New study examines open enrollment laws in all 50 states and shows how public school students are blocked from better schools

Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin have implemented the best open enrollment laws. Texas, California, and New York are among the worst.

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study analyzes every state's public school open enrollment laws in five key categories and finds that most states prevent public school students from accessing public education opportunities outside their residentially assigned schools. Only seven states have mandatory within-district open enrollment policies allowing students to attend another school in their school district other than their residentially assigned school. Similarly, just nine states require public schools to participate in cross-district open enrollment allowing public school students to transfer across district boundaries.

Disturbingly, the Reason Foundation study finds that 26 states do not have laws banning public school districts from charging transfer students tuition and fees to attend public schools other than the school they're assigned to. As a result, many affluent public school districts use transfer fees and tuition charges to prevent low-income students from transferring to their public schools.

For example, New York's Rye Brook School District charges $19,000 a year in tuition to kindergarten through sixth-grade public school transfer students who live outside the public school district's boundaries and $21,500 a year in tuition to similar public school transfer students in grades 7-12. Likewise, Lovejoy Independent School District, in an affluent suburb in the Dallas area, charges out-of-district transfer students $9,000 in tuition per year to attend its public schools despite also collecting state revenue for these students.

Overall, Reason Foundation finds that only five states—Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Utah—have implemented four of the five best practices to allow students to transfer to public schools outside their assigned school district or attendance zone boundaries.

Three states—Colorado, Delaware, and Wisconsin—meet three of the five open enrollment best practices. Two states—Nebraska and Tennessee—meet two out of five best practices. Meanwhile, 17 states meet just one best practice, and 23 states, including California, New York, and Texas, meet none of the best practices for open enrollment, Reason Foundation shows.

"In the United States, school assignments are determined by where kids live, casting unseen dividing lines in communities. These school catchment zones and district boundaries often serve as a barrier to better education opportunities for families," says Jude Schwalbach, the report's author, and an education policy analyst at Reason Foundation. "Simple statute changes could vastly improve students' public education choices in most states."

The report outlines specific suggestions and policy changes for every state, including how to prevent public school districts from unfairly rejecting transfer students, ensure transparent reporting for policymakers and parents, and prioritize fair funding for the school districts accepting students.

Full Report

The full report is available here and here (pdf).

Reason Foundation is a non-profit think tank that conducts public policy research on education, transportation, and other issues and promotes free minds and free markets. You find out more about Reason and its education research here.

SOURCE Reason Foundation