School buses may be a critical education policy lever, breaking the link between schools and neighborhoods and facilitating access to school choice. Yet little is known about the commute for bus riders, including the average length of the bus ride or whether long commutes harm academic outcomes. We begin to fill this gap using data from New York…

Initially driven by school consolidation and later augmented by the mandate to desegregate, school busing systems have grown monumentally all over the United States. Busing policy choices have been made and expanded without regard to the impact on the central enterprise of schools, which is student learning. Anecdotes from Montana, the Navajo…