4. Open and Shut: The Future(s) of the School Bus

School buses have substantially shaped the lives of children, the design of school spaces, and the wide-scale operation of public education in America. Yet many questions remain. Have the operation of these vehicles and their designs improved the lives and traveling experiences of the youths who get on them each day? In the context of a legacy of busing that emerged post-Brown, has this approach to desegregation actually done justice to historically marginalized children in America? As the first three chapters of this book have explored, there are no easy answers to these questions. The resounding shrug about the impact of busing on American schooling is damning when it comes to understanding how we value the time and dignity of students.

Take a tool, apply it, move on—so goes educational technology in this country. The bus is not without exception. It has promised to “fix” segregated schooling by powering up fleets of buses and let them (slowly) dilapidate. Unlike computers or slide projectors or software that gets updated with newer versions, the bus has quietly persisted because no substantial updates have been offered. It is not in the logistical, academic, or financial interests of innovators or policy makers to find alternatives to the shuttling of youths in this country. Built on a legacy of displacement and dispossession, this form of mobilizing youths toward specific geographies for schooling is a distinctly American experience. Referring to this busing process as one focused on American schooling, it is important to acknowledge that this label comes with the understanding that buses and the schools toward which they maneuver are part of and contribute to the settler colonial enterprise of U.S. public schooling writ large. These buses are a colonial technology, reinforcing where school takes place with disregard to land and nonwhite sovereignty. As we consider alternatives, updates, and new approaches to busing in the United States, it is necessary to build on the understanding that buses drive on land that has been taken from Indigenous communities, transporting young people to schools that reside on the same. The tapestry of inequitable socioeconomic distribution that necessitated busing more than half a century ago was woven from the same loom that founded this nation on land theft and chattel slavery. These are not contexts that live just in the past—the presence of settler colonialism hulks in the corners of every encounter in schooling today—nor are they divorced from the kinds of changes we might imagine collectively. From land rematriation to the curricular opportunities to broaden learning about and alongside Indigenous pedagogies, the too often overlooked voices of present Indigenous communities must shape how we design, transform, or even abolish busing technologies.

Furthermore, perhaps because people have feelings of nostalgia tied to school buses and how they signal an American schooling experience, there has been little effort to substantially transform how these buses operate. In contrast to the bright and shiny new technology brought into classrooms every few years—smartboards, laptops, tablets, and VR headsets—changing the transportation and sorting technology of schooling just doesn’t carry the same pizzazz as what Silicon Valley’s purveyors of cool may be peddling. Whereas questions about how to improve school buses are often met with disinterest at the policy level, insights about public transportation and busing offer ideas about how we could collaboratively transform busing technology and systems—if we collectively wanted to.

Throughout this book, I’ve tried to explain the contexts of these two interwoven forms of busing technology. As the mechanical wonder of the idling bus shoulders the means of confronting desegregation, the bus expands how technology is understood in educational contexts—learning happens through, because of, and about buses constantly, even if most people look past them as little more than an accepted utility. And this is where transformation could occur: we’ve taken for granted that this is how schools are supposed to operate, and so we refuse to update our perspectives from one generation to another. Sure, we could update the bus itself—make the vehicular technology a little smoother (and we’ll look at some examples of this in action later). However, such changes fundamentally assume that buses and busing are necessary for how schools must operate. What would it mean to design our school systems as busing agnostic? Or to utilize the bus as the school?

For several years, my wife was the outreach manager for a rural library. Among her responsibilities were driving, operating, and managing the library bookmobile. Watching the gigantic vehicle serve communities—through story times for children, programs for adults, and other civic goods—I was constantly reminded that our assumptions of what mobile technologies matter in and for schools are extremely limited. What would it mean to actually harness busing technology as a central factor in schooling opportunity? Leaning more fully in this direction or more fully away from the use of buses—either way would at least shift our conversations and decision-making about buses. The status quo right now? It’s not good enough. We assume the inflexible nature of buses now, as we did in the past and as we will in the future—unless we seek to leverage the disruption in front of us.

In Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit, Steven Higashide describes the seven basic criteria that satisfy people when it comes to public transportation (like city bus systems).1 Based on multiple surveys, these criteria are worth considering in light of the operations of school buses throughout the United States. Perhaps with exceptions for their reliability (principle 4) or for some routes that pick up students directly in front of a family’s residence (principle 5), it is striking that none of the criteria that Higashide describes is consistently met by the school busing systems in America:

