A generation ago, billboards, flyers, or radio spots advertising a public school would have been unusual and surprising. Now they are an increasingly regular feature of the educational landscape. As schools compete for students and resources in the new educational marketplace, they increasingly look to market themselves to prospective parents (and funders). The ways educational organizations use marketing to develop and promote a particular identity, recruit or exclude students, and navigate new systems of competition and accountability are thus critical elements of schooling in the 21st century. This is especially the case in urban areas, where choice policies are more common. In this issue, the authors have usefully unpacked key dynamics around the marketing of public educational services. In this commentary, the author first discusses two of the contributions this collection of articles makes that are particularly important to the field: demonstrating the disconnections between theories of marketing and the on-the-ground realities, and revealing the centrality of identity to the marketing process. She then argues that future research, building on these findings, should pursue a highly contextualized understanding of educational marketing.