Over 40 states have “open enrollment” laws that allow families to enroll their students in public schools outside their zoned school district. Twenty-four of those states require districts to accept these cross-district transfer students.

Families being allowed to transfer their students to public schools they deem better sounds great. But there is a catch.

Public school districts are allowed to self-report how much enrollment capacity they have. Typically, if districts say they do not have space available for out-of-district students, that is the final word.

In 2013, the Education Commission of the States (ECS) cited districts’ self-reporting capacity as the first “barrier to prevent students from taking advantage of open enrollment.” Quoting from the ECS report, policies that allow districts to self-report their capacity

prevent students from transferring to better schools even when the letter of the law states they have a right to transfer. For instance, when maximum class sizes or school capacity have not been clearly determined, a local decision-maker could turn down an application for transfer by simply responding that classes are full or that the school is “at capacity.”

There is evidence that students transferring across district lines tend to move from lower performing to higher performing public schools and experience increases in academic achievement, educational attainment, and other positive student outcomes.

Given these benefits to students, concerns about districts under-reporting capacity continue today. In Education Next, Jude Schwalbach recently noted that Wisconsin students with disabilities (SWD) were almost three times as likely to have their transfer requests denied as compared to other students. Forty percent of SWD students’ transfer requests were denied, while only 14 percent of other students had denials.

In his noteworthy 2023 report on open enrollment for the Reason Foundation, Schwalbach reports that other states have the same experience: large numbers of inter-district transfers being denied, especially among students with disabilities. This longstanding issue of making more high-quality public schools accessible to even more students raises this question: How can states ascertain the capacity public schools really have to admit out-of-boundary students?

In a new policy brief, I document that some desirable Kansas public school districts appear to be self-reporting capacity to serve transfer students at numbers significantly below their excess building capacity. But the brief’s real contribution is that it describes specific and extremely low-cost proposals that states could implement to give many more students the opportunity to transfer to public schools their families believe are better for their educational and social development—even when these public schools are located across district lines.

I call my approach to documenting the underreporting of building capacity “the change-in-enrollment method”. Public schools across American have experienced enrollment declines since fall 2019, and they are forecast to continue for the foreseeable future. To compute capacity to serve transfer students at individual schools, I start with the school’s fall 2019 enrollment and subtract its fall 2024 enrollment:

Fall 2019 enrollment – Fall 2024 enrollment = Open Enrollment Capacity

If the difference is positive for a given school, then the school has at least that much capacity to serve transfer students from other districts. Why? Because those schools had previously served that many more students in the recent past. However, this change-in-enrollment method for identifying building capacity will be inaccurate for schools that had unused (and unreported) capacity in fall 2019 to begin with.

Under Kansas’s 2022 open enrollment law, public school districts must self-report how much capacity is available at each of their schools for the upcoming year. Districts must then accept students whose families wish to transfer them there—as long as the school is below its self-reported capacity.

Table 1 shows the capacity to accept inter-district transfers in six Kansas public school districts, where capacity is computed with the change-in-enrollment method and compared to each district’s self-reported capacity. These six districts were selected due to their desirable public schools and reports that many Kansas families wished to transfer their students across district lines to access them.

Using this “change-in-enrollment” method across these six districts shows there were at least 8,455 open seats in fall 2024. By contrast, these districts self-reported they only had capacity for 2,518 out-of-district students. It is likely these districts could serve even more than 8,455 additional students in the current academic year, as the school buildings likely had at least some excess capacity in fall 2019.

The table suggests that at least five of these districts—Wichita, Auburn-Washburn USD, Shawnee Mission, Blue Valley, and Olathe—are self-reporting capacity at levels well below their building capacity—because they served many more students a mere five years ago. For example, the Auburn-Washington district experienced a decline of 468 students after fall 2019 yet reported no capacity to serve transfer students five years later. The Andover school district self-reported more open seats (344) than indicated by the change in enrollment method, indicating that the district had open seats back in fall 2019.

What could be done to give more students the opportunity to attend what their families consider to be better public schools? States like Kansas could better enforce open enrollment laws at an extremely low cost by:

1. defining capacity as “capacity in the building” (not capacity based on whatever staffing levels districts have, as some are currently defining it). Interestingly, the nation’s public schools have increased staffing since fall 2019, despite enrollments falling. So, on average, public schools should now have more capacity to serve students relative to 2019, even using their staffing method.

2. using the change-in-enrollment method presented here as a baseline for comparison with districts’ self-reports of capacity.

3. collecting and reporting information on the number of students applying for open enrollment transfers to each school and the number of acceptances and denials in each school.

4. employing a part-time state auditor who would visit individual public schools to make an independent assessment of building capacity. The deployment of an auditor would happen only when public schools have (a) a large difference between the number of transfer requests relative to their self-reported capacity, and (b) self-reported capacity levels lower than their recent enrollment declines.

5. withholding state funds from districts with excess demand that underreport building capacity, determined by comparing that amount to the change-in-enrollment method.

Public school advocates routinely claim that public schools are free and open to all. Well, they are not really “free”. As of two years ago, it cost taxpayers over $18,000 per student, on average, to provide students with a public education. That figure varies across states and districts, of course, and is most certainly higher today. As for “open to all,” individual public schools are accessible only if you happen to live within the school’s attendance zone or if you can afford to move to the district where your preferred school is located, or if you’re lucky enough to live in a state with universal open enrollment laws (that are enforced).

If public school advocates truly want their schools to be “open to all,” they should support policies that incentivize districts to report their capacities honestly. They should also support policies that open enrollment supporters suggest will allow more families to access public schools they believe are better for their children. Otherwise, they should abandon their untrue “free and open to all” mantra.

The first step is to get districts to tell families the truth about how much building capacity their schools really have. And states can do this at an extremely low cost. It’s simple math.

Ben Scafidi is a professor of economics and director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University.