“Geography of Opportunity”: Poverty, Place, and Educational Outcomes

This article is an expanded version of the 2008 American Educational Research Association’s Presidential Address. The purpose of the article is to describe the geography of opportunity in two metropolitan regions of the United States that are engaged in significant efforts to transform their local political economies. Both metropolitan regions have invested substantive resources into the development of an area of industrial science—one in telecommunications, one in biotechnology. A central underlying question in this article is, How does geography influence opportunity? The article’s two case studies investigate this question, using different methodological approaches. The article concludes with two important lessons learned from the research.