Legislators: Utah needs a state-level school open enrollment report

• According to a recent report, 17 states require a state-level report on open enrollment data; Utah is not among those.
• Utah should increase open enrollment data transparency by reporting, for each district, how many applications they received, accepted, denied, and how many students transferred out.

​The state board of education shares reports on assessments, attendance, enrollment, graduation rates, and more. Having this data helps the public and policymakers find information and identify trends.

Currently, the board does not share reports on school open enrollment data (that is, data on students transferring from one public school district to another). No statute requires the board to do this. Instead, districts are required to share this data, in specific detail, on the district website for each school within its district.

Based on current district compliance and today’s parent-focused culture, it makes a lot of sense to have a state-level school open enrollment report hosted on the state board’s website.

Why the state-level requirement?

If districts are already required to share this information, why make a state requirement? For starters, as I’ve written previously, less than a third districts are fully compliant. Among those that are, there is little standardization in how they share, label, or make it findable on their websites. Requiring a state-level report would add a natural layer of compliance effort that’s less punitive than other options (for example, the board could simply contact the districts to ask for the data that’s already mandated to be shared so the board can publish it too).

Furthermore, the state could unify the data into clear labels for publication and place it alongside all the other state reports it already publishes online. Like other reports, it could host this data beginning several years ago, enabling year-over-year analysis.

All this together means there would be more transparency and less guessing for parents and policymakers seeking this data.

What school open enrollment data should the state board publish?

The Reason Foundation’s annual open enrollment policy rankings recommend that the state-level reporting requirement include applications accepted, applications denied, and the reasons why applicants were denied.

Utah districts are not required to provide reasons why (though this would be prudent policy reform). However, they are already required to share how many requests were made and how many were accepted, making the number denied a simple calculation. The law also requires districts to share how many students within their district transferred out.

Thus, Utah lawmakers should require the state to share district-aggregated totals for (1) the number of open enrollment applications received, (2) the number accepted, (3) the number denied, and (4) the number of students within that district who transferred out.

Do other states do this?

Seventeen states already require school open enrollment data to be shared by the state, which means Utah is behind in not having this policy in place. This puts Utah among the states with a high open-enrollment policy score that fails to share state-level data.

According to the Reason Foundation, the states that received a perfect score in its rubric for state reporting policies are Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Nevada.  States that received partial credit were West Virginia, Idaho, Arizona, Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, South Dakota, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Texas.

After reviewing the state open enrollment reports for each of these, we identified best practices that Utah should consider if it decides to adopt this policy.

First, the state board should label the full report with an intuitive title like “School Open Enrollment Data” or “School Transfer Data.” It should be on a page dedicated to reports or to open enrollment, so it is easy to locate, and ideally should not be buried several links into the public website. It should not require a data request or additional step, meaning it should simply exist on the website. Likewise, data for prior years should remain hosted on the website, so comparisons can be made.

Second, a state open enrollment report should list the numbers for each of the 40-plus local school districts, state aggregates, and ensure the specific categories are clearly labeled in the report (as mentioned, the categories could be applications received by the district, applications accepted, applications denied, and the number of students who transferred out).

Third, it could include additional features that may help policymakers recognize trends, such as the percentage of total school enrollment that is students who transferred into the school, and a column identifying the reason that student applications were denied. This could be done with a legend explaining the different reasons (capacity, program capacity, prior misbehavior, willingness to comply with policy), or as simple as two categories like “capacity” versus “other policy.”

Another way to increase transparency would be to include some of the data in special annual updates, such as the Superintendent Annual Report.

Conclusion

Utah policymakers can beef up open enrollment transparency by requiring the state board to share data that districts are already required to gather and share, but do so in a way that shows state, year-over-year data. This simple change can help parents and policymakers understand open enrollment, a key piece of education choice in Utah.

Sutherland Institute policy intern Emily Payne contributed research to this article.