Date: 20 March, 2024


Dataset Title: Dataset to Assess the Educational Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program


Dataset Creators: M. Pedde, A. Szpiro, R. Hirth, S.D. Adar


Dataset Contact: Meredith Pedde mpedde@umich.edu


Funding: 966-RFA18-1/19 (Health Effects Institute)


Key Points:
- Older school buses can expose students to high levels of diesel exhaust.
- This exposure can adversely impact health and school attendance, which may lower educational performance.
- EPA has spent millions of dollars to hasten the transition of school bus fleets to cleaner vehicles.
- We find that this EPA clean bus funding program did not improve district-average student test scores in reading and language arts and math among selected districts overall. In secondary analyses, however, districts that were
awarded funding to replace the oldest and highest-polluting buses experienced significantly greater improvements in district-average student test scores compared with those not selected for replacement funding. 
- EPA distributed this funding randomly, allowing us to causally assess the educational impacts of school districts switching to cleaner buses.



Research Overview:
Approximately 25 million children ride buses to school in the United States (US). While school buses remain the safest school transport from an accident perspective, older buses often expose students to high levels of diesel exhaust. Since these exposures can adversely impact health and attendance, which may lower educational performance, the US EPA has spent millions of dollars to hasten the transition of school bus fleets to cleaner vehicles. 
Here, we leveraged the randomized allocation of the EPA’s 2012-2016 School Bus Rebate Program funding to causally assess the district educational impacts of upgrading buses. 
Districts randomly selected for School Bus Rebate Program funding had comparable changes in educational test scores for RLA and math in the year after the lottery to districts not selected for funding (mean SD changes in scores, 0.005 [95% CI, -0.007 to 0.018] higher for RLA and -0.001 [95% CI, -0.011 to 0.010] lower for math). 
For districts replacing the oldest buses (pre-1990 models), however, we observed significantly larger SD improvements in mean RLA test scores of 0.062 (95% CI, 0.050-0.074) and math test scores of 0.025 (95% CI, 0.011-0.039) compared with districts without replacements.
These findings support prioritizing clean bus replacement of the oldest buses as an actionable way for improving students' educational performance.

Methodology:
The data are used to assess the educational impacts of the US EPA's School Bus Rebate Program. All analyses were conducted in SAS v9.4.


Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA


Files contained here:
The dataset and SAS code shared here were used to assess the educational benefits of the US EPA's School Bus Rebate Program.
- DERA_Lottery_All_final.xlsx: analyses data used in this publication
- Bus_Funding_Education_Results_and_Tables_JAMA_Network_Open.sas: code to reproduce all results in this publication using the datset listed above

Related publication(s):
Pedde, M., Szpiro, A., Hirth, R., Adar, S.D. (2024). School Bus Rebate Program and Student Educational Performance Test Scores. JAMA Network Open. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.3121


Use and Access: 



To Cite Data: 
Pedde, M., Szpiro, A., Hirth, R., Adar, S.D. (2024). Dataset to Assess the Educational Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program [Data set]. University of Michigan - Deep Blue.