How open enrollment is reshaping Twin Cities school districts and impacting students

NINA MOINI: Nearly 44,000 Twin Cities students crossed into another district to attend school this year, using a process known as open enrollment. That's from a new report published by Axios Twin Cities, a digital news outlet. According to their analysis, the number of students participating in open enrollment has grown every year for at least a decade.

Many critics of open enrollment argue that the practice can lead to racial segregation in schools, which is a topic we'll get to later in the segment, but, first, we have the author of the Axios article, reporter Kyle Stokes, on the line. Thank you so much for joining us, Kyle.

KYLE STOKES: Hi, Nina.

NINA MOINI: I have to get out of the way, Kyle, that you and I went to college together at the University of Missouri and graduated together.

KYLE STOKES: We did, MIC.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, one of my dear friends and a wonderful journalist. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'm glad that you dug into this. What school districts were students moving from? And where were they moving to that you saw?

KYLE STOKES: Well, the school district that saw the most outflow was Minneapolis. And this has been an issue for a long time for this district. We should say that Minneapolis points out that their enrollment in recent years has stabilized, so they aren't seeing the year over year declines that we have been seeing over the last decade plus in that district.

They also lose a lot more students to charter schools, and that's not something that's part of this analysis. Charter schools, of course, being the tuition-free schools that are publicly funded but they're run by nonprofits, not school districts. So they see more loss in Minneapolis to those districts, but Minneapolis sees a lot of outflow. But it's all over the metro that kids are moving. And moving not just from Minneapolis.

Anoka-Hennepin is the state's largest school district. They see more students going out than coming in. And then on the flip side of that coin, you have a bunch of West Metro districts in particular that see a lot of movement from open enrollment. Minnetonka is the biggest target for students who are coming in from outside the district.

They enroll 4,000-- well, 4,400 kids in Minnetonka schools that don't live in Minnetonka public schools. That's about 40% of the current enrollment of the Minnetonka public schools. But it's not just in these districts, it's happening all over the place. And it's just over the past two decades or so, it's really just become a basic fact of life for a lot of the school districts in our region.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And what do you hear from parents as some of the reasons that they have gone toward open enrollment to a different district?

KYLE STOKES: Yeah. I mean, if you were to ask a parent directly, they would probably say that they're looking for something different in another district that they don't think that their current district can provide for them. And so the reasons that they will say are things like different types of academic programs.

And part of the history of school choice in Minnesota and all of the policies that state policymakers have enshrined over years is this idea that if you're in a school that you don't like or that, in fact, isn't serving you all that well-- which has been an issue that low income families and families of color, we should flag, that they've been dealing with this issue for generations in our country.

And the idea is that you shouldn't have to attend a school that isn't serving you particularly well. Now, that's what parents will say. And, of course, I think the other flip side of that is that if you give parents a chance to leave a school district where they might not feel comfortable with the current diversity in that district, the demographic makeup, some parents are going to take that opportunity.

And another guest is here to talk a little bit more about that impact as well. But, I mean, what districts tell me is that there are very few parents who are willing to say that part out loud, but they do list a lot of other reasons directly related to the quality and programming that they get from their kids' education.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. So there are, obviously, social impacts, there are also monetary impacts. Give us a sense of how this impacts school districts.

KYLE STOKES: Right. So when school-- when a student leaves a school district, the money, the state funding that goes with them follows them out of their resident district and into whatever school district that they choose. And the same goes if they go to a charter school, by the way. So the stakes of open enrollment for schools are really high. Every kid who goes out the door is money lost. Every kid who comes in the door is a financial gain for the district.

In Minnetonka, they enroll more than 4,000 kids from outside the district, 40% of their enrollment, in part because the students in their district, their resident population is smaller than what their schools can handle. Now, that comes with not every-- it's not always a clear gain.

Every time a student comes in, you've got to create a classroom for that student and you've got to make sure that there's enough building space. That can lead to you-- like in Minnetonka, I was watching a school board meeting when they were discussing this cap, and they were talking about how classrooms are full, lunchrooms are full, and so that can be a string as well.

