The field of education has become comfortable in its use of the construct urban to describe particular schools in particular metropolitan places. This article argues that the construct has come to signify not just place but also to denote particular meanings of "urban" populations. It analyzes how literary and social-scientific practices converged to anchor this construct paradigmatically in the registers of educational practitioners and researchers. Drawing from cultural geography, the article then demonstrates why the framework of the urban, and its other implicit pole the suburban, is no longer satisfactory for conceptualizing empirical questions about metropolitan schools. Lastly, the author identifies and discusses exemplars within the field of educational research that help us to remap our theoretical and empirical work.