Policy Brief - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Policy Brief

Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

Gevirtz School of Education

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9490

carolynsattin-bajaj@ucsb.edu

STUDENT TRANSPORTATION IN CHOICE-RICH

DISTRICTS: IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

AND RESPONSES

Abstract
Despite a growing recognition of the signiﬁcance of student
transportation for promoting equitable school choice, to date,
there has been limited understanding of the implementation of
school transportation policies, particularly in choice-heavy set-
tings. Moreover, little is known about the challenges associated
with managing student transportation in large school districts or
how school and district administrators working in distinct con-
texts respond to these challenges. This brief draws on interview
data collected from district administrators, charter school leaders,
charter authorizers, and stakeholders in three choice-rich school
districts with distinct transportation policies and public transit
infrastructures—Detroit, New Orleans, and New York City—to
identify the common challenges associated with implementing
student transportation policies and administrators’ responses to
them. The brief includes a discussion of the implications of high
transportation costs, logistical complexity, and student safety chal-
lenges as well as non-uniform transportation provision and trans-
portation policies for equitable access to charter schools. It ends
with a review of some potential policy alternatives that policy-
makers should consider when designing transportation policies
or working to improve existing transportation practices.

https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00377

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351

Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Cities

I N T RO D U C T I O N
Student transportation is an important ﬁnancial and logistical responsibility of school
districts, charter management organizations (CMOs), and schools. Districts spent over
$24 billion on student transportation in the 2014–15 school year, accounting for about 8 percent of all public education expenditures (National Center for Education Statis- tics [NCES] 2019). Student transportation policies also have implications for students’ access to the full range of educational opportunities ostensibly available to them, par- ticularly in choice-rich environments (Teske, Fitzpatrick, and O’Brien 2009; Jochim et al. 2014; Denice and Gross 2016; Blagg et al. 2017; Edwards 2021). Yet, policies gov- erning the provision of student transportation vary widely across states and localities, and there is signiﬁcant heterogeneity within the charter sector in terms of transporta- tion requirements and oﬀerings (Blagg et al. 2017; McShane and Shaw 2020). What is more, given the high costs of providing and managing student transportation, many school districts, charter networks, and stand-alone schools are attempting to reduce ex- penses by cutting school bus routes or eliminating busing entirely, relying more on public transit options, encouraging biking and walking to school, and even charging families for transportation (Bergal 2015; McDonald et al. 2016; Chen 2021). Federal, state, and local funds pay for student transportation, and the amount allo- cated varies by state and locality (Blagg et al. 2017; McShane and Shaw 2020). Along with heterogeneity in per pupil transportation funding across states, there is consid- erable diversity in state- and local-level student transportation policies and mandates for traditional public school districts, private and charter schools (Vincent et al. 2014; McDonald et al. 2016; McShane and Shaw 2020). In their comprehensive review of student transportation policies, McShane and Shaw examined ﬁfty state education statutes related to pupil transportation, paying particular attention to the transporta- tion requirements for various kinds of school choice, including interdistrict transfer programs, charter, and private schooling. They found a complex set of policies, man- dates, and funding practices. For example, in thirty-one states, transportation fund- ing or services are made available for students attending charter schools, but only in seventeen of them is some form of transportation funding mandated at a level on par with traditional public school students (McShane and Shaw 2020). Additionally, while thirty states allow for public funds to be used for interdistrict student trans- portation, only six states mandate transportation services for students participating in interdistrict choice programs at a level that matches the funding for within-district choice. In sum, there is a highly uneven landscape of student transportation policies across the 14,000 school districts nationally and the thousands of charter schools operating in forty-ﬁve states and Washington, DC. Thus, millions of students and families are making decisions about how to get to school and, where school choice exists, which schools may be feasible to consider, under very diﬀerent circumstances. Similarly, district administrators and other school personnel managing student transportation are responding to the demands of student transportation in distinct ways. The diver- sity of student transportation policies and practices in the United States presents a valuable opportunity to understand common challenges related to student transporta- tion, identify eﬀective practices, and examine areas for potential improvement and innovation. 