They go to intended and desired locations. Yes, school buses take students to the schools to which they are required or choose to go. However, schools in America leave much to be desired and improved upon. Considering how real estate listings include information on local schools, a desirable school would make the necessity of arriving at it by bus obsolete. The students in Bellwood described in chapter 2, for example, willfully get on a bus hours before school starts not because they desire to go to a school many miles away. Rather, they take buses because they are the most viable option for providing educational opportunity in the eyes of their parents.
They operate frequently. With a single pickup and drop-off time in most situations, buses for school children do not offer any timing flexibility. The frequencies of bus rides and routes are largely out of the hands of young people and their families. Bus schedules are dictated by school schedules, which are also inflexible and generally unresponsive to the needs and interests of young people.
They operate reasonably fast. Traveling safely along the same roads and highways as regular commuter traffic, school buses are about as quick a commute as is possible. While it’s arguable that they are much faster than walking or biking to a distant school location, their necessity within current educational systems blinds us to recognizing that public transportation to a closer school system—ideally within one’s immediate neighborhood—will always be faster. In this way, I want readers to question what counts as “reasonable” when we ask young people to interface with busing technology today. How much time and how quickly students get to a location are useful considerations. However, the speed of commuting is always tied to a social construction of geography that separates youths from meaningful learning opportunities in their surrounding neighborhoods.
They operate reliably. In contrast to every other principle on Higashide’s list, school buses might be close to a paragon of reliability. For more than a century, they have operated in generally the same form, just traveling consistent routes. Like the U.S. Postal Service might struggle with budget and labor demands, school buses and their drivers have weathered ongoing financial challenges to operate reliably. In this way, unlike a dated laptop or tablet that may not be capable of running contemporary software, it is hard to imagine a school bus becoming obsolete in today’s learning environment. This is both a feature of school buses as technology and a recognition of how stalwart the societal imagination might be about the fixedness of dated technology for school “operating systems.”
On the other hand, although the bus runs reliably on a daily, weekly, and annual schedule, my experience working with young people on the bus described in chapter 2 illuminated the regularity with which students would arrive to school or home late because of commuting delays. From unexpected traffic to the bus driver pulling over to discipline students, the school bus frequently arrived later than scheduled times—an irritation that the students had come to expect.
The service gets you within walking distance of your intended destination. Aside from potential pickup locations at student homes, school bus routes—particularly for young children—often require additional commuting for parents to get students to pickup locations. Yes, schools get the convenience of buses dropping off their students directly at their locations, but this is only half the service. The pickup and drop-off within a home community—such as for the students described in chapter 2—often require parents to travel additional distances, sometimes waiting in parking lots for long stretches of time when the operation of school buses was not as reliable as expected.
They operate comfortably and safely. Particularly referring to the experiences noted in chapter 2, students may be physically safe in the vehicles in which they are housed. Yet, given the opportunity to sleep, eat, and freely use a restroom instead of riding a bus, these are far from comfortable operations.
They operate affordably. When it comes to understanding the cost of busing, the financial costs must be considered alongside the costs of student time and meaning making. I recognize that buses have not seen substantial updates because their costs are covered by schools (and in turn by tax bases). Yet, we still must consider what is extracted from student lives during their time on buses. Too, we should tabulate the ecological footprint these buses have made over their near century of operation. What might seem relatively cheap in terms of impact must be weighed against the long-term costs that allow such busing systems to operate. Like the heuristics of platform studies in the previous chapter, we must question the material resources and human capital that have enabled busing to persist.

My research team and I experienced a surreal feeling while riding the school bus with the students described in chapter 2. Our mundane ride through traffic to and from schools meant looking at the passing scenery, during which time we saw other buses: pristine white charter buses took the same major thoroughfares that guided our bus to its destination each morning and afternoon. If you have been in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley recently, these upscale buses are probably a familiar presence to you. It is clear that there are better alternatives to the traditional yellow school buses—students just aren’t valued enough for us to invest in these options.

Higashide’s list is helpful for municipal considerations of public transportation, and his book offers a clear vision for centering busing when considering better ways for cities to operate. At the same time, his list reminds us that comfort and the value of time are reserved solely for adults in this country. As tools that function for our nation’s most vulnerable individuals, school buses simply do not heed the voices and desires of their users—something that has not changed for decades.

On Dignity

Taken together, the U.S. implementation of school busing fundamentally disregards the dignity, comfort, and agency of young people. This is not unique to how our society responds to the academic and learning needs of young people; time and again, we strip youths of their say in the broader operations of their civic landscape. Strikingly, it is through the seemingly benign school bus that they lose their dignity. This book illustrates how educational tools—like school buses, computers, or digital platforms—shape and redefine student life.

Though we can pessimistically interpret the impacts of educational technology, these tools do not exist within a bubble. They are always taken up within the sociopolitical contexts in which students are immersed. Across U.S. history, it is the young who have led change. The civil rights movement was largely youth driven. In recent years Black Lives Matter, the March for Our Lives movement, and the Global Climate Strike have spoken to the importance of youths’ dreaming and agency, even as digital and analog educational tools surveil and impede them. Young people’s dreams for social and civic progress have not been diminished by the draconian approaches of educational technology. Fundamentally, the physical technology of school buses remains unaltered. By looking at how the social technology of sorting and moving young people across this country has led to little actual improvement, we must ask, just how much do U.S. policy makers actually care about young people today?

