National School Choice Week (NSCW) is a celebration of the educational options some families have—and a vivid reminder of the options that all families need. During NSCW each year, we hear a lot about private school choice and public charter schools, but, in fact, the most commonly used school choice option doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Millions of students nationwide regularly take advantage of open enrollment policies. Let’s show this game-changing option a little more love!
Open enrollment policies allow students to access public schools outside of the one they are assigned. There are two types of open enrollment: inter-district, where students can choose a school outside of their assigned district, and intra-district, where students can choose an alternate school within their district.
Not all states have universal open enrollment policies. In places without such policies, parents may actually be fined, prosecuted and threatened with jail time for finding ways to access a public school education outside of their assigned school or district.
At a recent National Summit on Education, ExcelinEd highlighted the story of Kelley Williams-Bolar, a mother in Ohio who was arrested and put in jail for giving a false address in order to get her daughters into a better school. In Illinois, the City of Chicago sent one family a bill for $60,000 in tuition after they lied about their address so their children could attend one of the city’s most selective high schools.
Why would parents lie to get into a different school? It’s because, all too often, school quality aligns with the districts, communities and homes that people can afford. It’s no secret that neighborhoods in the United States can be starkly divided by income. For many decades, they have also, by and large, been divided by race.
Historically, school districts were intentionally divided by race through a process called redlining—a nefarious practice that is nearly a century old. It’s rooted in a national response to the effects of the Great Depression, when Congress passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act to help Americans purchase homes. Through the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), the government subsidized home loans so that more Americans could create and build wealth. HOLC created a series of local maps, highlighting “desirable” neighborhoods for subsidized loans. It also identified “hazardous” areas, highlighted in red, which gave rise to the term “redlining.” People who lived in red areas, which were predominantly Black neighborhoods, were ineligible for subsidized loans. As you’d expect, the property values in those neighborhoods fell, and for a vast number of families, their dreams of building wealth never happened.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act outlawed redlining. But sadly, the effects of this discriminatory policy persist today—in the way states and cities create school district boundaries. While you might not notice redline boundaries when driving around a city, there’s a way to see how they have endured. If you overlay an HOLC map from the 1930’s onto current school district boundaries, you will often see a nearly identical overlap of desirability and racially segregated neighborhoods. To learn more, the University of Richmond has created a tool to show the effects of redlining on the largest metropolitan cities across the U.S.
This is one of many reasons why open enrollment and choice policies are so important for American families. They finally break the links between housing, wealth and a quality education.
How can policymakers further advance those goals? Here are three ideas:
If you are interested in learning more, check out our full panel discussion from the 2021 National Education Summit on redlining. There’s information on how this continues to affect everyday citizens and what states can do about it. Open enrollment and education choice are a big part of the answer.
Thirty-four states have open enrollment or intra-district policies on the books, twenty of those policies are mandatory, while fourteen are voluntary. Learn how those twenty states compare in this analysis.
