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Open enrollment lets students transfer from assigned schools to
any public school with available seats, but the Reason
Foundation study finds most states’ open enrollment policies are
lacking.
Illinois was one of 19 states that scored a zero out of five
categories on the best practices of open enrollment laws.
The report said the best practices include banning public
schools from charging tuition, allowing within-district and
cross-district open enrollment and requiring transparency
reporting at the district and state level so parents can
identify public schools with available seats and districts
cannot prevent transfers for unjust reasons.
Illinois school districts can charge tuition fees for
cross-district transfers.
Jude Schwalbach, education policy analyst at Reason Foundation
and author of the study, said sometimes a student wants to
transfer because another school is a better fit, or there may be
practical reasons.
“The school is on the way to their parents' job where their
residentially assigned one is in the opposite direction,”
Schwalbach said. “We also see students transfer just because
maybe they get along better with teachers at a different school
or the learning style or programming is better.”
Schwalbach adds that school districts responded to competition
caused by cross-district open enrollment policies. School
districts that lost students to open enrollment initially
improved on state tests soon afterward.
A 2023 Becker-Friedman Institute report about Los Angeles
Unified School District’s within-district open enrollment option
found that the program had positive effects on student
achievement and college enrollment. The authors argued that the
competition between schools encouraged them to improve.
Many states with no open enrollment policies frown upon getting
around the rules. The report found that 24 states criminalize
address-sharing, which is the practice where parents falsify
their address to gain access to a public school other than their
assigned one.
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