Interdistrict and Intradistrict Open Enrollment

Key Findings

• Key Finding 1

  In voluntary interdistrict open enrollment programs, districts that refuse applications from interdistrict transfers are disproportionately high achieving, socioeconomically advantaged, located in the suburbs, and in a relatively strong financial position.

  Early studies using experimental designs in individual cities and norm-referenced reading tests as the outcome measure reported more positive findings than later studies using nonexperimental designs, evaluating statewide programs, and utilizing state accountability math tests as the outcome measure. Later studies have mostly reported at least some negative findings.

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• Key Finding 2

  Open enrollment participation rates are broadly similar across states, ranging from 5% to 10%. However, the characteristics of open-enrolling students vary from state to state, in part because of differences in state policy design.

  The results regarding whether students who use open enrollment are more advantaged in terms of socioeconomic status or achievement are somewhat inconsistent, with research from different contexts reaching disparate conclusions. These differences may be attributable to the mandatory or voluntary nature of the open enrollment policy context. However, the literature is remarkably consistent in finding that students with disabilities and English language learners are much less likely than students without these classifications to use open enrollment. 

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• Key Finding 3

  The academic, demographic, financial, and structural characteristics of districts are all related to the transfer decisions of students.

  On average, students use open enrollment programs to transfer to districts with higher test scores. Students also tend to transfer to districts with relatively high levels of socioeconomic advantage, but the relationship between student transfer decisions and district socioeconomic status significantly attenuates after accounting for district achievement levels, which suggests that the relationship is primarily attributable to families seeking to transfer to high-performing districts. Distance also plays a large constraining role in students’ transfer calculus, with students being much more likely to transfer to nearby districts than to transfer to districts that are farther away.

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• Key Finding 4

  Open enrollment participation exhibits, on average, little relationship with students’ future educational outcomes, but there is some evidence of variation in this relationship according to the nature of students’ program participation.

  Most studies indicate that open enrollment participation is unrelated to students’ future test scores. However, students who consistently open enroll exhibit better outcomes than students whose participation is transitory or sporadic, though this difference may just reflect self-selection by those who stay longer. Such results are consistent with students using open enrollment for different purposes. 

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• Key Finding 5

  Open enrollment increases competition among school districts, which leads to small increases in student test scores.

  Open enrollment leads districts to compete with one another for students and the associated state funding. Studies show that these competitive pressures can slightly increase student test scores, and there is evidence that districts are particularly responsive to transfer outflows. 

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• Key Finding 6

  There is some evidence that both families and districts participate in open enrollment programs in a manner that increases segregation. However, the scale of student participation in these programs is generally too small for these effects to be substantively meaningful.

  Studies typically find that open enrollment programs lead to greater levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation. However, these findings are not universal, and the small percentage of students transferring through a program means that the size of the effects is substantively modest.

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• Key Finding 7

  Open enrollment programs affect families’ residential location decisions and housing prices.

  Research finds that open enrollment programs generate increased housing prices in school districts located near highly desirable districts into which families can open enroll. By contrast, cross-district choice programs reduce home prices in the most desirable districts, as families no longer must reside in the district to gain access to public schools in the district.

  Explore the evidence

Introduction to open enrollment policies

Historically, the public school that students attended was determined by the location of their residence. Students would enroll in the district where they lived and, within that district, attend the school whose attendance boundary encompassed their home. Open enrollment policies, both intra- and interdistrict, break this link between residential location and school of attendance. Interdistrict open enrollment policies allow students to enroll in a district other than the one in which their residence is located. By contrast, intradistrict policies provide students with schooling options within their residential district but across the usual neighborhood zones.

