Texas Must Enact Universal Open Enrollment

Written By: Emily Sass

Moms and Dads, 

Last week, the House Select Committee on Educational Opportunity and Enrichment met to take both spoken and written testimony on ways to improve and reform our Texas public school system, including parental choice and open enrollment.  

Parental private school choice took up much of the energy and time of the committee—and rightly so. We were also able to deliver testimony on open enrollment. You can see my testimony here, but I wanted to give you a quick overview below.  

Open enrollment is a massive and vital step to empowering parents. By allowing parents to freely switch between schools in a district and between school districts—when seats are available—we can empower parents to put their kids in public schools that best fit their individual needs, home culture, and other concerns. It also can serve, like parental choice with Education Savings Accounts, to help improve our public school system through competition.  

Frustratingly, open enrollment is anything but straightforward. Despite the general consensus that public education is, and should be, free, many school districts deny transfers for academic reasons and charge tuition (sometimes up to $14,000). They’re not required to publish transfer information (or tuition rates) and can generally make it difficult for parents to transfer out of their zip code assigned school.  

This is unacceptable, and it requires fixing. Texas must empower parents with every avenue of choice possible, which means the state must streamline and standardize open enrollment. That means: 

• Ending the practice of charging students tuition for a public education 

• Creating a transparent way for parents to find out which public schools have space for their child 

• Ensuring the student transfer process is easy and predictable 

• Regularly reviewing past data to learn how to better support Texas students and schools  

Texas kids deserve it, and Texas parents need it. The time is now!