A bill to create universal open enrollment for New Hampshire public schools is already prompting school boards to consider marketing their districts to families. And the bill hasn’t passed either chamber of the Legislature yet.
Senate Bill 101, sponsored by Sen. Tim Lang, R-Sanbornton, would require all school districts to “establish an open enrollment policy to allow pupils to transfer among schools within the district, from another district in the state, or in any state that has an interstate compact with New Hampshire that does not require nonresident pupils to pay an application fee or tuition.”
Districts could limit non-resident student enrollment based on capacity, but couldn’t ban it outright.
School district attorneys have begun advising their clients to start preparing marketing materials directed toward the families of currently enrolled students. Because open enrollment will put parents in control of their children’s education dollars, districts would have to compete for those funds if the bill becomes law. To do this, they’ll need to convince families to stay, or convince new families to come.
“We need to start selling all the positive things that it has because at some point, we may have to compete for students,” Matt Upton, legal counsel for the Manchester School District, told the Manchester Board of School Committee’s Education Legislation Committee on Wednesday, just hours after SB 101 received an ought-to-pass recommendation from the Senate Finance Committee, Manchester Ink Link reported.
New Hampshire already has an open-enrollment law, but districts have to create their own programs, and the process is cumbersome. After a state Supreme Court ruling last year clarified that districts could not prohibit their students from attending another district’s open-enrollment school unless they also had an open-enrollment program, many districts began discussing how to create their own programs, the Union Leader reported in December.
With a universal open-enrollment law looking more likely to pass this year, planning for the creation of an open market for public education services has spread.
Opponents, such as Manchester Board of School Committee Vice Chairman Jim O’Connell, worry that open enrollment would harm public schools. On Wednesday he called open enrollment part of “an effort to undermine public education and to take death by a thousand cuts and do everything you can to undermine public education.”
But open enrollment has been a feature in public school systems across the country for decades. California passed its open enrollment law in 1993, and Colorado followed in 1994. Research on open enrollment shows that, far from destroying public schools, it helps to improve student outcomes and make public schools more attractive to parents and students.
As we pointed out in a briefing paper with the Reason Foundation last year:
Open enrollment doesn’t just help students. It can help districts improve as well. Research from California, Ohio and Wisconsin showed that competition between school districts can encourage them to improve.
This isn’t surprising since research from Colorado and Minnesota showed that lower-performing districts tend to lose transfers at higher rates. Moreover, small or rural school districts in Wisconsin and California bolstered their enrollments with transfers. These data show that open enrollment can be a win-win for students and school districts.
As California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in its evaluation of that state’s District Choice Program, “home districts often respond to the program by taking action to gain
clarity about the priorities of their communities and by implementing new educational programs. We also found that the home districts most affected by the program have made above-average gains in student achievement over the past several years, although the role of the program in these gains is difficult to determine.”
The evidence from other states strongly suggests that statewide open enrollment would achieve two long-sought goals in public education: elevate individual student outcomes and improve district public schools.
Last August, The New York Times reported that school choice expansion was prompting public school districts to identify their strengths and better market those strengths to parents. New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program has not triggered such broad changes because limitations on enrollment have prevented the program from scaling. But just the prospect of universal open enrollment is already prompting those discussions in New Hampshire.
With districts developing marketing plans just in case parents might gain control of their children’s education dollars, it’s easy to see how competitive forces will spark improvements here, as in other states, if parents are empowered to go public school shopping.