There are multiple variants of intra- and interdistrict open enrollment policies. On the interdistrict side, the two major policy types are referred to as mandatory and voluntary programs. Mandatory policies require districts to enroll nonresident students, although they generally specify a series of conditions that districts can cite as a legal basis for refusing a student entry.¹ These policies typically prohibit resident districts from rejecting out-student transfers. By contrast, voluntary policies allow districts to decide whether to admit nonresident students. Although most U.S. states do not give resident districts the power to reject student outflows, a small number of states require sending and receiving districts to have a transfer agreement in place before any student movement can occur. The literature has not settled on a similarly neat classification of intradistrict choice policies, as they tend to have their own intricacies and nuances.

The first statewide interdistrict open enrollment policy in the U.S.—a mandatory one—was enacted by the Minnesota state legislature in 1988, with the program going into effect the following year. The idea quickly took root, and open enrollment programs began to spread, with early-adopting states concentrated mostly in the middle of the country. Wisconsin, Ohio, and Colorado were relatively quick to follow Minnesota with passage of their own open enrollment programs. The expansion of interdistrict open enrollment programs continued over the next three decades. Figure 1 illustrates that 43 states have an interdistrict open enrollment policy, with 15 states operating a mandatory policy, 19 running a voluntary program, and 9 having both a mandatory and a voluntary policy.² Figure 2 shows that, on the intradistrict side, 29 states (including DC) have passed legislation explicitly allowing within-district choice, while 22 states leave the issue unaddressed in state policy. No state has enacted a policy expressly prohibiting intradistrict open enrollment.

• Figure 1

  Number of States with Interdistrict Open Enrollment Policies, by Policy Type

  

  Footnotes

  Source: Education Commission of the States.

• Figure 2

  Number of States with Policy Addressing Intradistrict Open Enrollment

  

  Footnotes

  Source: Education Commission of the States.

In the policy arena, there are arguments both for and against open enrollment. Supporters of open enrollment programs often note that they allow families greater access to schools located in neighborhoods where the families might not be able to afford housing. Additionally, open enrollment programs often receive support from stakeholders who want families to have educational options and who perhaps want to increase competition but are wary of providing those options outside traditional educational governance structures, such as via charter schools or private school vouchers. On the other side, opponents of interdistrict choice policies note that these programs can cause financial challenges for school districts that experience significant transfer-induced enrollment declines. The programs are also criticized for their potential to exacerbate cross-district segregation and inequality along both racial and socioeconomic lines.

Understudied topics: We highlight three major issues in the open enrollment literature that warrant further study. First, compared to other school choice policies, such as charter schools and private school vouchers, there is very little experimental or quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of open enrollment programs—almost all prior work has been based on designs requiring very strong assumptions for a causal interpretation of the estimated relationships. Second, the bulk of existing work has examined the operations and effects of interdistrict open enrollment programs, with much less attention having been paid to the intradistrict variety. Third, most studies examine the characteristics of districts into which students transfer, and there has been relatively little attention to the specific schools that students attend via their use of open enrollment policies.

Policy considerations: The conclusions outlined above are based on the best available evidence in the open enrollment literature. However, given that most of this evidence is correlational, policy recommendations based on this evidence should be made with caution. Furthermore, much of the evidence has been generated from a handful of states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, and Colorado—that are located in the center of the U.S. and contain a relatively large number of geographically compact districts. The findings from these states may not generalize to other state contexts, such as those in the South, where school district borders and county borders often overlap, leading to much larger school districts in terms of geographical size.

Evidence

Our review of the research evidence on open enrollment programs proceeds in two main stages. We first summarize evidence on the operations of these programs, addressing topics such as district participation, student participation rates, participant characteristics, the determinants of student transfers, and the role of state policy design in shaping program operations. We then review evidence on the effects of open enrollment programs. Specifically, we describe the evidence on student academic outcomes, the (de)segregating effects of open enrollment programs, and the impacts of these programs on residential location decisions and home prices. Compared to other school choice programs, such as charter schools and private school vouchers, the open enrollment literature is weighted more heavily toward studies of program operations, containing fewer studies on program effects, as our review shows.

