Open Enrolment and Mechanism Design

Open Enrolment and Mechanism Design

Open Enrolment is the idea of removing school districts and allowing kids to attend any public school their parents choose for them. It has been advanced as a policy that improves fairness by enabling parents to pull their kids from underfunded and underperforming schools. The idea is by removing the ties between where you live and where your child goes to school you remove price discrimination from education.

There are significant downsides to Open Enrolment. The most notable downside that applies to all such programs is community disconnection. By attending programs of education outside their communities individuals become less invested in their communities. Grassroots efforts to fix underperforming schools are replaced by attempts to abandon said schools.

In a common worst case, lotteries are necessary to handle enrolment caps at high performing schools. The design of such lotteries is an important point of contention. Is it fair to force a parent who is local to a school in their community to take their kids to one further away and less connected to them because other kids from outside the community want to attend that school?  Arguments can be made on both sides of this point but we can look to the past failures of programs like busing designed to reduce segregation as evidence that there is substantial pushback to forcing kids to be educated outside their communities.

Such lotteries can introduce substantial hardships especially for parents who aren’t drivers. Neither my wife nor I drive and we specifically chose to live a walkable distance to a public school so that our son could be dropped off without us needing to resort to long trips on a mediocre at best public transit system. Any lottery system that denies students guaranteed places at their local schools also says that people lose the ability to control the education commute for them and their kids. This can be a substantial hardship for some households. It can also strain transit infrastructure by substantially increasing traffic as losers and winners of lotteries engage in longer commutes across what often amounts to underfunded and out of date transit infrastructure.

When we get into the specifics of the programs, far more issues can arise. If students are imported to a school district from an adjacent one without a sufficient transfer of funds then a race to the bottom emerges where each district tries to outsource its education program to neighbouring districts in order to lower the property taxes paying for education. If the transfer of funds is too large then underperforming school districts face a permanent shortfall of funds as their tax base is drained by kids escaping to neighbouring districts.  Because of the practical realities of school size limitations some students end up trapped in this failing underfunded school system.

It is possible for programs to hit a Goldilocks zone where the transfer of funds is neither too large nor too small. Doing so is non-trivial and needs to account for the differing costs of a diverse populace. Transferring a special needs student out of district should come with a far higher transfer payment to the neighbouring district to handle the added costs for instance. There are lots of complexities and subtleties that go into a well designed open enrolment program.

My personal view is that I am skeptical of the ability of politicians to design an effective program that handles the incentives properly. Because of the risk of a race to the bottom I think an abundance of caution around open enrolment is necessary.  Costs tend to drift over time and if the program is designed with transfers that were at one point in the goldilocks zone that isn’t solid evidence that the transfers will remain there.

Ultimately, the main benefit of the program is that low-income children have the potential to access the generally better public schools in areas with high property values they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. This is no doubt important, but it’s hard to say it’s more important than the adverse pressures on the education system in combination with the decline in community involvement, the increased strain on transit infrastructure and the hardship for parents and students forced into substantial commutes non-consensually.

An interesting proposal is a limited form of open enrolment that gives each student priority in their local school. It then allows a lottery for any surplus spaces in those schools. This program has the advantage of ensuring parents can control education commutes and of never forcing a student out of their local school and community non-consensually.  It has the disadvantage that the number of surplus slots available is often small which reduces the number of beneficiaries of the program dramatically. It tends to help equalize gaps in school performance by ensuring top schools have completely full classes while underperforming schools get to provide students with more individual attention due to sometimes smaller class sizes.

I’m more in favour of the limited form of open enrolment. Because of the limited number of students who would cross district borders the mechanism design problems are less severe. If the transfers are set too low it doesn’t create a race to the bottom when politicians know that something like 90% of kids will stay in their school district. If the transfers are set slightly high and only 10% of students are transferring out of a bad school district the reduction in funds for that school district is less likely to be crippling. Because students are able to opt-in to their local communities the sense of community is preserved for the vast majority of students and the deleterious effects on parental involvement are dramatically reduced.

I think we should strive to improve all schools and we should strive to improve access to the best schools. That being said we have to be smart about how we do that. The best schools are the best schools for specific reasons and it’s important we don’t destroy the things that make them great in our desire to make access to them more equitable.