Your ZIP Code Picks Your Child's School, the Case for Open Enrollment

The most expensive tuition in America is not charged by a private school. It is charged by a real estate agent. The price is the premium on a house inside the right attendance zone, paid every month for thirty years, and it buys a seat at a public school that is, in theory, free.

Let us say plainly what that means. A free public school that you can enter only by buying a more expensive house is not free. It is rationed, and the ration is priced. This post argues that conservatives, who understand better than anyone what happens when a valuable good is rationed by an arbitrary rule, should be the loudest voices for open enrollment.

The claim

Assigning children to public schools by the address of the family's home lets housing markets ration access to good schools, locks out families who cannot afford the right house, and should be replaced or supplemented by open enrollment, within districts and across them, paired with other forms of choice. I will define the terms, number the premises, state the objections fairly and answer each one.

Terms

An attendance zone, also called a catchment area or a school boundary, is the geographic area whose children are assigned to a particular public school. The district draws the lines, and the lines can be redrawn.

Intra-district open enrollment lets a family apply to any school within its own district, regardless of zone, usually with priority rules and a lottery when a school is oversubscribed.

Inter-district open enrollment lets a family apply to a school in a different district, with state funding following the child, usually subject to the receiving district's capacity.

Capitalization is the economist's word for what happens when the value of an advantage gets built into a price. If a good school makes a neighborhood more desirable, buyers bid up the price of houses there, and the advantage is "capitalized" into the housing price.

Premise one: zone lines are drawn, not found

Nobody believes that a child's education is determined by where a river runs. Attendance zones are drawn by school boards, and they are drawn for reasons: where the buildings are, how many children each can hold, how far buses can travel, and sometimes politics. Lines get redrawn when a school is built or closed, and the redrawing causes some of the most heated meetings a board ever holds.

Think about what that means. A line on a map, drawn by a public body, decides which of two houses on the same street gives its children access to a school that the whole community pays for. The map could be drawn differently, and when it is, home values on both sides of the new line move. That tells you how much those lines are worth.

Premise two: school quality is priced into homes

This is not a theory. Economists have measured it. One of the best-known studies, by Sandra Black, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1999, compared houses on opposite sides of the same attendance boundary in Massachusetts, which are alike in neighborhood and nearly identical in everything but the school. She found that parents paid about two and a half percent more for a house for every five percent increase in the test scores of the assigned elementary school. A later body of research reaches broadly similar conclusions: families pay a measurable premium for better-rated schools, and the premium is built into home prices.

Here is the arithmetic, labelled as an illustration and not as a forecast. Suppose a house costs $300,000, and suppose a five percent improvement in the school's test scores raises its price by two and a half percent. The premium is 0.025 x $300,000 = $7,500. Suppose a school's scores are 20 percent higher than a neighboring school's. By that proportion, four times five percent, the premium would be roughly 4 x $7,500 = $30,000. Those are round numbers chosen to show the method. The point is that for a family choosing a house, the quality of the school is a line on the bill.

Premise two, then: the market prices access to good schools, and the price is paid in housing.

Premise three: those who cannot pay the premium are locked out

If good schools are rationed by housing price, then the families who most need the good school and can least afford the premium are the ones left out. A family that earns less cannot bid. A family with a child who has a particular need cannot move. A single mother renting an apartment has no ability to buy her way into the zone.

The system has a name when it happens by law: a rule that assigns a benefit by wealth. It happens here by design, though it does not feel that way, because nobody votes to exclude anyone. It is the result of two things each of which seems innocent, a zone line and a housing market.

Conservatives are usually the first to notice when a government rule, with the best intentions, shuts out the poor and rewards the well-off. We notice it in occupational licensing, in zoning and in the tax code. Look at what a restrictive zoning ordinance does when it forbids anything but large houses on large lots: it prices out the people who would otherwise live there. The link between school zones and housing is a close cousin of the link between zoning and housing, and the two reinforce each other. For the housing side of the question, see houston has almost no zoning, and its houses cost less to prove it.

Premise four: open enrollment has been tried, and it is workable

Minnesota was early. In the late 1980s it adopted a program that allowed students to attend public schools outside their home districts, with state funding following the student, and it extended the idea in the years that followed so that it covered the state. The thing to notice is that this was a state with a strong tradition of local control and good public schools, and the sky did not fall. Other states adopted their own versions in the years since, some mandatory (a district must accept applicants if it has room) and some voluntary (a district may opt in). I will not give you the count of states, because it changes as legislatures act and because the rules differ so much. Check your own state's education department for its law.

Within districts, many large urban districts have moved to some form of choice. Some use a unified application and a lottery, and some give priority to siblings, to students from the neighborhood or to students from low-income families. The designs vary, and the research on results is mixed on some questions and encouraging on others. I would urge you to be wary of anyone who tells you that the evidence is all one way. What it shows clearly is that the practical objections have workable answers.

The steelman

Here is the best case against open enrollment, in words its defenders would accept.

First, neighborhood schools are a public good. A school that serves the children who live around it is a center of community life. Families know each other, children walk to school and parents volunteer. Choice can weaken that, scattering children across the district and leaving the neighborhood school hollow.

