(The Center Square) – Open enrollment laws for Maine’s 172,000 schoolchildren are as bad as any in America, says a new analysis.
Transparency from the Department of Public Instruction and individual school districts is lacking, says report author Jude Schwalbach of the Reason Foundation. Public Schools Without Boundaries 2025, released Thursday, dives into seven areas of open enrollment for each state and offers related developments.
Scoring for a possible 100 points perfect score was in statewide cross-district open enrollment (60 points); statewide within-district open enrollment (15); children have free access to all public schools (10); public schools open to all students (5); transparent state reporting on transfers (4); transparent district reporting on transfers (4); and transfer applicants able to appeal rejected applications (2). Partial scoring was considered.
Maine scored zero points in every category, alongside Alaska, North Carolina and Maryland.
According to Schawlbach, the Pine Tree State only allows cross-district or within-district transfers “under exceptional circumstances” and “fail to establish anything resembling a comprehensive open enrollment policy.
The state’s education association, aside from tracking the number of transfer students overall, doesn’t collect information about rejected requests nor provide those denials in writing to families or offer an appeals process. There’s nothing banning districts from discriminating against students with disabilities, nor must they disclose each school’s capacity or prevent it from charging tuition.
The Reason Foundation is a Libertarian think tank. It promotes liberty, free markets and the rule of law.
And it’s not the only bad news the state’s been given about its education system recently.
According to the Kids Count Data Book, an annual report that focuses on the wellness of America’s youth which was published in June, Maine’s educational achievement scores dropped 27 spots over the last decade – from 14 in 2015 to 41 in 2025. This is in large part to due to plummeting reading and math proficiency rates for three-quarters of students in fourth and eighth grades.
“That’s not a slip,” Rep. Mike Lance, R-South Paris, said during a June 13 radio address. “That’s a collapse.”
He pointed to a change in policy from the state Department of Education that he says deprioritized “traditional” academic learning for reading, writing and math for “social emotional-programming and identity-based instruction.”