Key finding #1: District participation

Mandatory interdistrict open enrollment policies require districts to accept nonresident students, while voluntary policies grant districts the autonomy to decide whether to enroll transfer students. A modest literature considers district participation patterns and analyzes the factors that correlate with the decision to accept—or not—transfer applications from students residing in a different district. This work has been conducted in three main contexts—Massachusetts,^{3, 4} Ohio,⁵ and Michigan⁶—although one study used Schools and Staffing Survey data from five states with voluntary interdistrict choice policies.⁷

The findings regarding district participation are remarkably consistent across contexts. Districts that refuse applications from interdistrict transfers are disproportionately high achieving, socioeconomically advantaged, located in the suburbs, and in a relatively strong position financially. For example, an analysis of Ohio found that in the average nonparticipating district, approximately 31% of students were economically disadvantaged; additionally, mean achievement was around the 70^th percentile on state-administered standardized tests.⁸ By contrast, in the mean participating district, approximately 45% of students were classified as economically disadvantaged, and the mean achievement levels were between the 45^th and 50^th percentiles. Similarly sized disparities on the economic disadvantaged front were evident in analysis of districts’ participation choices in metropolitan Detroit.⁹

In addition to socioeconomic and achievement characteristics, studies emphasize the importance of districts’ financial status and neighboring districts’ behavior as determinants of district participation choices. Research from Ohio makes clear that districts are much more likely to open their doors if neighboring districts accept transfers.^{10, 11} This pattern is likely attributable to financial considerations, as districts are rarely in a position where they are willing to lose students—and the attendant state aid dollars—to neighboring districts without any prospects of attracting students in return. Taken together, the evidence suggests that high-achieving, financially stable, socioeconomically advantaged, and suburban districts often opt out of enrolling nonresident students, while less-advantaged districts under some financial pressure are more likely to opt in to open enrollment. In addition to being important in its own right, district participation decisions have significant implications for students’ available transfer options, which we turn to below.

Key finding #2: Student participation

One basic question about any school choice program, including open enrollment, is “Who chooses?” The first scholarly analysis of interdistrict open enrollment program participants, which dates back to the mid-1990s, provides an overview of students attending a nonresident district through Milwaukee’s Chapter 220 program, a desegregation initiative designed for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) students to enroll in suburban districts, and vice versa. As this was the era before statewide longitudinal data systems, Wisconsin researchers sent surveys to participating families inquiring about their characteristics.¹² The results from these surveys revealed that compared to the broader set of MPS students, those transferring to the suburbs had somewhat higher reading scores and greater levels of socioeconomic advantage, as measured by income, free lunch eligibility, and maternal educational attainment. The relative advantage of participants may be unsurprising because despite the state’s provision of transportation to and from suburban districts, the program required families to provide prior behavioral and academic information as part of the application process. More advantaged families might also have higher educational expectations that lead them to transfer.

Largely due to the absence of accessible, systematic data, the subsequent fifteen-year period saw little additional analysis of the characteristics of open enrollment participants. This situation began to change around 2010 as statewide longitudinal data systems began to come online. Over the next decade, scholars conducted in-depth analyses of open enrollment participants in multiple contexts, with work from four states—Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, and Minnesota—providing the bulk of the evidence. This work has conveyed five primary findings about interdistrict open enrollment participants.

First, statewide interdistrict open enrollment programs are typically used by 5-10% of a state’s public school enrollment. This is the case in Ohio,¹³ Colorado,^{14, 15} Minnesota,^{16, 17} Michigan,¹⁸ and Wisconsin.¹⁹ Of course, it is important to recognize that these states are broadly similar in that, with the partial exception of Colorado, they are located in the middle of the U.S. and have a relatively large number of districts that are geographically modest in size. With small districts, the choice options in other districts are closer to home and, hence, more practical. The participation rates in other contexts, such as Southern states with countywide districts, may differ and would be a natural topic for future research. Overall, though, the participation rates in such contexts match or even exceed the student take-up of more visible choice programs, such as charter schools or private school vouchers.

