Michigan ranks poorly in public school open-enrollment study

(The Center Square) – Michigan has some catching up to do with other states when it comes to providing open enrollment opportunities for the state’s public-school students.

The Reason Foundation’s latest study concludes Michigan fails in four of the five best practices used to evaluate states’ open enrollment practices.

The study – “Public schools without boundaries: Ranking every state’s K-12 open enrollment policies” – was released earlier this week. Michigan only checked one of Reason’s best practices boxes, which is the state’s law outlawing tuition for public schools.

The state, however, doesn’t require mandatory cross-district and within-district open enrollments and fails in Reason’s two transparency categories, which faults lack of open-enrollment reporting by the State Education Agency as well as individual school districts failure to make readily accessible information regarding school seating capacity and grade levels to parents.

“Unfortunately, the Great Lake State does not require districts to publicly report their available capacity on their websites,” the report reads. “The SEA is not required to collect or publish data about open enrollment, such as the number of transfer students or the reasons why applications were rejected.”

The report continues: “Michigan is the only state to financially penalize districts for opting out of open enrollment. School districts are not required to participate in cross-district or within-district open enrollment. However, if districts choose to not participate, they lose 5% of their state funding.”

Students transferring schools under Michigan open-enrollment rules cannot be charged tuition, but districts opting out of open-enrollment may still impose a tuition on transfer students.

The report notes mandatory within-district enrollment in Michigan only happens when a school is unaccredited for three consecutive years. Although districts must publish open-enrollment options, they are not required to publish the information online.

Open enrollment is made more difficult for families because districts grant priority status to former transfer students and same-family students, the report says. Students not meeting that criteria may be placed on a waiting list or only admitted through a random lottery if the school they wish to transfer to is oversubscribed.

The report offers three policy recommendations for the state to improve its open enrollment for students. The first two would require participation in cross-district and within-district open enrollment for all school districts, and to post those policies and procedures on the schools’ websites. The third recommendation is a requirement for all school districts to post available capacity on their websites.

Poorer scores were given to Michigan’s neighboring Midwestern states. Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were zero of five. Only Wisconsin among its neighboring states fared better, getting three of five. Five states – Florida, Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah, and Arizona – scored four of five; no state was five of five.