Over the last 30 years, school choice policies have weakened the link between home residence and school assignment by allowing students to attend schools other than their neighborhood school. In theory, school choice policies can raise student achievement by increasing access to effective schools and by creating competitive pressure for schools to improve their academic quality. However, geographic factors may act as barriers to participating in school choice policies and constrain access to effective schools. To date, little attention has been paid to how geography shapes participation in and effectiveness of school choice policies. In this dissertation, comprised of three papers, I provide some of the first evidence concerning the roles of distance, residential mobility, school district boundaries, and access to transportation in participation in formal school choice programs and access to effective schools. Also, I estimate the impacts of school transportation—a policy that can mitigate the negative effects of these geographic factors on student outcomes. I examine these relationships in Michigan where students have been able to participate in inter-district and charter school choice for over 25 years. I use student-level enrollment, achievement, and address records for Michigan public school students over seven years to describe geographic inequities in participation in choice use and access to effective schools as well as to estimate the effects of the school bus on student attendance and achievement.In my first paper, I estimate a set of hazard models to determine the relationships between residential mobility, commute time to school, and exit from school choice programs. I find that the majority of exits from school choice programs correspond to a residential move. Furthermore, the probability that a student exits charter school and inter-district choice programs increases as the time spent commuting to school past their assigned school increases. These findings establish that participation in school choice policies can be determined by where schools are located in relation to students’ residences.Even where school choice participation is widespread, geographic factors may still constrain access to effective schools. In my second paper, I investigate whether students living in Detroit attend the highest quality schools in their choice sets, as determined by levels of and contributions to achievement, using a set of discrete choice models. I find that students are morelikely to attend the higher quality schools in their choice sets when their choice sets are restricted to schools located within Detroit, implying that access to effective schools is constrained by geographic factors.In addition to influencing access to effective schools, geographic factors can also affect student outcomes. In my final paper, I exploit the walking distance cutoffs that determine transportation eligibility to provide some of the first causal evidence of the effects of school transportation on student attendance and achievement using a regression discontinuity design. I find that transportation eligibility increases attendance rates and decreases the probability of being chronically absent especially for disadvantaged students. However, my results provide no evidence that school transportation affects achievement.Taken together, the findings of this dissertation provide substantial evidence that where students live in relation to where they go to school affects their educational opportunities and outcomes. I also show that public policy has the potential to mitigate the negative effects of these relationships.
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