Second, research makes clear that transfer rates vary across different groups of students. In particular, across the states noted above, students with disability designations and those classified as English learners attend school across district lines at approximately half the rate of other students.^{20, 21} These differences in participation may be partially attributable to provisions in state law allowing districts to refuse transfer applications if the districts lack the programmatic offerings required to serve students. Regarding grade levels, previous work demonstrates that high schoolers transfer via open enrollment at rates a couple of percentage points higher than elementary or middle school students.²²

Third, although most evidence indicates that open enrollment participants are relatively advantaged in terms of socioeconomic status, the literature is not unanimous in this conclusion. In Ohio, between the 2008–09 academic year and the 2013–14 academic year, approximately 31% of open enrolling students were considered economically disadvantaged by the state, compared to 42% of students attending school in their resident district.²³ An analysis of Colorado open enrollment participants also finds transferring students to be more socioeconomically advantaged. However, work from Michigan reaches the opposite conclusion—students attending school across district lines are disproportionately likely to be eligible for subsidized lunches.²⁴

Fourth, the relationship between open enrollment participation and student achievement is context dependent. In Ohio, the relationship is strong and positive, with open enrolling students exhibiting mean achievement levels that are approximately four percentiles higher than those of their nontransferring peers.²⁵ This relationship holds regardless of whether the comparison group consists of all nontransferring students across the state or is restricted to nontransferring students in open enrollers’ resident district. Analyses from Colorado return mixed conclusions. Open enrolling students in elementary grades score slightly higher than students attending their resident district, but high school transfers score somewhat lower.²⁶ Additionally, in Michigan, open enrolling students have lower average achievement levels than their peers who attend school in their resident district.²⁷ Although we lack definitive evidence, the inconsistent results across contexts may be attributable to the variation in policy design discussed earlier, which produces differences in district participation and, ultimately, the set of feasible transfer options for students. The district participation patterns in Michigan differ from those in Ohio, which also operates a voluntary program, and from those in the states operating mandatory programs.

Fifth, analyses of the dynamics of student open enrollment participation consistently return evidence of two qualitatively different groups of transfer students. The first group of students participates in open enrollment consistently, using the program to find a long-term educational home. The second group of open enrolling students is more transitory in its participation, entering the program one year and exiting the next. Consistent open enrollers are more socioeconomically advantaged and higher achieving than their peers who participate only sporadically.²⁸ Indeed, transitory open enrollment participants are typically more disadvantaged than a state’s general student population.²⁹

Key finding #3: Determinants of students’ interdistrict transfer destinations

Now that we understand where the evidence points in regard to the question of “Who chooses?,” the natural follow-on question is “What do they choose?” The literature contains a robust set of high-quality studies that address this question, with evidence on the open enrollment choices of students in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Arizona. The results of these analyses are remarkably consistent and highlight the importance of several factors in shaping students’ transfer decisions. Notably, prior work focuses almost exclusively on the districts into which students transfer, with little analysis of the characteristics of the specific schools that students attend via open enrollment.

First and foremost, the literature makes clear that students use open enrollment programs to transfer to districts with relatively high levels of academic performance. Studies of student transfers in Minnesota,³⁰ Wisconsin,^{31, 32} Colorado,³³ Indiana,³⁴ and Ohio³⁵ all indicate that district academic performance levels exhibit a strong positive relationship with open enrollment transfers. This relationship is evident both in studies of district-level transfer flows (as in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Colorado) and in work drawing upon student-level data.

Although evidence indicates that transfers are related to average test scores, they are largely unrelated to districts’ estimated value added.³⁶ Districts vary, sometimes significantly, in how much progress students make over the course of a school year. For example, some districts serve students with relatively low average test scores but help them achieve fairly large learning gains over the course of the school year. Other districts enroll students with high achievement levels who make more modest progress throughout the school year. Ultimately, it is unsurprising that districts’ value added is unrelated to student transfer decisions. Compared to districts’ value added, it is much easier for families to observe their average test scores.

