make for a decent enough research design, it doesn’t take into account that public transit is generally geared to move workers to jobs—from inner ring neighborhoods to downtowns on a nine-to-five schedule—and thus is fundamentally maladapted for student use. Before leaping to the conclusion that “moving all the schools” is the easiest means of improving access, additional CRPE-style simulations with experimental parameters should be attempted. A recent Bellwether Education Partners report takes that tack with regard to district-based transportation, urging better use of data and technology as its least invasive recommendation, and the same could be done for public transportation using CRPE’s experimental model. A transit-friendly bell schedule is an obvious variable with which to experiment, as is the incorporation of nodal transportation: picking students up at their doors in smaller, more flexible vehicles—like Uber fleets or on-demand autonomous vehicles (for those adventurous early adopters out there)—and delivering them to a central transfer point. Van pools and neighborhood circulator routes could also be tried in spreadsheet form.

One final note: CRPE’s researchers make one real attempt to avoid their “move all the schools” conclusion by floating the idea of interdistrict open enrollment, an option particularly attractive for sprawling Denver where the nearest good school for many underserved students might be in a neighboring district. Open enrollment is a small segment of school choice in the city currently, and it should be expanded as much as possible, but Fordham is here to tell you that that option hits a wall in terms of transportation too once it gets large enough and families will be back to square one.

With district-based transportation hidebound and in disarray in cities large and small, and public transportation generally ill-adapted for student travel, it is perhaps no wonder that CRPE’s researchers leaped from their disappointing findings to a non-transportation-based recommendation. Transportation is a basic necessity for most school children, regardless of the type of school they attend. And it could be so much more even than it has been—a bulwark against absenteeism, a reading lab on wheels, or even a rolling study hall complete with Wi-Fi. But only if we give up the old ways of thinking and understand that transportation must be about what students need, and not what is easiest for school districts or even transportation planners.

SOURCE: Betheny Gross, Patrick Denice, “Can Public Transportation Improve Students’ Access to Denver’s Best Schools of Choice?” Center on Reinventing Public Education (June, 2017).

This blog originally appeared as an editorial in today’s edition of the Columbus Dispatch.

The Ohio Senate just voted to allow the class of 2018 to receive diplomas without demonstrating proficiency in a single academic subject area. The competence-free graduation option, which came from recommendations made by the State Board of Education under pressure from local school superintendents, would award students a diploma upon meeting just two of eight conditions.

These include softballs like attending school regularly, obtaining a 2.5 senior-year grade-point average or completing community service. Show up, do a nominal number of assignments or a few months of part-time volunteer work, and the diploma is yours. Forget about setting a pitifully low bar; Ohio is about to remove it altogether.

It’s important to remember why, decades ago, Ohio and many other states decided to set competency-based graduation requirements in the first place. Namely, too many local school districts were willing to hand out diplomas that their graduates could not read, to young adults who had made it to 18 with the reading, writing, and math skills of grade-school students. The system had failed them.

The problem was most pernicious for poor and minority students, who were much more likely to be marched through school, year after year, without any responsible adults making sure they had actually mastered the material. The reforms of the past quarter-century were meant to ensure some basic level of equity — to guarantee that no Ohio child was simply passed along whether their schools had taught them essential skills or not. Graduation requirements were a key part of the strategy.

And there has been real progress as a result. In 2005, only 24 percent of Ohio students met the ACT’s college readiness benchmarks; by 2016, that number had risen to 33 percent.

Sadly, we still have a long way to go until we can look every Ohio student in the eye and say that we did right by them. The “rising tide of mediocrity” described by the Nation At Risk report in 1983, the year I was born, has not ebbed. Roughly one in three Ohio high-school graduates arrives at college wholly unprepared, requiring remediation in math or reading. And those are the students who actually attend college. The tide of mediocrity has continued to swell; the only difference is that we’ve found larger and sturdier islands of denial to shelter us from the waves.

Policymakers should be asking themselves how to ratchet up expectations and ensure that more schools rise to the occasion to help their students meet them. Instead, by “fixing” Ohio’s graduation “crisis,” they are embracing state-sanctioned low expectations, a resignation that we think students simply aren’t capable. Despite being cloaked in language about “flexibility” and the need to acknowledge students’ “other accomplishments”— as if personal triumphs or character traits will compensate for an inability to read or do math — Ohio policymakers are imposing a solution that most of us would never accept for our own children.

