Facts of an Open Enrollment Program:A Case Study of a City District in California
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概要
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Many of the studies of school choice in America published in Japanese have been based on documents written by American researchers. This situation imposes a critical limitation on the examination of the implications inherent in the system of school choice for the educational change that Japan is facing. Bearing in mind the differences between Japanese and American systems regarding school choice, this paper sets out to discover the facts and mechanisms of the open enrollment program of a city district in California.<BR>Because there is no official registration system like the Japanese Jyumin-toroku or catchment areas rigidly delineated by city councils(chonai), American children are not assumed to be the prospective students of individual schools. For this reason parents are expected to enroll their children as students in the public school system just before they reach school age. Ordinarily, they are allotted places in their local schools according to where they live. Open enrollment is a system whereby parents are able to request enrollment at any school in the district regardless of where they live, although the availability of spaces, sibling preferences, and the ethnic balance of the school must all be taken into account.<BR>Through the open enrollment program that was introduced in the early 1990s, some schools are losing and others are gaining many students. In order to reveal the internal mechanisms of this program this paper focuses on two middle schools:the most popular and the least popular.<BR>These two middle schools are very different from each other in such aspects as academic achievement and personal safety. The least popular school is in a suburban area, but it has been notorious for its lack of safety and low level of academic achievement. By contrast, the most popular school is an inner-city middle school situated on the periphery of the downtown and close to a residential area. The neighborhood environment of the most popular school is far better than that of the least popular one. In addition, in the 1980s the most popular school established an academic program titled Gifted and Talented Education(GATE). The school channels students with special academic interests into this GATE program so as to adjust educational settings to student diversity.<BR>Through the open enrollment program, the most popular school has become a favorite among parents who live within the catchment areas of the least and the second least popular schools. The parents living within the catchment area of the least popular school refuse to send their children to that school, citing its unsafe environment as an unattractive feature, and seek places for them instead in the most popular school, to which they are mainly attracted by the GATE program.<BR>Interestingly, no competition among parents for specific middle schools is attributable to open enrollment. This is partly because the student numbers of the most popular school are falling. For that reason the school is able to offer a great number of places to open enrollment and attract academically gifted students from throughout the district. Moreover, many parents seem to be unaware of the existence of the program. This may also contribute to the lack of competition. Unless parents try to obtain information about open enrollment by themselves, they may never find out about the existence of the program. Access to successful open enrollment is limited to those who are actively seeking information about education and who can provide transportation for their children to and from school.<BR>By using the open enrollment program, parents are easily able to avoid local schools in unsafe areas and send their children to the most popular school that has the GATE program. The open enrollment program offers a district-wide multiple tracking system rather than a single-track system of schooling, mainly for the parents and the children seeking the elite track at the middle school level.
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