Here’s the bad news: school district boundaries restrict educational opportunities for Texas’s 5.4 million students. Here’s the good news: a handful of common-sense reforms would remove key barriers for families seeking alternative education environments for their kids. That’s the main conclusion of our recent study on the Lone Star State’s student-transfer law, in which we evaluated student-transfer data and school district policies across the state.
In recent years, states such as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Florida have adopted cross-district open-enrollment policies that give families easier access to schools outside of their residentially assigned districts. But Texas has lagged behind these leaders in reforming its