352 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / f / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 8 2 3 5 1 2 0 7 5 8 3 1 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 7 7 p d . / f f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj There is growing evidence about the signiﬁcance of student transportation for fam- ilies’ school choices and for school choice systems to function equitably (Teske, Fitz- patrick, and O’Brien 2009; Jochim et al. 2014; Denice and Gross 2016; Blagg et al. 2017; Hamlin 2018; Sattin-Bajaj 2018; Edwards 2021; Trajkovski, Zabel, and Schwartz 2021). Therefore, policy makers and administrators working in places with expansive school choice oﬀerings would beneﬁt from knowing more about what it means to im- plement student transportation policy, the obstacles associated with providing eﬃcient and equitable transportation services, and how education oﬃcials are responding to the challenges of managing student transportation in choice-rich cities. To that end, in this policy brief, I present new empirical evidence drawn from interviews with district administrators, charter school leaders, charter authorizers, and stakeholders in Detroit, New Orleans, and New York City about the frequent challenges associated with imple- menting student transportation policies and administrators’ actions and decisions in re- sponse to transportation-related issues. I ﬁnd that high transportation costs, along with the logistical complexity associated with managing transportation for large numbers of students, represent signiﬁcant burdens for district and charter school administrators alike. Student mobility and safety concerns compound issues of cost and complexity, often requiring additional economic and human capital investments. In this brief, I de- scribe the range of costs that districts, CMOs, and schools incur when implementing school transportation policies, identify other diﬃculties they experience, and highlight some of the ways they attempt to reduce or counteract the logistical and ﬁnancial de- mands associated with student transportation. I discuss the implications of these high transportation costs and challenges as well as non-uniform transportation policies and services for equitable access to charter schools, and I review some policy alternatives that may increase access to transportation, including pilot programs and initiatives be- ing tested in diﬀerent places across the country. R E L AT E D L I T E R AT U R E School choice policies have been a mainstay of education reform in recent decades, and choice oﬀerings continue to grow nationwide (Wang, Rathburn, and Musu 2019). Re- search documenting the importance of transportation for families’ school choices, and therefore for an eﬀective and equitably functioning choice system, has accompanied the expansion of school choice across the country. Studies show that transportation is an inﬂuential factor in parents’ school selections (Jochim et al. 2014; Teske, Fitzpatrick, and O’Brien 2009; Hamlin 2018); lack of transportation also limits some families’ ca- pacity to choose schools that are farther away or inaccessible via public transit (Teske, Fitzpatrick, and O’Brien 2009; Jochim et al. 2014). Lower income families’ choices are disproportionately constrained by the absence of free or highly subsidized student transportation (Jochim et al. 2014), highlighting transportation as a source of inequity in choice-heavy environments. Beyond ensuring all families’ ability to consider the full range of educational op- tions in a school choice system—arguments often central to the rationale provided for school choice policies (Betts and Loveless 2005), there are multiple potential beneﬁts associated with student transportation. To start, research shows that riding the bus to school reduces chronic absenteeism, particularly among some of the most vulnera- ble students (Gottfried 2017; Burdick-Will, Stein, and Grigg 2019; Cordes et al. 2019; l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / f / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 8 2 3 5 1 2 0 7 5 8 3 1 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 7 7 p d . f / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 353 Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Cities Gottfried, Ozuna, and Kirksey 2021). Further, school bus eligibility has been found to increase the likelihood of choosing to attend a particular school, fulﬁlling the promise of many school choice policies to expand options (Trajkovski, Zabel, and Schwartz 2021). Finally, in a study from New York City, researchers found that students who attend a choice school (rather than their zoned public school) are more likely to rely on student transportation services, and they attend higher-performing schools (of choice) (Cordes and Schwartz 2019). In other words, the availability of publicly funded transportation facilitates students’ access to higher quality schools. A related line of inquiry focuses on students’ travel time to school. Researchers have analyzed how far students live from diﬀerent school types (e.g., traditional public ver- sus charter) and schools of diﬀerent “quality” (as measured by school resources and student outcomes) along with