But on the flip side you have Minneapolis which is talking about huge budget deficits. And while the enrollment overall decline is not so much of a drain on their finances now as it was in previous years with enrollment stabilizing overall, open enrollment certainly complicates that picture because kids are walking across district lines into Robbinsdale and Edina and ST Louis Park to attend school.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Kyle, thank you so much for setting the scene for us with your wonderful reporting. Appreciate your time.

KYLE STOKES: Of course.

NINA MOINI: That was Kyle Stokes, a reporter with Axios Twin Cities. And meanwhile, research shows racial segregation is worsening in schools in the Twin Cities and around the country, and some argue that open enrollment is one reason why, as Kyle was alluding to. So joining me to dive more into this issue is Myron Orfield, the Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law school. Thank you very much for being here with us.

MYRON ORFIELD: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: So starting with the big picture, why do you think racial segregation in Twin Cities schools has gotten worse because of open enrollment? Do you think it's plainly open enrollment, or is it one of the reasons? What do you think the connection is?

MYRON ORFIELD: It's one of many reasons. The state in about the year 2000 abandoned its efforts to integrate and actually told school districts, for about seven years, they thought it might be illegal for them to be integrating their schools. And then at the same time they did that, they exempted open enrollment, which used to be a deal that had to be negotiated between districts so that you didn't just take the affluent kids, you had also took some poor kids along with it too.

And they also exempted charter schools from it. So these were a perfect storm at the time the Twin Cities became more integrated. We really stopped and, in fact, kind of told districts they shouldn't integrate and we went-- we just skyrocketed. So we have 180 schools in our metro that are more than 90% non-white and poor. Our counterpart in Portland, Oregon just has one school compared to our 180. And Seattle with about 58,000 more students has about 40.

So we're way, way, way more segregated than our racial counterparts. And open enrollment is one of the-- open enrollments charters and just the general way the state has made it difficult for districts to integrate has made it really bad.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, I have friends of mine who grew up in the Twin Cities and say, it used to be not this way. Just a few decades ago, public schools were largely racially integrated. And so you're talking--

MYRON ORFIELD: Before 2000, we were one of the most racially integrated school systems in the nation. And we went for a very white Metropolitan area where by far the most segregated, and it was a quick change. And it was accomplished through the policy decision by the state. And it's had very devastating consequences for kids in these segregated schools.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Say a little bit more, if you would, about the policy that led to that.

MYRON ORFIELD: Well, in the middle of an election in the year in 1998, the Democratic governor of the state, the candidate for governor, decided that integration, which we really favored before, was not-- we were going to abandon it. And we really abandoned our integration system in the middle of an election in 1998, and we paid the consequence for it.

And we did things that other states had never done. We exempted charters which no other state had ever done. So we gave them free license to become mostly single race schools. And then we also made open enrollment very easy for kids who had families with money and cars to leave and go to a wider district.

And different kinds of kids have different kinds of information and abilities to use choice. Families that are more affluent and understand have more information about which schools lead to college and have parents who can drive them, can use this.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are differences in circumstances. But before I let you go, I want to make sure we talk about solutions or efforts around this. What do you see out there happening to try to, I guess, integrate more?

MYRON ORFIELD: Well, there's a lawsuit that has been brought called Cruz Guzman versus the State of Minnesota. And in December of 2023, the Supreme Court made a very strong decision making that-- helping that suit go forward, saying that segregation, the severe segregation we have in the state may violate children's right to an adequate education.

And so I think that reforming systems like open enrollment, so that making them fair so that a district like Minnetonka can't just take the most affluent, whitest kids from the surrounding districts like Hopkins and Eden Frarey and others, and maybe some magnet schools that try to draw kids in, some of these charter schools are very low performing. The Star Tribune has been doing a series of very fast breaking studies on that, reducing some of those schools and perhaps making some more integrated alternatives.

We also built $7 billion worth of new schools at the edge of the Metropolitan area in the last decade, which really made this a lot worse. And maybe instead of continuing to build so many schools 150 way at the edge of the region, we should be trying to draw kids back into the older suburbs like Hopkins and some of these other places.

NINA MOINI: Myron, thank you very much for your perspective on all of this. I really appreciate your time.

MYRON ORFIELD: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was Myron Orfield, the Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School.