Buses and the “New Normal”

If a central argument of this book is that the school bus has been the most disruptive form of educational technology in U.S. schools, it is telling that it took a global pandemic to temporarily halt its ongoing impact on the lives of millions of children across the country. In fact, I would argue that it is because busing stopped that the instructional tools of learning—online video conferencing software and learning management systems—finally got the attention that skeptics and enthusiasts were calling for. Anxieties around “learning loss” and the quality of online education were hashed out in real time. Messily, they continue to find uncertain purchase in the virtual classrooms of global pandemic as I write this book.

A few years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine schooling in the United States without a busing system. It took a rapid and chaotic response to global pandemic to slow the daily busing commute. However, once busing halted for the better part of the 2020–21 school year, it turns out it wasn’t so easy to restart. The current, not-quite-post-pandemic status of busing continues to be stalled. Just as myriad staffing shortages from the pandemic greatly burdened classrooms, a substantial gap in bus drivers is still prohibiting young people across the country from actually getting to school.

In the days when I was finishing the first draft of this book, in early October 2021, a friend in Portland casually mentioned how school buses had upended her family’s daily experience. Because of the shortages noted here, every day, either my friend or her husband rearranged their morning and afternoon schedules to drive their kids the lengthy route to their school. As she described this, she noted that the more heartbreaking part of this journey was seeing other students waiting outside “for a bus that was never going to come.” Students wanting to go to school were left in the literal dust of those whose families had the labor and time flexibility to drive students along routes that weren’t in operation (i.e., failing principle 4 on Higashide’s list). A local news station reported, “In an email to parents on Friday, Portland Public Schools announced that they canceled 13 bus routes to Benson and Lincoln High schools and 16 routes with different pickup or drop-off times for the foreseeable future.”2

What is transpiring in Portland is also occurring across the United States. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “Philadelphia School District officials warned the community about worsening school bus driver shortages this summer and shifted start times over community and school objections to streamline operations. The district is even offering families $1,500 annually to drive their children to school instead of putting them on a yellow bus.”3 Likewise, NPR reported about the impact of furloughs during the pandemic creating shortages throughout the country.4

Meanwhile, educational technologists, seeing an opportunity, have started to intrude on the domain of the yellow school bus. While the systems of busing are saddled with labor shortages, technology companies are creeping closer to automating aspects of schooling previously the purview of busing technologies. As reported at the start of the 2021 school year, Bay Area districts are handing over the proverbial keys of their busing system to private companies: “The San Francisco Unified School District has awarded Zūm, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district.”5 The promise of Zūm is to move to an electric fleet of vehicles (in future years) and modernize the tracking dashboard of buses. Platforms and the allure of shiny new buses at a future date promise to offload the responsibilities of busing to someone else. America’s bused youths are going to be someone else’s problem to deal with and, likely, for a little bit less money. It is hard not to be cynical of the motives of transportation companies given the immediate shift back to the inequitable conditions of schooling in these precarious times. Even under the banner of working in a “new normal,” the same old conditions of schooling remain remarkably trenchant.

The Hollow Promises of Educational Technology

We were promised flying cars and a world without crime. Instead, we got more surveillance and further restrictions on our bodies and cognitive freedoms. The dreams of technological progress far outweigh what actually transpires in classrooms, schools, and society writ large. The platforms that mediate so many of the interactions of students speak to what we’ve given up of ourselves and how we’ve abdicated our responsibilities to young people. They deserve more than the wireless tools and algorithmic learning opportunities that have ceded actual pedagogical innovation.

We can now recognize the school bus as a cognitive technology that reorients our assumptions of where schooling occurs and how. The bus demonstrates the juxtaposition between America’s promise of educational progress its actual enactment. Describing the school bus and its impacts on civil rights in America, Dee Schofield writes, “It is ironic that the familiar yellow school bus, for many a source of pleasant childhood memories, has assumed the properties of the serpent in Eden, spreading havoc and destruction wherever it goes.”6 As we watch nicer buses operate and fancier new tools brought into classrooms (at the cost of investing in teacher expertise and student interests), the intended uses of technology in schools come into focus: digital tools are about power.

The bus has been powering systems of education for generations, dictating who gets educated and where. It continues to power student experiences, orienting young people to the surveillance of their bodies and the limits of what they might do. It powers educational policies and funding decisions. Even more broadly, the school bus is powering city landscapes and parent relationships with schools. They demand energy consumption considerations and are powering the geographic and spatial considerations of municipalities. Think of the huge lots that house buses and the ways school parking lots have been designed to ensure that they can easily maneuver them. The school bus powers cities and systems of schooling.