Second, the characteristics of students’ resident district relate to transfer decisions, but they do so in a somewhat nuanced manner. Compared to students in the lowest performing districts,^{37, 38} students are actually somewhat more likely to exit districts with average or even slightly above average academic performance. Coupled with the evidence reviewed above, this dynamic implies that open enrollment is disproportionately used by relatively advantaged families to exit fairly high-performing district contexts and to seek access to districts with even higher levels of performance.

Third, evidence indicates the importance of structural factors in shaping students’ transfer decisions. Distance is the most important of these factors, with study after study finding distance to play a large constraining role in families’ transfer.^{39, 40} The importance of distance is amplified by the design of state programs, which typically leave transportation responsibilities to families. At most, state policy requires districts to provide transportation from a point within their borders. In addition to distance, prior work points to extracurricular opportunities⁴¹ and the presence of choice options, particularly charter schools,^{42, 43} as factors that are positively related to families’ transfer choices. On its face, the finding that choice options shape student transfer decisions may seem counterintuitive. However, in several states, school districts authorize and operate charter schools, and nonresident students may need to use open enrollment programs to access these schools.

Fourth, families’ transfer choices are affected by supply-side factors. Such factors are most relevant in the context of voluntary interdistrict choice programs reviewed above. However, even mandatory policies specify conditions under which districts are allowed to reject transfer applications, such as a lack of capacity, the absence of programs required to effectively serve a student, or a history of disciplinary infractions. In the context of Minnesota’s mandatory open enrollment program, researchers found that districts were more likely to reject applications when students were more advantaged, in either socioeconomic or academic, than nearby districts from which most applications originated.⁴⁴ This pattern is consistent with analyses of district participation in voluntary programs, where the most advantaged districts are least likely to open their doors to nonresident students.⁴⁵

Finally, on average, students are more likely to transfer to districts with relatively high levels of socioeconomic advantage. However, given the strong positive correlations between test scores and socioeconomic status, the power of socioeconomic status in predicting student transfer attenuates⁴⁶ or, in some studies, even disappears⁴⁷ after conditioning on district-level achievement. This empirical result calls into question whether families use open enrollment to intentionally seek out socioeconomically advantaged contexts per se—evidence suggests that transferring to those contexts is a byproduct of seeking out high-achieving districts.

Key finding #4: Effects of open enrollment on participants’ achievement

Understanding the impact of open enrollment on the achievement of participating students is clearly of interest to students and their families, as well as to policymakers and researchers. The evidence to date suggests that, on average, participating in open enrollment programs has little effect on students’ academic achievement. Importantly, though, the estimated relationships in this literature require strong assumptions to interpret them causally. Compared to the literature on other school choice programs, the body of work on interdistrict open enrollment contains little experimental or even quasi-experimental evidence.

The most common design in the literature exploits within-student variation in open enrollment participation to estimate the relationship between interdistrict transfers and student achievement. For example, analyses from Michigan,⁴⁸ Ohio,⁴⁹ and Colorado⁵⁰ all rely on this design, with each study returning little evidence of a relationship between open enrollment participation and student achievement. Such findings are consistent with the above evidence that student transfers are unrelated to district value added—we would expect students to exhibit academic gains only if they transfer to districts that are more effective at increasing test scores.

Notably, some of these studies provide evidence of heterogeneity in this relationship. For example, evidence from both Ohio⁵¹ and Colorado⁵² indicates positive achievement trajectories for students who consistently open enroll, but it demonstrates stagnant or even negative achievement trajectories for students whose participation is transitory. In Ohio, the achievement gains for consistent open enrollers are particularly large for Black students in urban areas of the state. These students exhibited achievement gains of 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations (s.d.), compared to students who remained enrolled in their resident district. By contrast, students who open enrolled out of suburban districts with very low levels of poverty experienced achievement declines. Research recognizes that selection likely plays a significant role in the consistency of students’ open enrollment participation, but these results still suggest that urbanicity, participation consistency, and the characteristics of a student's district of residence may be important sources of heterogeneity in the relationship between open enrollment participation and student achievement.