commute times to school, modes of transportation used, and how these vary by student background characteristics (Blagg et al. 2018; Corcoran 2018; Cowen et al. 2018; Denice and Gross 2018; Lincove and Valant 2018; Cordes and Schwartz 2019; Edwards 2021). Taken together, the evidence underscores the impor- tance of school location, distance, and transportation for ensuring school accessibility and equity, speciﬁcally in the context of school choice plans. This research has expanded the body of literature on student transportation that had been historically dominated by studies of operational and ﬁnancial issues (Chambers, Parrish, and Lam 2002; Bittel and Young 2012) as well as work documenting the health and environmental impacts of school buses (Weir 2002; Balmes 2011). DATA S O U R C E S A N D M E T H O D S To comparatively examine how student transportation policies are implemented in three school choice–rich settings, I conducted a multiple comparative case study using individual, semi-structured interviews as the primary methodology. The data presented in this brief are mainly drawn from telephone interviews conducted with district oﬃ- cials knowledgeable about the student transportation policies and their district-level implementation; charter school leaders and charter school personnel responsible for coordinating or overseeing student transportation at a school or CMO level; charter school authorizers; and other relevant stakeholders in each city, including representa- tives from advocacy organizations and local foundations involved in funding student transportation. Interviews focused on participants’ roles and involvement in transporta- tion policy or daily oversight of student transportation, the challenges and costs associ- ated with student transportation, and their perspectives on the ways that transportation provision and public transit inﬂuence school choice.1 Three Choice-Rich Cities The three cities included in this study all have extensive school choice oﬀerings. They diﬀer in size, density, and demographic composition, and, most signiﬁcantly, have widely divergent student transportation policies. A summary of available transporta- tion for students in each city at the time of data collection is presented in table 1. 1. For a full description of the methodology and the interview sample, please see appendix A, available in a separate online appendix that can be accessed on Education Finance and Policy’s Web site at https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp _a_00377. 354 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / / f e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 8 2 3 5 1 2 0 7 5 8 3 1 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 7 7 p d . f / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj Table 1. Student Transportation Policies and Options by City Detroit, MI Mode Yellow bus Public transit New Orleans, LA Yellow bus New York, NY Public transit Yellow bus Public transit Student Access • Grades K—8 and students with special needs • Grades 9–12 who attend a Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) school • Grades K—12 enrolled in Orleans Parish School Board (OSPB) or Type 5 (RSD) charter schools • N/A • Grades K—6 and students with special needs • Grades 7—12 Source: Urban Institute analysis of district transportation policy. Notes: This is a broad summary of student transportation policy in these cities. The Education Achievement Authority is Michigan’s state-run school district. A Type 5 charter school is a school chartered through the Recovery School District, Louisiana’s state-run school district. New York City The Oﬃce of Pupil Transportation (OPT) at the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) oversees transportation for all students in New York, including students at- tending district, charter, and some nonpublic schools. Yellow bus transportation is al- located by grade for students in kindergarten through sixth grade based on distance (in miles) from home to school. Students in seventh grade and above are given MetroCards for use on public buses and subways depending on distance from school. Students in all grades (K–12) who do not qualify for yellow bus or full-fare MetroCards may be eligible for half-fare MetroCards based on distance. Students with disabilities whose individual- ized education plans (IEPs) mandate special transportation receive tailored bus service. All standard transportation costs are covered by the NYCDOE. Detroit The Oﬃce of Student Transportation at the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) coordinates transportation, which is only guaranteed for students attending neighborhood (district public) schools. Students who enroll in a charter school or in a neighboring district through Michigan’s Schools of Choice program receive trans- portation at the discretion of their school or district (paid for by the school, CMO, or district). Transportation eligibility varies by grade level and distance from school. Stu- dents in eighth grade and under attending DPSCD schools may qualify for yellow bus service. Students in grades 9–12 who live more than two miles from their neighborhood school and meet low-income criteria receive public transportation passes. Students with disabilities who qualify for special bus service get individualized transportation. Detroit has a very limited public transportation infrastructure: There