We were promised computer-assisted learning experiences that would locate student bodies virtually in metaverses limited only to one’s imagination. We remain benched on school buses taking us on journeys that restrict multiple dimensions of human agency. We let this happen because we’ve grown complacent about the status quo and nostalgic for how things used to be. Those happy feelings you might hold for the school bus in your heart? Those are also nostalgia for eras that originated legacies of harm and racism. Popular media has a long history of romanticizing forms of technology and casting them in the light of adolescent coming-of-age importance: Walkmans, boom boxes, record players, and jukeboxes are tools that typically convey technology-mediated, fuzzy memories of the past. The bus is like that too. It may not look like much, but it is a “charisma machine” in the same way that Morgan Ames describes a mid-2000s infatuation with the one laptop per child movement.7 If we are going to transform and improve the lives of students who currently ride on buses, we need to disregard charismatic technology and a nostalgia that assumes this is how things should be. Students today deserve so much more.

Beyond the “Antiquated Shackles” of Yesterday’s Buses

In unveiling his Interstate Highway System in 1954, which would reconfigure transportation across America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared a vision of an America empowered by mobility and forward progress: “We are pushing ahead with a great road program . . . that will take this Nation out of its antiquated shackles of secondary roads all over this country and give us the types of highways that we need. . . . It will be a nation of great prosperity, but will be more than that: it will be a nation that is going ahead every day.” I’ve continually thought about Eisenhower’s words because his highway system enabled the busing technologies that have been covered throughout this book. The promise of a “great road program” has led to countless hours of student lives dwindling as passengers awaiting moments of learning, friendship, and civic engagement.

In listening to administrators discipline kids as part of the research described in chapter 2, it wasn’t uncommon for students to be warned that riding the school bus was a privilege that was afforded to them—a privilege that could be, and, in response to certain behavioral incidents, was, taken away from them. As I’ve spent the last few years researching and thinking deeply about the lasting impact of the school bus and its future possibilities, this framing of privilege on school buses has sat uncomfortably with me. It should sit uncomfortably with you too. The kids being warned were Black and brown youths voluntarily getting onto buses much earlier than their peers in an attempt to get a higher-quality schooling experience. So the threats of taking away bus-riding “privileges” should be recognized as racially fraught, even if they were not intended as such.

We owe so much more to current students than the current school buses and systems of busing currently offer, even if they were operating efficiently and consistently. The school bus illuminates how the imagination of educational policy makers has failed for far too long. Particularly as the world continues to recover from a global pandemic, a steady march—or idling crawl—back to “normal” schooling operations beckons kids and drivers back on the ever-familiar bus.

What a shame. The billions wasted on ineffective online and digital educational technologies could have improved analog interactions. I say this not as a tech-fearing Luddite. Frankly, I first took on the study described in chapter 2 because I was excited about the possibilities of digitally enabling powerful and meaningful learning for kids stuck on buses each day. I believe that digital tools can help improve academic and social learning opportunities in schools and on buses. But they can only achieve this when they are used in support of relationships and when students are at the center of how expertise is shared and enacted. As a kind of extreme, buses literally find students in one place and physically move them at the whims and demands of adults. We have worried about ridding ourselves of the “antiquated shackles” of past practices of learning and schooling in nearly every corner of public education, except for the school bus. Inequalities in schools perpetuate the need for the very technologies that reinforce them. It is a circular logic that breaks down when held up to close scrutiny: we need buses because schooling systems are inequitable, and because schooling systems are inequitable, we need buses. The pandemic temporarily broke one-half of the chain of this logic, but the magnetism that binds technocratic solutions to sociopolitical ills is a strong one, and it will take more than an interest in global competitiveness to wrench us out of the complacency with busing technologies.

For nearly three years, school communities have spoken of the fear of “learning loss” during a global pandemic, as if any such thing is even remotely the primary concern when the emotional toll of the lives lost and ravaged by the pandemic is not addressed in schools right now. Setting this point aside, if our society were actually concerned about learning loss, we might consider the kinds of time, utility, and joy lost by students every day in the thousands of hours they spend gazing at a world passing by them from inside a school bus.

This book has been an ongoing argument that busing technology operates in two ways: as a mechanical device that drolly brings students from one place to another and as a social tool for addressing school desegregation. And although I think there are innovative ways in which these two technologies operate separately and synergistically, I also am eager for us to find these tools obsolete in a more imaginative system of schooling. As you inevitably witness the next school bus rumble past you, I invite you to wonder how else we might redefine how schooling and technology intermix and where they might take us.

Acknowledgments