The bulk of the literature returns evidence of, on average, no relationship between open enrollment participation and student achievement; however, two studies indicate a positive relationship, although each has limitations. First, experimental evidence from Connecticut indicates that students who use open enrollment to transfer into magnet schools exhibit substantial test score gains—in the range of 0.15 to 0.30 s.d.—although it is not possible to disentangle the magnet school effect from the open enrollment effect.⁵³ Second, work from Los Angeles County finds that open enrollment-induced mobility is associated with meaningful increases in test scores.⁵⁴ The design of this study, however, conditions only on selected observable student characteristics, leaving it susceptible to validity threats from unobserved factors.

Key finding #5: Competitive effects of open enrollment

One main premise of open enrollment is that allowing families to choose the schools where they send their students, regardless of residence, will produce competition among schools and districts to maintain enrollment levels and the attendant funding. In theory, this increased competition could lead to increased education quality. As in the literatures on charter schools and private school vouchers, research on the potential competitive effects of interdistrict open enrollment is an important complement to studies of direct participant effects, and analysis of these effects is necessary to comprehensively understand the achievement impacts of choice programs.

Two main studies address the question of whether open enrollment-induced competition boosts district performance. One of these studies was conducted in the context of Wisconsin,⁵⁵ while the second used Minnesota as its empirical setting.⁵⁶ Drawing upon district-level transfer flows and using a combination of district fixed effects and instrumental variable strategies to address the potential endogeneity of student transfers, these two studies do not find that transfer inflows affect district achievement levels. However, they provide evidence that transfer outflows lead to subsequent achievement increases. For example, the work from Wisconsin estimates that a 5-percentage-point increase in outflows generated a 4-7-percentage-point increase in students scoring in the top two standardized testing quartiles.⁵⁷ Similarly, the analysis of Minnesota finds that districts with higher rates of out-transfers exhibit increased reading scores in the following year.⁵⁸ However, the substantive size of these effects is relatively modest, with a 1-percentage-point increase in out-transfers increasing the number of students scoring at the proficient level on the state reading test by 0.2 percentage points. Taken together, these two studies provide evidence that open enrollment programs induce competition that leads to slight increases in student achievement. While the size of these competitive effects is quite modest, they are on par with the effects observed in analyses of other choice programs, namely, charter schools and private school vouchers.

Key finding #6: Open enrollment and segregation

Like any choice program, open enrollment provides families with an opportunity to make schooling decisions that can either increase or decrease segregation, relative to the levels that would exist if all students attended their district of residence. Empirically, the bulk of the evidence suggests that open enrollment leads to slight increases in racial and socioeconomic segregation, although the substantive magnitudes of these impacts are generally quite modest.

Evidence on the (de)segregating effects of open enrollment comes from analyses at both the metropolitan and state levels. These analyses typically present statistics that describe the racial and socioeconomic composition of districts under two conditions: 1) students’ district of attendance with open enrollment in place and 2) a counterfactual condition in which all students attend school in their resident district. Although the results from these studies are informative, their validity rests on the assumption that interdistrict open enrollment programs have no impact on families’ residential choices. However, the evidence that we review in the following section casts some doubt on this assumption.

Studies from the Colorado context—both a statewide analysis⁵⁹ and a study of the Denver metropolitan area⁶⁰—find open enrollment to have little impact on segregation levels. Statewide, evidence indicates that interdistrict transfers led to slight increases in socioeconomic stratification and small declines in racial stratification. In both cases, though, the size of the change was negligible in magnitude. The analysis of metro Denver returns descriptive evidence that open enrollment led to greater levels of stratification along socioeconomic lines because higher-income students were more likely to participate in open enrollment. However, the study’s lack of student-level data limits its ability to observe the specific schools that students attended via their open enrollment transfers.

