Funding Education Opportunity: Grading and ranking every state’s open enrollment laws

Good morning, I wanted to share Reason Foundation’s “Public Schools Without Boundaries 2025” report, which ranks the K-12 open enrollment laws in all 50 states. Open enrollment policies are a vital part of improving students’ options and outcomes, allowing them to transfer to public schools with open seats rather than be restricted to their residentially assigned schools. 

My annual open enrollment study grades and ranks every state’s open enrollment laws based on seven best practices, as shown in Table 1.

Using Reason Foundation’s open enrollment best practices as a measure: 16 states have statewide cross-district open enrollment laws, 17 states have statewide within-district open enrollment laws, 27 states make public schools free to all students, 10 states make public schools open to all students, five states publish transparent state-level open enrollment reports; eight states make open enrollment policies and availability transparent at the district-level, and four states have a robust appeals process for denied transfer applicants. 

As with the 2024 edition, Oklahoma continues to lead the nation with the best open enrollment policy, scoring 99 out of 100 points thanks to a well-rounded law that lets kids transfer to public schools with openings, bans tuition charges for transfer students, and offers data and transparency to parents and policymakers. 

Thanks to an improvement that established a statewide within-district open enrollment law and improved transparency provisions, Arkansas now has the second-best policy in the nation, scoring 98 out of 100 points, surpassing Idaho, last year’s second-place state, which now ranks third.

Based on the Reason Foundation’s examination of open enrollment laws, six states—Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho, Arizona, West Virginia, and Utah–received “A” grades this year. 

Generally, these states tend to have excellent open enrollment laws, allowing students to transfer to any public school with available openings. However, their laws could be further improved by increased data sharing at the state- and district-levels or more effective appeal processes. 

Seven states — Florida, Kansas, Colorado, Delaware, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin — received “B” grades in the report.

Two states—North Dakota and Montana—received “C” grades.

Two states — Iowa and California — earned “D” grades. California could improve its inter-district transfer laws and move all the way up to an “A” grade.

The remaining 33 states scored an “F.” 

Table 1: Reason Foundation’s open enrollment best practices

Three states that received an “F” grade still improved their overall scores from last year’s report.

Nevada codified a strong within-district open enrollment policy and adopted good state- and district-level transparency provisions, improving its score from 35/100 points to 51/100 points. It now ranks 17th overall, tied with Minnesota and Massachusetts.

Similarly, New Hampshire established a strong within-district open enrollment law, improving its score from 35/100 to 45/100 points. It now ties for 21st place with Connecticut, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.

South Carolina has made its open enrollment policy more transparent at the district level, scoring 37 out of 100 points — an improvement of one point.

Lastly, Missouri’s open enrollment score dropped from 35/100 points to 5/100 points, ranking second-to-last, alongside Alabama and Virginia. This occurred because the state’s highly restrictive cross-district transfer options — the Metropolitan Schools Achieving Value in Transfer Corporation and Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation — are either defunct or no longer accepting transfer applicants. As a result, Missouri has no cross-district transfer options.

Alaska, Maine, Maryland, and North Carolina continue to rank dead last, scoring zero out of 100 points. 

A detailed summary of the study, including its rankings and grades for every state, as well as its methodology, is available here. 

The full report, Public Schools Without Boundaries, is available here (PDF). 

Previous editions of the study can be found here.

If you have any thoughts or questions about the report, your state’s policies, or open enrollment, I’d love to hear them.

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Grading and ranking every state’s open enrollment laws appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Source: https://reason.org/education-newsletter/grading-and-ranking-every-states-open-enrollment-laws/