are public bus networks and small rail systems primarily in the downtown area, but they cover a small fraction of the city’s vast geographic expanse. Transportation challenges in De- troit are exacerbated by low rates of car ownership among low-income families. Within the highest-poverty census tracts in Detroit, more than one in four households do not have a car (Blagg et al. 2018). New Orleans Louisiana state law requires public school districts to provide transportation for stu- dents living farther than one mile away from school. Charter schools in New Orleans l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / f / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 8 2 3 5 1 2 0 7 5 8 3 1 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 7 7 p d f / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 355 Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Cities are each considered a local education agency and are therefore responsible for provid- ing and paying for student transportation. In the large majority of cases, this means that charter schools run yellow buses, although some also give public transit passes for students in upper grades. E V I D E N C E Costs Associated with Student Transportation High Costs of Busing In New Orleans, where charter schools are responsible by law for providing transporta- tion for students, in recent years, charter schools have spent an average of 6 percent of their total budget on transportation, with some schools reportedly spending as much as 13 percent (Babineau et al. 2018). Charter schools in Detroit that opt to oﬀer trans- portation must cover the costs completely out of pocket, with no public funds available for transportation purposes. Budget estimates provided by interview participants from both cities for any form of bus service ranged from roughly $400,000 per year per
school at one New Orleans network to $100,000 for the purchase of two buses for a network in Detroit. Irrespective of the actual ﬁgure, charter personnel who provide busing in both cities cited transportation costs as among the largest budget items for their schools annually. Special Education Busing Special education transportation, and, speciﬁcally, personalized busing when required by a student’s IEP, is one of the largest transportation-related expenses incurred by districts. In New York City, for example, students with special education classiﬁcations constituted 13.3 percent of the total public school population in 2016–17 school year but accounted for 75.4 percent of the transportation budget (NYCDOE 2017). District ad- ministrators have considered a number of proposals to try to reduce these expenses ranging from encouraging more “mainstreaming” of students with IEPs on buses serving general education students to renegotiating special education transportation costs in contract negotiations with general bus service providers. In Detroit, oﬃcials also expressed interest in moving toward more neighborhood assignments for stu- dents with disabilities—a practice they thought would beneﬁt students educationally and reduce transportation costs but that conﬂicts with the basic idea underlying school choice. Responses to High Busing Costs Charter school leaders use a range of tactics to balance quality service, cost, and ef- ﬁciency in student transportation provision. Some Detroit charter networks that pro- vide busing to students contract with DPSCD for yellow bus service, leveraging the district’s existing bus contracts and in-house staﬀ to develop routes and manage oper- ations. Others negotiate their own contracts individually with bus companies allowing them greater ﬂexibility in terms of bell schedules and routes but potentially higher costs because of lost economies of scale. A third approach that some charter networks have adopted in New Orleans and Detroit is to purchase a small ﬂeet of buses, a strategy that oﬀers maximum control and unrestricted use of vehicles but includes additional demands such as bus maintenance. 356 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / f / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 8 2 3 5 1 2 0 7 5 8 3 1 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 7 7 p d f / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj The high cost of transporting students to charter schools via yellow buses in De- troit and New Orleans means that charter school leaders must make some signiﬁcant ﬁnancial trade-oﬀs. A senior administrator at a charter school network in Detroit juxta- posed the circumstances of one school in the network that did not provide busing and could pay teachers higher salaries and recruit “good talent” with another school whose location necessitated spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars on transportation” to ensure suﬃcient student enrollment. The founder of another set of two charter schools in Detroit who used private donations to cover the cost of purchasing buses summa- rized the calculus as follows: “When someone writes a $20,000 check, that could go
to the classroom, or that could go to a bus, it becomes a push and pull.” In short, high
transportation costs forced school leaders to make diﬃcult decisions about resource
allocation: Transportation mandates and/or competitive market pressures to maintain
student enrollment meant that expenditures on transportation often displaced instruc-
tional or human resource investments.

