Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Over the last twenty years, in most states, public school choice policies have expanded the number and diversity of schooling options available to students beyond their home address. Theoretically, this should increase access to schools as well as encourage school quality to improve through competition. However, the number of schools families can choose from is constrained by distance and geography since students must travel to school every day. This problem is especially acute for low income and single parent families who may have not have the time or ability to provide direct transportation to and from school. One solution is to increase the availability of publicly provided school transportation, a direct but expensive policy lever. Limited evidence exists on the effect of the provision of transportation on choice of school or student outcomes. The recent descriptive studies concerning school transportation show that students using transportation are able to attend higher quality schools outside their neighborhood (Cordes and Schwartz, 2018), riding the school bus is associated with decreased absenteeism for kindergarteners (Gottfried, 2017) and longer commutes to school are associated with an increased likelihood of transferring schools and increased absenteeism (Blagg, Rosenboom, and Chingos, 2018).

This study attempts to provide some of the first causal evidence on the effect of transportation on choice of school. My rich student level administrative data including students’ school assignments, addresses, and outcomes for students living in Detroit where less than one quarter of students attend their assigned school, over forty percent attending a charter school, and one in five students leave city limits to attend school. These data allow me to exploit the strict walking distance cutoff, three quarters of a mile for K-8 students, that determines eligibility for the school bus for students who choose to attend their assigned school in Detroit.

In particular, I estimate the effect of a student’s eligibility for school bus transportation on the likelihood of attending his or her assigned school for students living near the walking distance cutoff. This design allows me to test whether or not providing transportation induces students to attend that school. If being eligible to receive school provided transportation increases the likelihood of attending, providing transportation could allow more students to attend their desired school. If families prefer schools with higher levels of achievement, which previous research suggests that they do, the provision of transportation could increase demand for those schools, inducing schools to compete for students by improving their academic quality.

Very preliminary results suggest that more Detroit students attend their assigned school when they are provided transportation. These findings may have important implications for choice rich cities focused on expanding access to quality schools. Policymakers may need to consider public provision of student transportation to all schools within a city or district for most students to increase the number of students ability to attend schools with high levels of academic quality.