Despite the well-documented and highly theorized link between family resources, residential location, and access to high-achieving public schools, past research has not measured how this relationship varies across metropolitan area housing markets. This study fills the gap using a novel, granular dataset of over 7 million housing sales records linked to block-level measures of the academic achievement of locally accessible schools. We find wide variation in the cost of accessing high-achieving public schools across 121 large metropolitan areas. Metropolitan house price competition for school access is more intense in areas with higher income inequality, in areas fragmented by many small school districts, and in states where property taxes tie more closely to local school revenue. Importantly, we also find that economic and racial gaps in school access differ widely depending on the metropolitan area where families live. We provide a novel metropolitan-level dataset to accompany these findings and conclude with a call for researchers to investigate how macro level conditions moderate the effect of schools on children's outcomes.