In light of the high cost of student transportation in New Orleans and Detroit, lead-
ers in the charter sector have experimented with a series of diﬀerent cost-containment
solutions. They also manage their school budgets in a number of ways to pay for buses.

Tiering
Tiering was one strategy that multiple charter schools in New Orleans used to minimize
transportation costs. When schools tier, they use the same bus to pick up students on
diﬀerent routes by staging arrivals. The leader of one New Orleans charter school net-
work explained how tiering works in some of her schools to reduce expenses: “A group
of kids gets there [at a school] at 7:45 before school starts. Those same buses go back
out and pick up more kids and get them back here by 8:10. You’re getting paid per
bus, so let’s say there are nine buses, instead you actually only have six.” Though most
participants discussed tiering within a single school, some also mentioned attempting
to tier across diﬀerent schools within the same charter network. Provided that start
times could be coordinated and the geographic distances were manageable, sharing
buses across schools was a way to reduce costs. Yet, school calendars and start times
complicate cross-school tiering eﬀorts, and some charter leaders expressed signiﬁcant
reservations about the idea of tiering with schools from a diﬀerent CMO.

Greater Reliance on Public Transportation and Contract Renegotiation
In New Orleans, where transportation costs were both politicized and high for nearly
all of the schools in the city, charter school leaders explored a number of other options
to reduce expenses. For example, one charter leader discussed pursuing a cost-savings
plan to combine public transportation with yellow bus service for students in a high-
demand high school in her network. Others mentioned cutting the number of bus
routes, which could reduce costs but likely increase students’ time spent on the bus.
Contract renegotiation with existing bus company partners or rebidding contracts to
engage lower cost providers was another strategy that charter school leaders identiﬁed
as a particularly eﬀective way to address expenses.

Reduce Administrative Staff
Charter operators in New Orleans and Detroit looked for ways to reduce other expen-
ditures to ﬁnd suﬃcient funds in their annual school budgets to cover transportation

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357

Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Cities

costs or they sought to raise private money. One charter school leader in Detroit ex-
plained that she could aﬀord to oﬀer busing without additional state funding for this
purpose by maintaining a lean central oﬃce and keeping administrators’ salaries low:

I don’t make $400,000 a year, or $300,000 or $200,000. I don’t have a central
oﬃce staﬀ that makes the type of money that you see in a lot of other CMOs,
and that’s done intentionally . . . I can aﬀord it [busing] because I’m not taking
money out of the schools to pay signiﬁcantly high central oﬃce salary.

Aside from busing costs speciﬁcally, the human capital costs associated with man-
aging the logistics of transportation were high, and charter leaders in all three cities
relied on their existing staﬀ to oversee transportation in addition to a host of other
responsibilities.

Other Transportation Challenges
Complex Logistics and High Student Mobility
Day-to-day management of student transportation requires signiﬁcant time and
personnel resources. District and school personnel described numerous demands
associated with student transportation ranging from ﬁelding ongoing requests for rout-
ing changes to dealing with unexpected issues like public transit cards not arriving to
schools on time. Oﬃcials in both New York and Detroit also named continual changes
to transportation policies and high levels of student mobility as sources of additional
complexity. In Detroit, one charter authorizer pointed to the loose enrollment policies
as a driver of the high mobility:

Kids come and go with no transfer policies and really no kind of accountabilities
in place around who’s moving where—so there’s no citywide policies. Kids are
just moving constantly . . . to the school, it would be like out of control, the
amount of jostling, rustling you would have to do to even try to operate a bus
schedule.

