Baltimore high school students are less likely to pick a school — even the city’s best — if they face a long, complicated trip to get there on Maryland’s unreliable transit system, a new, six-year study by Johns Hopkins University researchers found.

Students were about a third less likely to choose the city’s college prep or career and technical education schools among their top five picks if their commute was longer than 34 minutes or required a transfer to another bus, according to the research by Julia Burdick-Will and Marc Stein.

The study reinforces Baltimore Banner reporting that the city school system’s reliance on Maryland Transit Administration bus service is affecting students’ education. The Banner analysis found students spend, on average, 40 minutes getting to school and longer getting home. The majority of students must transfer at least once to get to school.

MTA delays and unreliability often extend the commute and make it impossible for students always to arrive on time.

Baltimore does not offer students yellow bus rides after fifth grade. Tens of thousands of students depend on their parents to drive them or ride public transit.

“What matters to people is not necessarily how physically far away a school is but how difficult it is to get there,” the study said.

Neither the Baltimore City Public Schools nor the Maryland Transit Administration responded to requests for comment on the study.

For the past 20 years, Baltimore students have been able to choose any middle and high school in the city they want to attend. With an array of schools — from small charter schools to those focused on career and technology and college prep — the city has few traditional, comprehensive neighborhood schools left. Students are not assigned a school based on where they live.

In eighth grade, students fill out a list of their top five high school choices. Some high schools have entrance criteria, but the vast majority do not. The decisions students make then can influence their academic performance, the after-school activities they have access to and the colleges they attend.

In theory, students have a wide array of educational options that give them a chance to choose the school that is best for them.

But in Baltimore the Hopkins research suggests that students who rely on public transit may, in practice, have more limited options.

The research shows the system that was designed to give students equity — the freedom to break free of their neighborhood and get a better education at a school across town — has instead left them stranded. Transportation is now the barrier.

A massive $135 million overhaul of the public bus system in 2017 gave Burdick-Will and Stein an opportunity to examine how commute time and complexity factored into students’ decisions on where to go to school. They looked at school attendance patterns before and after the overhaul.

The data, researchers said, shows students from the same neighborhood made different decisions on what schools to place on their lists before and after the changes to the bus schedules.

“Relatively small changes in the transit schedule can lead to meaningful differences in enrollment patterns,” the study found.

As much as the length of the ride, students’ choices were sensitive to transfers.

“Transfers are really big for kids. They’re stressful. They’re time-consuming. They’re unreliable,” said Burdick-Will, an associate professor at Hopkins. Students have to build in extra time, even if the trip is only going to be 20 minutes, because they anticipate there could be problems with the first bus that would make them late for the second, she said.

About one in four Maryland Transportation Authority buses will not arrive on time during morning commuting hours, making it impossible for students to get to school on time every day, a Banner investigation found. In addition, students are victims of crime on their way to school and said they feel unsafe during their commutes, particularly when they stand at bus stops in areas where violent crime has occurred.

The research was published in the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. Stein, who began the research at Hopkins, has since become the executive director of an education-focused organization called the Improvement Colaboratory.

Although school districts with widespread school choice, including Baltimore, assume their students can find their way to school, they often can’t, the study’s authors wrote.

“You cannot talk about an open choice, open enrollment system without finding a way to get kids easily to those schools,” Burdick-Will said.

Neither the MTA nor the city school leadership has taken responsibility for the problem, although the school system acknowledges it is an issue for students.

Education and transportation researchers and policymakers rarely overlap, Burdick-Will said, but there are ways to solve the problem.

Although it is difficult to change where students live and the geographic distribution of schools, it is relatively easy to make changes to transit schedules or add buses.

“It could be possible to improve educational access for many students without having to open new schools in new locations or even dramatically redistribute resources across schools,” the authors wrote.

The researchers also concluded that MTA’s expensive 2017 redesign made little difference for students — neither better, nor worse.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.