K-12 open enrollment by the numbers: 2025

Executive summary

K-12 open enrollment lets students transfer to public schools other than their assigned one and is an increasingly popular form of school choice. There are two types of open enrollment: cross-district open enrollment lets students transfer to schools outside their assigned district, and within-district open enrollment lets students transfer to schools other than their assigned one inside their district.

The hallmark of a strong open enrollment law is that districts must accept applicants if seats are open in their grade level.

Since 2020, nine states strengthened their open enrollment laws by applying them statewide. Currently, 16 states have strong cross-district open enrollment laws, 14 states have strong within-district open enrollment laws, 29 states have weak open enrollment laws, and four states have no open enrollment policies codified at the state level.

Yet, even in states with robust open enrollment, detailed data on these programs are scarce. Only 13 state education agencies (SEA) are required to collect data on the number of transfer students and just three states must publish comprehensive open enrollment reports by law. As a result, policymakers, taxpayers, and families are left in the dark about the number of participants, participant demographics, rejected applicants, and trends based on district characteristics.

This is important because open enrollment data show key trends and insights on how the policy affects students and school districts alike.

For students, open enrollment data can show which student groups benefit the most, those that are rejected at higher rates, and other trends among student transfers.

For school districts, these data reveal which districts are benefiting from increased student counts and, conversely, which districts lose students. This has implications for funding since school districts generally gain or lose state dollars when enrollment changes.

Most importantly, for families these data keep schools accountable, allowing the public to question when administrative actions appear to run askew of policy.

Working with the available data from 19 states, obtained via data requests or publicly available reports, this study finds five key data points about open enrollment nationwide:

1. More than 1.6 million students across 19 states used open enrollment to attend a school other than their assigned one.

Nearly 44% of these transfers occurred in three states—Florida, Texas, and Colorado—which had the most students using open enrollment. Even though most states had fewer participants, open enrollment transfers still made up a significant percentage of students enrolled in traditional public schools, approximately 8% across states on average.

Colorado and Delaware boasted the highest participation rates, with about one in four public school students using open enrollment in those states. Moreover, data from seven states showed that open enrollment participation generally increased over time.

As student mobility grows, state policymakers will need to increase education funds’ portability so they can follow students to their school regardless of where they live.

2. Forty-three percent of students using open enrollment are from low-income households.

Data from 10 states show that nearly 475,000 students using open enrollment are free and reduced price lunch eligible or from low-income families. This suggests that open enrollment can weaken the connection between housing and schooling since some students use it to enroll in schools that would otherwise be out of reach due to high housing costs.

Public schools with available capacity should be open to all students, regardless of where their families can afford to live.

3. About one in 10 open enrollment participants is also a student with disabilities. But students with disabilities are still denied transfers at high rates.

Data from 10 states show that more than 12% of students using open enrollment were also students with disabilities (SWD), accounting for nearly 121,000 transfers.

However, data from Nebraska and Wisconsin (the only states to collect this information) showed that SWD transfer applicants were rejected at higher rates than their peers.

Policymakers should take steps to ensure that SWD have equal transfer opportunities as their non-disabled peers.

4. Nearly one-third of students using open enrollment transferred to rural school districts.

Data from 18 states show that nearly 342,000 of nearly 1.2 million students used open enrollment to transfer to rural districts.

Texas’ and Indiana’s rural districts received the most transfers overall, while transfers to rural districts in South Dakota and Iowa accounted for the largest percentage of transfers across states.

In 10 states, the majority of transfers occurred in rural districts. Despite concerns that open enrollment will negatively impact rural school districts’ enrollments, policymakers should be reassured since rural districts are one of the most common recipients of transfers from other districts, showing that most districts have more to gain than lose from open enrollment laws.

5. Most states lack transparency regarding open enrollment.

Only three states collect and publish comprehensive open enrollment reports, reporting district-level data, such as the number of transfers, the number of rejected applicants, and why they were denied.

Only seven states published on their state education agency websites the number of students using open enrollment by district. More granular data, such as participation rates by race, low-income, and SWD status, were generally unavailable.

At least one state— Utah—does not collect any open enrollment data.

Without this data, families, taxpayers, and policymakers lack the tools to gauge the impact of or demand for open enrollment programs. Better transparency is crucial to public accountability, program refinement, and more accurate distribution of education funds.

Full study — K-12 open enrollment by the numbers: 2025

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Source: https://reason.org/policy-study/k-12-open-enrollment-by-the-numbers-2025/