Second, capacity is finite. A good school has only so many seats. Open enrollment cannot create seats, so it merely changes who gets them, and if the lottery is fair the real beneficiary is whoever holds the better ticket.

Third, funding and transportation. When a child leaves a district, the funding may leave too, and a district that loses students can find its fixed costs spread over fewer children. And a child who attends a school across town needs a way to get there, which a family without a car may not have.

Fourth, some families will choose badly, or will not be able to navigate the system, and the result will favor families who are already informed and engaged.

These are real concerns. Every one of them has been raised by thoughtful people who care about children. Now the answer.

The answer

1. Neighborhood schools remain an option. Open enrollment does not abolish the neighborhood school. It makes it a choice. Most families will keep their children in the nearby school, and that school retains its character when it is a good one. It is the failing school in the neighborhood that has the most to fear from competition, and that is the point.
2. Capacity is a reason to expand good schools, not to ration them by house price. A lottery is fairer than a real estate market, because it treats every family the same. And a system that sees good schools in demand can open more of them. Rationing by price tells the system nothing. Waiting lists tell it where to build.
3. Funding can follow the child, with a transition. A state can phase in funding changes so that a district that loses students is not hit all at once. And a district that attracts students gains funding, which gives it a reason to improve. As for transportation, a state can reimburse it, offer vouchers for it or provide it to families who qualify. The problem is real and solvable.
4. The informed-families objection argues for better information, not for fewer options. States can publish plain-language comparisons, run a single application and give outreach and help to families who need it. The alternative, a system in which the informed are choosing already by paying for housing, does not look better.
5. The effect on housing is the point. If school access is no longer tied to the address, the premium on houses in the favored zone falls, and the housing market becomes less distorted by schooling. That helps families who rent, and it frees families to live where they can afford.

What open enrollment is not

Let me be careful not to oversell. Open enrollment is not a cure. A family can choose among bad schools, and an open door into a poor school is of little help. It works best when paired with the other tools: charter schools that open new seats, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts that let families use private options, and honest information about results. We have written about the charter evidence in The Charter School Lottery Studies and What They Show About Cities, about accounts in Arizona Made Every Child Eligible for an ESA, How the Idea Spread So Fast and about scholarships in Tax-Credit Scholarships, the Choice Program Built on Private Donations. Open enrollment is the most basic tool, the one that costs the least and asks the least of anyone, and it is a good first step.

Nor is it a way to escape the question of who runs the system. Boards and superintendents still decide how many seats each school has, how the lottery works and what the priority rules are. See Who Actually Runs Your School District, Board, Superintendent or State to learn who has authority in your state. And if your concern is rural families, who may have no second school within reach, take a look at School Choice Fails Rural Kids? Here Is the Rural Objection Answered.

A short history lesson

There is a historical point that supports all of this. In 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court held that a federal court could not order a desegregation remedy that crossed from Detroit into its suburban school districts, absent a showing that the suburbs themselves had caused the segregation. The ruling made district lines a powerful barrier, and it was a major reason that the boundaries between districts came to matter so much for who goes to school with whom.

I do not raise the case to relitigate it. I raise it because it shows how consequential a line on a map can be. If a line decides which children share a classroom, the question of who may cross it is among the most important in education. Open enrollment answers that question by letting families cross voluntarily, with no court order and no bus lottery imposed from above. And it is an answer in the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education (1954): the state may not close the schoolhouse door by any rule, and that includes a rule that looks neutral and prices the door.

The founding tradition is relevant too. The Founders thought of education as a matter for families, communities and states, not a national program. They would have recognized the principle that a family is the best judge of its child's needs. Federalism lets states try open enrollment their own way, and the results can be compared. See Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It.

What a good open-enrollment law contains

If you are talking to a legislator, here is a checklist of provisions worth asking about. It is a list of features, not legal advice for any particular family.

• A mandatory rule within districts, so that every school with space must accept applicants, subject to a fair lottery.
• Inter-district transfers with funding that follows the child.
• Clear priority rules, which may include siblings, low-income students and students from the failing school, stated in advance.
• Free or reimbursed transportation for low-income families.
• A single, simple application and a published calendar, with help for families who need it.
• Published data on capacity, applications and the number of students admitted, so that the public can see who is getting in.
• No selective admission by test or interview for ordinary public schools, which would bring back the sorting that open enrollment is meant to end.

The case in brief

1. Attendance zones are drawn by public bodies, and which side of a line a house falls on decides access to a school the whole community funds.
2. Research, including Sandra Black's 1999 study of houses on opposite sides of school boundaries, shows that school quality is priced into home values, so access to good schools is rationed by housing cost.
3. Families who cannot pay the premium are locked out, which is a rule that rations by wealth.
4. Minnesota's late-1980s law and later state transfer laws show open enrollment is workable, and its main objections, on capacity, funding, transport and information, have practical answers.
5. Open enrollment works best alongside charters, scholarships and accounts, and it is the cheapest first step toward a system that does not charge for the address.

What you can do: look up your state's open enrollment law on its education department website, then ask your school board whether your district accepts transfers and publishes how many seats are open.