The State Board of Education justified its decisions based partially on the “potential unintended consequences to the class of 2018.” But what are the unintended consequences of expecting so very little of our students? How can Ohio leaders say that all children deserve an excellent education, no matter their family background or stake in life, and then turn around and expect next to nothing of them?

Don’t mistake political expediency for benevolence: There’s nothing compassionate about diminished expectations. I say this not only as an education policy analyst or a former public school teacher, but as a first-generation college graduate. I was a child who could have been written off in the same manner that Ohio lawmakers are set to do to scores of young people. Good intentions don’t matter when the stakes are so high.

The message we send matters immensely. We either signal to our students that they’re capable of reaching great heights, or we perpetuate a dangerous belief that they’re not resilient enough, not hardworking enough, not brilliant enough, not capable enough. It’s critical that the legislature reject the Senate’s proposed graduation alternative. If they refuse, Gov. John Kasich needs to stand up for the belief that all kids can learn, and veto these changes.

In early June, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released an updated draft of its ESSA plan for public comment. The department had initially intended to submit its plan earlier this spring, but after heavy pressure, state officials decided to delay submission until September. The most important part of the document is its description of the state’s proposed school accountability and intervention policies. We believe that Ohio’s plan does a good job meeting both federal and state requirements.

Still, Ohio should aim for excellence, if not perfection. Allow me to identify three improvements worthy of consideration before ODE submits its plan to the U.S. Department of Education. These are sections that ODE could likely tweak without running afoul of federal or state law.

Eliminate the Chronic Absenteeism indicator (Title I, Part A: Improving Basic Programs Operated by LEAs—Indicators; lines 428-512)

ODE proposes using Chronic Absenteeism as a new report-card measure to comply with ESSA’s requirement for an indicator of School Quality or Student Success. This is a mistake. While related to student learning, absenteeism is not itself an outcome measure, which should form the basis of school accountability. Attendance should be viewed more akin to an “input” measure, like student demographics; as the Ohio Auditor of State writes, “attendance is merely an input over which schools have minimal control.” In addition, to maintain the integrity of the indicator, a robust process may need to be in place to verify schools’ attendance data. Audits of attendance data have revealed unintentional errors or intentional manipulation of records under what the Auditor has called an “honor system” of district attendance reporting. A recent Plain Dealer article notes that the district with Ohio’s highest chronic absenteeism rate claims an error was likely made in the data. For these reasons, ODE might consider other options to comply with ESSA’s School Quality indicator, such as using only its Prepared for Success component (for high schools) or perhaps data from its Achievement component (such as “indicators met” which would cover almost all schools).

Identify the bottom 5 percent of schools for “comprehensive support”—and no more (Title I, Part A: Improving Basic Programs Operated by LEAs, Subpart 4; lines 224-233).

ESSA requires states to identify a minimum of 5 percent of schools as low-performing and in need of comprehensive support—i.e., some form of state intervention. Ohio should affirm that it will identify, per the federal minimum requirement, the bottom 5 percent of schools. But ODE should also make clearer how it plans to identify comprehensive schools—the draft only refers to the use of the summative rating system. It does not indicate whether the total number of points earned by a school, or whether the overall A-F letter grades themselves will lead to identification of comprehensive schools. ODE should use the point system that drives the A-F ratings, not the summative ratings. That’s because the number of F-rated schools may exceed the 5 percent target. Using the points system, however, would allow ODE to identify just the bottom 5 percent. By limiting the number of comprehensive-support schools, the state could better focus its resources on the organizational changes necessary to improve Ohio’s lowest performing schools. It may also discourage state policymakers from lowering the bar just to have fewer schools assigned F’s and placed under state oversight.

Eliminate the Watch category of schools from the ESSA Plan (Title I, Part A: Improving Basic Programs Operated by LEAs, Subpart 4; lines 319-337).

Under ESSA, Ohio must identify two groups of schools as in need of improvement (“comprehensive” and “targeted” support schools). But ODE’s plan goes beyond these categories and identifies a third group of low-performing schools called “watch” schools. The basis for this identification is found in state, not federal, law, and ODE may not need to include Watch schools in its plan to comply with ESSA. In the coming days, Ohio lawmakers should consider eliminating or modifying the state law that allows ODE and the State Board to identify Watch schools and subject them to school improvement plans. Under federal law, Ohio must already intervene in schools with low-performing subgroups, i.e., “targeted” support schools. The Watch category goes further—perhaps a step too far—by identifying even more schools for intervention based on subgroup performance. It’s unlikely that ODE has the capacity to support in a meaningful way so many schools for improvement.

