Open enrollment lets K-12 students attend public schools other than their assigned schools. It’s a burgeoning form of school choice that, rather than restricting kids to their residentially assigned schools, lets parents and students find the best public schools for them. In just the past four years, half of the country’s 16 strong open enrollment laws were codified by states.
As more parents seek to customize their kids’ educations, open enrollment policies are garnering significant support from 80% of parents with school-aged children, according to June polling by EdChoice-Morning Consult.
Yet, policymakers, families, and taxpayers are often in the dark about school districts’ open enrollment practices, including which schools have open seats, student participation rules, and its effect on districts’ enrollments.
States can vastly improve open enrollment transparency in two key ways: Identify the open enrollment data state education agencies (SEAs) should collect; and require the agencies to publish this data in an easily accessible way. These provisions should be codified in state law.
State education agencies should publish open enrollment data in an annual report and include district-level data, namely:
- The number of transfer students accepted;
- The number of rejected transfer applicants;
- The reasons the students were not allowed to transfer to the public schools.
As of 2024, a new Reason Foundation report found that only Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin’s open enrollment laws require them to collect and publish all these data sets. The report found that up to 13 states’ laws require SEAs to report some or all of the data. Excluding those states already mentioned, 10 states’ laws require them to identify the number of transfer students, only three states must identify the number of rejected applicants, only two states must note why applicants were denied, and only three states must publish their data annually.
Some states, such as Florida, also collect some open enrollment data but are not required to do so by law. As a result, data in these reports are not regularly available or easily accessible to parents or policymakers. In other states, such as Georgia, SEAs don’t collect any open enrollment data.
Students and parents benefit from these reports since they can reveal school districts’ unfair or bad open enrollment practices, such as rejecting transfer applicants for arbitrary reasons.
Transparent state education agency reports can also help policymakers improve existing open enrollment programs. For instance, Wisconsin policymakers created a secondary application window because report information showed that program demand was high. This legislative tweak was likely responsible for the nearly 20% spike in open enrollment participation during the next school year.
At the same time, these reports can help state policymakers and taxpayers make informed decisions about state and local funding requests from school districts. For example, taxpayers can use these reports to gauge the merit of a school district’s request to increase levies or staffing.
School districts that increase their enrollments with transfers, like Minnesota’s Round Lake-Brewster School District, may need to expand their facilities. On the other hand, requests from under-enrolled districts, especially those where many students transfer out, may be treated with skepticism.
These transparency reports can also shine a light on school districts’ open enrollment practices. For example, Wisconsin’s outstanding annual student transfer report revealed that students with disabilities were rejected at far higher rates than their peers. In fact, “Schools rejected about 40% of applications [from students with disabilities], with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14% of applications from students without disabilities,” Wisconsin Watch reported in 2023.
These reports can also reveal how school districts, including those outside metropolitan areas, can benefit from open enrollment. For instance, during the 2021-22 school year, more than 52% of Wisconsin’s 71,203 open enrollment participants transferred to public schools in rural areas or towns.
Since many rural policymakers worry school choice programs will negatively impact their schools, it is worth noting that rural school districts in Wisconsin increased their overall student counts by nearly 2,500 students due to open enrollment. This bolsters enrollment, adding at least $20 million, or about $8,000 per student, in new funding for these rural public schools.
Nuanced reports like these give policymakers, families, and taxpayers a data-backed starting point for addressing student barriers and opportunities. They also provide insights into how school districts benefit from open enrollment.
Unfortunately, only a handful of states make this data readily available to the public, including many of the states with strong open enrollment laws. In some cases, such as in Nebraska and West Virginia, the states just need to clarify in their existing laws that their open enrollment reports will be published annually and made publicly accessible.
Other states, such as Idaho, need to tweak their reporting to include why applicants were denied transfers by school districts. However, in most cases, open enrollment transparency provisions need to be significantly strengthened in law because 37 states don’t require their state education agencies to collect or publish any open enrollment data.
As more states adopt and improve their open enrollment laws, policymakers should ensure that strong transparency provisions are included to help students and parents, ensure public accountability and identify opportunities for improvement.