Academic outcomes show this doesn’t help the students, but cities continue on regardless. What person thinks a 40 minute commute for a child is appropriate or healthy? I would be shocked if that worked for anyone.
Busing hasn't been a thing for many years, and never was in use in "most cities".
Edit: for those in other countries, "busing" in this context means loading the children who would normally attend one school onto a bus and transporting them to another (often distant) school. The intent behind this was to even out the distribution of races among the schools. It never did work well (not the least because essentially all of the students and parents involved hated it), and was effectively banned by a series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1990s.
Within a school district, teachers are assigned. They rarely get the school they want. So for any given school, an entire district has the same pool of teachers. And yet some schools are much worse than others.
Additionally, people literally buy houses for the school district - if you start to disrupt that system you'll potentially cause a shift in housing values and then you're up against both the rich and property owners and America can't win that fight with its current political system - money carries too loud of a vote.