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Geo‐Spatial Analyses and School Choice Research

For those who study cities, attention to space is nothing new. An electronic search for scholarly articles using the term “spatial” or “space” plus either “urban” or “cities” identified 6,397 documents since 1966. Even limiting the search to article titles uncovered 893 articles using those terms. Nor has there been a lack of attention to geographic information systems (GIS) as a research tool, although the lineage in this case does not go back so far. Searching citations and abstracts for the specific term “geographic information system*” provided 2,546 documents, with the first fittingly titled “An Introduction to Geographic Information Systems” being published in 1977. It has taken some time, though, for these approaches to migrate into the literature on schools and school choice. Coupling the search terms “spatial” or “space” plus either “urban” or “cities” with the term “school*” generates only 287 documents (4.5 percent), and limiting the search to titles produces only six articles, only two of which focus on school choice. The editors of this issue recognized that the disconnect between school choice and considerations of distance and space is poised to be remedied and have done a service by collecting these examples and throwing, if you will, a “coming-out party” to announce an emerging line of theorizing and empirical analysis. Hovering in the background, though, is a nagging question. This call for greater attention to spatial analysis comes at a time when many others are suggesting that changes in transportation and technology are making space less and less constraining and arguably less and less important a variable to take into account in explaining household behavior and public policy. Is this a case of the cavalry arriving too late? In this article, I review some of the reasons to imagine that the high-powered analytical tools afforded by GIS may be coming into play just in time to demonstrate the declining significance of space. I make a few distinctions that