The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s (CRPE) latest report asks whether public transportation can improve students’ access to Denver’s best schools of choice, and the answer appears to be “no.” Denver’s geography, diffuse population centers, and distribution of quality school seats in relation to poor students already complicate the school district’s own transportation efforts to make quality seats accessible in terms of travel time from home to school. As an experiment, CRPE researchers compared district residency and public transit route data via Google Maps Directions Application Program Interface to calculate travel times between each student’s home address and the schools to which they could have applied. The hope was to make quality schools more accessible to those who need them most—just like a parent researching such schools might do—but the results are discouraging.
Based on their analysis, CRPE finds that just 55 percent of low-income students could attend a high-performing school within thirty minutes of their home on public transit; that percentage falls to 19 percent for schools within fifteen minutes’ travel time. In other words, most low-income students would continue to face long commutes to the city’s top schools when using public transportation, despite a choice-friendly atmosphere that includes a common application and lottery-matching system that strives to give all families their most-preferred option. We know that proximity often trumps quality considerations when parents are given a choice, and extant transportation options in Denver and other large cities do very little to change the balance.
In the end, CRPE’s researchers conclude that it would be easier to move good schools to the students (a huge leap based on these experimental findings) than to move students to good schools in a reasonable amount of time by using existing modes of transportation.
But hold up a sec. This experiment was conducted using existing data—including modes, routes, timing, and extant bell schedules. While that might make for a decent enough research design, it doesn’t take into account that public transit is generally geared to move workers to jobs—from inner ring neighborhoods to downtowns on a nine-to-five schedule—and thus is fundamentally maladapted for student use. Before leaping to the conclusion that “moving all the schools” is the easiest means of improving access, additional CRPE-style simulations with experimental parameters should be attempted. A recent Bellwether Education Partners report takes that tack with regard to district-based transportation, urging better use of data and technology as its least invasive recommendation, and the same could be done for public transportation using CRPE’s experimental model. A transit-friendly bell schedule is an obvious variable with which to experiment, as is the incorporation of nodal transportation: picking students up at their doors in smaller, more flexible vehicles—like Uber fleets or on-demand autonomous vehicles (for those adventurous early adopters out there)—and delivering them to a central transfer point. Van pools and neighborhood circulator routes could also be tried in spreadsheet form.
One final note: CRPE’s researchers make one real attempt to avoid their “move all the schools” conclusion by floating the idea of interdistrict open enrollment, an option particularly attractive for sprawling Denver where the nearest good school for many underserved students might be in a neighboring district. Open enrollment is a small segment of school choice in the city currently, and it should be expanded as much as possible, but Fordham is here to tell you that that option hits a wall in terms of transportation too once it gets large enough and families will be back to square one.
With district-based transportation hidebound and in disarray in cities large and small, and public transportation generally ill-adapted for student travel, it is perhaps no wonder that CRPE’s researchers leaped from their disappointing findings to a non-transportation-based recommendation. Transportation is a basic necessity for most school children, regardless of the type of school they attend. And it could be so much more even than it has been—a bulwark against absenteeism, a reading lab on wheels, or even a rolling study hall complete with Wi-Fi. But only if we give up the old ways of thinking and understand that transportation must be about what students need, and not what is easiest for school districts or even transportation planners.
SOURCE: Betheny Gross, Patrick Denice, “Can Public Transportation Improve Students’ Access to Denver’s Best Schools of Choice?” Center on Reinventing Public Education (June, 2017).