A statewide study of the stratifying effects of Ohio’s interdistrict choice program returns evidence that this program led to small increases in segregation, although, again, the size of the transfer-induced demographic changes was substantively quite small.⁶¹ For example, in the 2017-18 academic year, open enrollment decreased the share of White students in the average Black student's district from 45.1% to 44.4%, and the exposure of the average economically disadvantaged student to more advantaged peers decreased from 32.6% to 32.5%. However, it is important to recognize that these effects are averages, and there were particular Ohio districts that saw much larger changes in segregation levels—both increases and declines—as a result of interdistrict choice.

Regarding studies of particular metropolitan areas, work from Phoenix examined the 27 districts comprising the Phoenix metropolitan area and concluded that open enrollment did little to meaningfully change prior patterns of stratification.⁶² Additionally, analyses of Detroit emphasize the role of district participation in shaping the segregating effects of open enrollment, highlighting how the participation choices observed in metro Detroit have led to racial and socioeconomic stratification.^{63, 64, 65}

Although the effects of interdistrict open enrollment on segregation levels are theoretically ambiguous, the weight of the empirical evidence indicates that these programs either leave segregation levels unaffected or lead to small increases. These muted effects are at least partially attributable to the fact that open enrollment participation rarely exceeds 10% of students in a state. This level of participation simply does not lead to enough student transfers to meaningfully change the underlying levels of segregation. That said, there are areas where open enrollment participation is higher, which points to the potential value of extending this line of inquiry to those contexts.

Key finding #7: Open enrollment and the housing market

Although a large majority of the research on open enrollment examines the educational dimensions of these school choice programs, a few high-quality studies explore how open enrollment affects other societal dimensions, such as housing prices and political outcomes. Grounded in work that uses computable general equilibrium models as the basis for theoretical predictions that the adoption of school choice programs may affect residential location decisions and housing,^{66, 67} two papers empirically assess these predictions.

The first paper draws upon data from Minnesota and analyzes changes in home prices before and after the state adopted its interdistrict open enrollment policy.⁶⁸ Using the transfer rates in the first year of the policy as a measure of district desirability, this work shows disproportionate increases in home prices in districts where a relatively large number of students transferred to desirable districts. The magnitude of these effects is meaningful, with a 1-s.d. increase in students transferring to desirable districts leading to a 3% bump in home prices. By contrast, home prices in desirable districts decline by approximately 3% for every 1-s.d. increase in students transferring into the district. Importantly, these effects accrue over time and take approximately eight years to reach full scale.

Building upon this work, a subsequent analysis marshaled data on interdistrict transfers and home prices from 12 separate states.⁶⁹ Working with district-level data and an empirical strategy broadly similar to that used in the Minnesota context, this study convincingly shows that introducing an interdistrict choice program boosts home prices in districts with desirable transfer options in close proximity. This rise in home prices is accompanied by increases in both residential density and household income. In short, interdistrict choice programs increase the demand for housing in districts with attractive nearby schooling options, with these impacts being concentrated in metropolitan areas. Taken together, the studies on this topic provide strong evidence that interdistrict choice programs have meaningful implications for residential choice and home prices.

In addition to the work on interdistrict choice and home prices, a single study has examined whether open enrollment programs affect the passage rates for school bond proposals. Theoretically, for families whose children attend school in a district in which they do not reside, this type of school attendance may lead them to be less likely to support bond proposals from their resident district. However, an analysis that drew on 2009-2015 data from Michigan found no relationship between districts’ open enrollment rates and support for bond proposals.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, this series of studies illustrates the importance of considering how the impacts of open enrollment programs may extend to realms beyond education.

Endnotes and references