The unpredictability of both policies and student movement across schools adds an-
other layer to an already complex endeavor.

Though OPT in New York is responsible for coordinating transportation for thou-
sands of students across hundreds of charter schools citywide, many of the day-to-day
tasks of managing student transportation fall to school-based staﬀ. In New Orleans,
where each CMO is essentially its own district and, in Detroit, where charter schools
provide busing at their own discretion, every aspect of student transportation from
vendor contracting to routing is under the school or charter network’s purview. Con-
sequently, interviews with charter-based personnel revealed a number of logistical
challenges distinct from those discussed by district-level administrators.

Developing eﬃcient bus routes requires time, expertise, and adaptability, particu-
larly at the start of the school year when enrollment may change daily. The director of
operations of a ten-school charter network in New Orleans described the chaos of set-
ting up student transportation when enrollment is in ﬂux: “The ﬁrst couple weeks of
school are always challenging about bus routes. You think you want to run these routes,

358

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Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

but then you ﬁnd out that we have to add two more kids.” Even in New York, where bus
routing is managed by OPT, administrators must ensure that all students are riding the
assigned bus and ﬁeld angry phone calls from parents whose children were not eligible
for yellow bus service per the NYCDOE policies. This takes time and energy, and school
staﬀ reported that they ﬁnd it stressful and unpleasant.

Student Safety
Charter school personnel in New York, Detroit, and New Orleans named safety con-
cerns on buses and public transit among the most pressing transportation-related chal-
lenges they faced. One former director of operations at a charter middle school in a
high-poverty area of Brooklyn explained how safety issues played out for their families
in terms of walking to and from bus stops and public transportation: “You are late by
7:30. Then school is dismissed at 4:00. What that means is that during those winter
months it’s just—it’s dark. People don’t want their kids walking around in the dark at
4:00.” Neighborhood safety was similarly mentioned in Detroit, and this was additive
to parents’ fears about public transportation.

In response to families’ anxiety about student travel to and from school, some
schools increased the frequency of communication home and experimented with new
modes of communication. A charter school network in New York City, for example,
used an app that would text parents with updates including if the bus was running late
for pick up or drop oﬀ. Another New York City charter network had students practice
riding public buses and subways to help them prepare for when they would no longer
be eligible for yellow bus service after sixth grade.

Student Behavior
Student misbehavior on the bus and bus drivers’ limited capacity to manage behav-
ior problems were additional sources of concern for charter school leaders in all three
cities. They emphasized the importance of developing and enforcing strict policies with
consequences to try to limit behavioral issues on the bus. The director of operations at
a New Orleans–based charter network described the bus as an extension of the school
building, underscoring the importance of having consistent expectations for behavior
and associated discipline policies on the bus and at school.

Hiring bus attendants is one way that some charter schools have attempted to re-
duce the likelihood of behavioral incidents on the bus. This is standard practice for yel-
low buses transporting students attending DPSCD schools. However, for some charter
schools whose transportation expenses come directly from their own budgets (like in
New Orleans and Detroit), paying an additional staﬀ person to ride the bus is ﬁnancially
untenable. Instead, some provide additional training for the bus drivers so they are bet-
ter equipped to deal with student issues. They also make eﬀorts to have the drivers
recognized by students as a formal part of the school community. The CEO of three
charter schools in New Orleans explained her strategy to train bus drivers as follows:

The schools themselves, their relationship to the bus company is super impor-
tant. . . . We train [the bus drivers] ourselves for a morning about the expec-
tations we have. We . . . . give them t-shirts of our schools, and we want them
to feel like they are a part of our school. We also make it really clear to kids

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Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Cities

that they are a part of our school, even though they don’t work directly for
us. If you’re gonna mouth oﬀ to the bus driver, guess what? Tomorrow morn-
ing, you’re gonna ﬁnd out that we all know about it, and you’re gonna have a
consequence.