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ODE’s ESSA plan should simply describe how it intends to meet federal requirements within the state accountability framework. In the areas noted above, ODE could dial back or clarify its compliance with ESSA before submitting the plan to federal officials. Each of these suggestions has the potential to reduce the administrative burdens—while maintaining accountability for outcomes—and free Buckeye educators to focus on students. 

Apprenticeships are all the rage. President Trump recently announced a doubling of federal funding for apprenticeship programs to $200 million in his next budget. This follows an investment by President Obama of $50 million in the outgoing months of his administration. In fact, this follows a major rewrite of the federal legislation governing job training in 2014. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) calls for a much greater level of coordination among workforce programs.

President Trump correctly noted that the organizational framework surrounding workforce development still needs some work, but this criticism is too simplistic. States have made major strides in recent years to improve the coordination of workforce development, and some have promoted apprenticeships as a part of the effort. The WIOA legislation made a requirement for workforce plans at the state level and some states have plans to expand apprenticeships. Many states have invested state tax revenue in apprenticeships and other mechanisms to strengthen training for youth.

Ohio, for instance, has recently taken critical steps to link apprenticeship programs to young people’s educational experiences. These include: 1) expanding linkages between high schools and state-recognized pre-apprenticeship programs through the College Credit Plus program, 2) developing an optional state recognized pre-apprenticeship pathway for students in regular career and technical programs, and, 3) expanding registered apprenticeships utilizing the state community college system, particularly for non-traditional apprentice occupations and under-represented populations.[1]

The point here is that apprenticeship programs are—not to mince words—boutique programs. A program that trains roughly 3,000 new apprentices a year in 2010 in Ohio cannot make a major dent in the labor demands for the state as a whole. In a study of ten states, only 35,000 students annually start apprenticeship programs. Ohio has over 5.8 million people working and has an unemployment rate of below 5 percent. There is great need for new entrants into the skilled trades. There are currently 7,500 jobs for “construction” alone and 700 for “welders” on OhioMeansJobs, the state online job posting system. In 2015, the combined output for all Ohio schools on an annual basis was only 654 welders. While it is projected to increase over time, the Ohio Education Research Center’s research shows that it can be very hard to meet the labor supply needs of growing firms with educational institutions.[2] All the more reason for the apprenticeship system to be improved.

Registered apprenticeship programs can be high quality. The best evidence indicates that the median annual earnings of completers of apprenticeships are over $60,000/year in the State of Washington, which works out to a median hourly wage of $37. In the ten-state study from 2012, the average difference in annual earnings for those in skilled professions was over $6,000 between those that did an apprenticeship and those that did not.  

Dr. Eric Hanushek recently suggested in an opinion piece that apprenticeships might not be the ideal education program for youth, and that young people need better general education. However, since the average age of apprentices is about 30 years old, apprenticeships are clearly serving a clientele that has tried other programs and had work experience and is looking for something new. An apprenticeship is still a great option for an adult seeking to support a family. And programs have gotten much better at linkages with community and technical colleges. In the future, they very well may be a real alternative for youth as well as 30-year-olds. But what I worry about in response to Dr. Hanushek’s work is that we throw out a good training system just because it doesn’t teach general skills as well as a good suburban high school.  

In addition to being small in comparison to the demand, apprenticeships are devilishly hard to scale up. An apprenticeship is a complex system of industrial relations, including an educational component (often at a community college), a trade union supervising the curriculum and training, and employers working on the practicum part of apprenticeships. The reason they thrive historically in Germany has a lot to do with the interdependence between firms, unions, and educational institutions and the “Lander” or regional government. We should be very skeptical that we can transplant the form to the United States without major effort at research and development. 

Doing this right at the national level is not going to cost $200 million. If we take the estimates on the government costs from the 2012 study, it might be on average $1,000 per apprentice. For an apprenticeship system as big as, say, the community college system, we would need $170 million dollars just for Ohio. What happens if we really want to take on the problem and we give $1,000 per apprentice to a state the size of Texas or even California? Costs will vary among programs, so the real costs will be much greater. Clearly, President Trump will need to increase the overall budget for apprenticeships, as will states, if we really want to make a dent in the demand for skilled trades in the nation.

The nation would do well to take education for careers more seriously than it has in the past. The apprenticeship system is a major part of this potential source of training. However, taking it seriously requires dealing with a whole host of fiscal, educational, and social issues. I hope the states, including Ohio, are up for it.

Joshua D. Hawley is Associate Professor in the Glenn College and an Associate Professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University.