Charter School Autonomy and Centralized Student Transportation: How Contextual Factors Influence Perspectives in Three Cities

ABSTRACT

Some school districts have centralized school operations as a means to ensure universal access to schools of choice. Yet, centralization can infringe on charter school autonomy. We explore how district and charter school leaders in three contexts perceive and negotiate the trade-offs between centralized versus school-based autonomy. We find that decision-making and governance of student transportation are inherently place-specific, with conditions of history, geography, infrastructure, and state governance dominating leaders’ preferences. Therefore, despite the recognized benefits, school leaders maintain vastly different perspectives about the feasibility and appeal of centralized transportation within the charter sector.

KEYWORDS:

• educational policy
• school autonomy
• schools of choice
• student transportation

Acknowledgments

We 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. We 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 Sarah Woulfin, conference participants at AEFP and APPAM, and anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Get On And Learn (GOAL) Line launched in 2018 as a pilot bus loop to take students attending different K-8 public (traditional district and charter) and private schools to and from school on the northwest side of Detroit. The morning loop was discontinued and the program now exclusively transports students to an after-school activities center (Huffman, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Walton Family Foundation.