Similarly, a charter network in New York City that hires bus attendants pays them
to cover breakfast duty at school so they can be “embedded in the culture” and “not
just the person who rides the bus,” but, rather, seen as someone who works at the
school. Ultimately, schools sought to make student time on the bus an extension of
their time inside the school building, and they reinforced this through hiring practices
and communication to students and families about behavioral expectations on the bus.

D I S C U S S I O N A N D P O L I C Y A LT E R N AT I V E S
Evidence from three choice-rich school districts highlights the signiﬁcant role that
student transportation plays in determining administrators’ operational and ﬁnancial
decisions. High costs and logistical demands associated with student transportation
inﬂuence hiring, student recruitment, and even decisions about whether and where to
open new schools. Moreover, districts, CMOs, and individual schools are constantly
pursuing cost-reduction strategies while trying to maintaining school quality and
accessibility.

Ultimately, the costs and challenges of providing widespread transportation compli-
cate eﬀorts to ensure equity in access to schools via school choice. When transportation
is not mandated for schools of choice and is not funded by states or districts, families
with transportation barriers are essentially cut oﬀ from schools that do not provide it.
Barriers to access are exacerbated in places with limited public transit. In sum, student
transportation provision constitutes a signiﬁcant source of stratiﬁcation within school
choice systems, and transportation policies can fundamentally shape how schools op-
erate and whether families can reasonably choose them.

The ﬁndings from this study suggest some potential policy alternatives that policy
makers should consider when designing transportation policies or improving existing
transportation practices. To start, policy makers should seek out ways to reduce both
costs and the logistical demands associated with student transportation for district ad-
ministrators and school-level personnel (charter or non-charter). This could include
greater centralization of transportation services to increase economies of scale and im-
proved coordination within and across schools and school sectors. More centralization
may facilitate better contract negotiation with bus companies, more opportunities for
tiering, and even shared bus routes under certain circumstances. In fact, multiple dis-
tricts have experimented with shared bus options to expand students’ access to diﬀerent
schools. For example, Detroit launched a school bus loop modeled after Denver’s “Suc-
cess Express” (Denice and Gross 2018) in Fall 2018 with the goals of reducing trans-
portation barriers and encouraging students living in Detroit to attend schools within
city limits. Initially serving 10 charter and DPSCD schools in Northwest Detroit, the
GOAL (Get On And Learn) bus picks students up on designated street corners and
drops them oﬀ at diﬀerent schools. While GOAL expanded to more schools in subse-
quent years, there have been some issues with take-up, coordination, and cost, raising

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Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

questions about its overall eﬀectiveness as a strategy (Edwards et al. 2019; Pogodzinski
et al. 2021).

Policy makers should also consider ways to control special education transporta-
tion costs, potentially through shifting away from wholly separate bus services for stu-
dents with disabilities where appropriate. Finally, signiﬁcant labor shortages during the
COVID-19 pandemic have created new challenges and possibilities for innovation with
student transportation. Districts and schools have responded by paying families who do
not use school bus services to which their children may be entitled and by paying par-
ents to drive their children to school (Burnett 2020; Bhattarai 2021). In many ways, in-
novation in transportation is in its early stages, aﬀording policy makers and researchers
wide leverage to explore and experiment with new approaches to student transportation
that can improve access and equity to schools, particularly in school choice systems.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Matt Chingos and Kristin Blagg for supporting this work as part of the Urban Institute’s
Student Transportation Working Group with funding from the Walton Family Foundation. I also
thank Betheny Gross, Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Missy Cosby, Joshua Cowen, Jane Arnold
Lincove, Jon Valant, Nathan Barrett, and Sean Corcoran for their research assistance and feedback
as well as feedback from Ayesha Hashim, Sarah Woulﬁn, and two anonymous reviewers.

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