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This paper suggests that synergies can be produced by using geospatial analyses as a bridge between traditional qualitative-quantitative distinctions in education research. While mapping tools have been effective for informing education policy studies, especially in terms of educational access and choice, they have also been underutilized and underdeveloped. This paper focuses on the potential benefits of expanding geospatial analysis, which has traditionally been heavily quantitative in its orientation, by incorporating qualitative research, including the accounts of lived experiences and perceptions that guide and shape institutional and individual behaviors and decisions. To that end, the paper proposes an agenda for mixed-methods research by drawing on new advances in the fields of human and critical geography.

Critical racial studies of school choice elucidate the worsening effects of school choice policy on racial segregation in diversifying cities around the world. This paper contributes to this scholarship by illuminating how a neoliberal education policy of school choice has created racial divisions in new ways in a settler-colonial city. It focuses on how neoliberal education reform of school choice reconfigures and reifies race as a socially and spatially constructed category, fixing the racial identities of youths. I apply critical theories of race, space and youth to examine how diverse youths make sense of, and negotiate, race within and between schools in making “choices” in the local context of a historically racialized urban geography. This paper shows that neoliberal reforms of education do not erase, but rather reconstruct, racial identities and divisions by shedding light on 59 students’ (ages 11–19) accounts of racial exclusion and their constructions of new racial stereotypes in the processes and outcomes of school choice.

In this article, we map the expansion of geographic approaches in education policy scholarship in the last two decades. Our main objective is to trace key contributions, illuminating moments and turns from multiple epistemological perspectives within the scholarship of education policy and from the field of (human) geography. In doing so, we discuss how different types of methodological frameworks have developed, contributing to new and innovative geospatial methodologies in recent years. Following that, we note the extent to which the reassertion of critical perspectives into geospatial analyses has affected and could affect education policy and scholarship.