RALEIGH — The school-choice movement in North Carolina and many other states has generated much effort and focus on charter schools, tax credits, and vouchers. Meanwhile, another means of achieving progress in educational choice has gone fairly overlooked: public school open enrollment.
In an open enrollment or interdistrict public school system, parents who are dissatisfied with the assigned public school may send their children to any other public school in the district. They may also transfer their children to a public school outside their home district.
President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law gave this option to parents of a child in a failing school. For example, children in a chronically low-performing inner-city public school could have the choice of transferring to a successful suburban public school.
The state of New Jersey will begin the 2011-12 school year with a public school open enrollment policy that has received almost no national attention outside of the Garden State, despite receiving support and votes from Republicans and Democrats.
Although unconventional, open enrollment deserves our attention as a serious option with advantages even charter schools cannot offer. Establishing a charter school often requires starting a school from scratch; open enrollment works with schools already in place. In states like North Carolina, charters are subject to state-imposed school and enrollment restrictions that may constrain choices available to families.
The New Jersey Interdistrict Public School Choice Program started off as five-year pilot program in 2000 affecting only a few counties. The program was very successful, persuading legislators to establish the program statewide beginning in 2011-12.
Under this open enrollment policy, funding will follow the child. State per-pupil funding will go with the students who choose to enroll in new schools. To avoid overcrowding, schools are allowed to set a number of openings that they have available per grade. If there are more students requesting admission to that school than openings, the school will choose the new students by a lottery. Students wishing to attend a new school that is more than 2.5 miles but less than 20 miles away from their homes will have transportation provided for them by the home district.
Critics argue that open enrollment public schools are not all flowers and butterflies. It’s obvious that with an open enrollment policy, schools with higher achievement will attract students, and schools and districts with lower achievement will lose students. The policy risk is that if too many students transfer to isolated schools, it would create achievement segregation between districts.
That scenario, however, already is the reality in most school districts. If anything, open enrollment creates the option for students to get out of the poor-performing schools without their parents having to move in order to gain admission to that school. Moving to a high-performing school’s jurisdiction is often not an option for poorer families.
Another advantage to an open enrollment policy is that it makes public schools operate in a market mode. Schools have to strive to retain their base students and compete to attract other students. Competition to improve the education of schoolchildren is good.
New Jersey schools that participated in the pilot program, especially the poor-performing ones, improved with this added pressure of trying to attract and retain students. These schools figured out ways to improve and often hired better teachers and strengthened accountability measures.
None of this diminishes the importance and success of charter schools. Ideally, every parent would be able to choose from a plethora of school options, including charter schools, tax credits or vouchers, and public schools. Unfortunately, those options are not a reality for most parents.
We should applaud a state for making progress in giving students and parents one more option when it comes to school choice. It is worth noting, though, that an open enrollment policy is able to serve more students than all other public school choice programs combined in most areas.
Kellie Slappey is an intern for the John Locke Foundation.