EdWeek 2006
Article on the Coleman Report and its legacy
Race
Report’s Influence Felt 40 Years Later
Legacy of Coleman study was new view of equity
By Debra Viadero
Just
before the Fourth of July weekend in 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly
released a report that would shake the beliefs upon which many educators and
social reformers had staked their work.
Titled
“Equality of Educational Opportunity,” the mammoth, 737-page study reached the
unsettling conclusion that school might not be society’s great equalizer after
all.
On
the eve of the 40th anniversary of that study, now better known as the Coleman
Report, researchers continue to grapple with many of the same questions about
how family background contributes to disparities in children’s school
performance.
The
report found that black children started out school trailing behind their white
counterparts and essentially never caught up—even when their schools were as
well equipped as those with predominantly white enrollments.
What
mattered more in determining children’s academic success, concluded the
authors, was their family backgrounds.
“This
was the 1960s,” the policy expert Marc S. Tucker recalled. “The idea that who
one’s parents were and what happened in the home is a far greater determinant
of one’s future than what schools could do was a pretty grim commentary and one
that was very hard for people to accept.”
Mr.
Tucker, today the president of the Washington-based National
Center on Education and the Economy,
was among a group of scholars convened by Harvard University
Four
decades later, scholars say that much has changed in American education and
much has not. While social science has found more sophisticated ways to chart
disparities in children’s schooling and achievement, it has failed to make them
go away.
“The
Coleman Report basically opened up that question, and nobody’s been able to
answer it satisfactorily since,” said David J. Armor, a researcher who worked
on the original study and subsequent reanalysis. “No one has found a way, on a
large-scale basis, to overcome the influence of family,” added Mr. Armor,
currently a professor of public policy at George
Mason University
in Fairfax , Va.
The
project was historic for more than its provocative conclusions, though, says
David K. Cohen, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor
“I
think it really marked the beginning of a new era for both research on
education and a more general understanding of schooling and how schools work,”
he said.
Breaking
New Ground
The
study was ordered by Congress as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In
Section 402 of the legislation, federal lawmakers directed the U.S.
Following
the release of "Equality of Educational Opportunity" in July 1966, Harvard University
To
carry out that task, Alex M. Mood, then assistant commissioner for educational
statistics, chose two researchers: James S. Coleman, the Johns
Hopkins University
sociologist whose name has become indelibly associated with the study, and
Ernest Q. Campbell, a sociology researcher from Vanderbilt University
The
report they produced was, and some say, remains, among the most extensive and
best-known studies of American education. At a cost of $1.5 million in 1966
dollars, the project drew on data for 570,000 students, 60,000 teachers, and
4,000 elementary and secondary schools across the country. When completed, it
weighed as much as the Manhattan
What
was revolutionary about the report, though, was its use of testing data to
measure educational disparities, which was an innovation that went beyond the
project’s congressional mandate. Rather than provide a checklist of physical
resources, Mr. Coleman and Mr. Mood wanted the study to find out what children
actually learned.
“Up
until that time, very little attention was paid to student outcomes,” said Eric
A. Hanushek, a Stanford
University
Mr.
Coleman, an unassuming football-player-turned-academician, and his research
team worked under intense pressure to complete the massive project within the
two-year time frame. James McPartland, one of the young researchers whom Mr.
Coleman recruited to work on the study, recalled that the sociologist even
rented an apartment near Capitol Hill to cut down on commuting time from Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore
“The
frenzy was all about, ‘What do we have here?’ ” said Mr. McPartland, who is now
a co-director of the Center for Social Organization of Schools, based at Johns
Hopkins. “And Jim was the one making sense of it all.”
Mr.
Coleman, who later moved to the University
of Chicago
Greeted
With Silence
When
the report was done, it met with deafening silence. The lack of response was
due in part to its release right before the July 4 weekend.
In
addition, the advisory committee that had been appointed for the project
refused to sign off on it, citing methodological concerns, recalled Edmund W.
Gordon, a member of that committee.
“We
weren’t sure that Jim had drawn his conclusions from a sample that was
sufficiently representative,” said Mr. Gordon, who is now an emeritus professor
of psychology at both Yale University and Teachers College, Columbia University
Gradually,
though, news of the findings spread. Christopher S. Jencks, a
journalist-turned-policy expert, writing in The New Republic in October
1966, called attention to the report as the “most important piece of education
research in years.” And he noted that its “diagnosis of what makes students
learn is at odds with almost everything legislators, school board members, and
school administrators have believed in recent decades.”
The
findings, in fact, came less than a year after President Lyndon B. Johnson had
signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with its Title I—a
Great Society program aimed at providing compensatory educational services to
disadvantaged students.
The
news also reached Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist, former Johnson
administration official and future U.S.
senator, at Harvard
University
Mr.
Moynihan had just written a controversial report, “The Negro Family: The Case
for Action,”which argued for federal attention to problems of disorganization
in black families. With other Harvard academic stars, such as Thomas F.
Pettigrew, a social psychologist, Mr. Moynihan obtained funding from the
Carnegie Corporation of New York
“Because
the results were so earthshaking, everybody wanted to reanalyze the data and
make sure nothing was amiss,” said Mr. Armor.
Gordon
M. Ambach, who later became New York
In
the end, 75 scholars became regular attendees, traveling to Harvard at their
own expense once every two weeks for the dinner-to-late-night sessions. Their
ranks included some of the most prominent academics in the social
sciences—people such as Frederick Mosteller, a widely admired statistician; the
reading expert Jeanne Chall; and Theodore R. Sizer, then the dean of Harvard’s
graduate school of education. Seven professors came from the law school. The
sessions also drew a crop of young graduate students and junior professors who
would later go on to make their own names in the field of education.
“Many
people cut their teeth at that seminar,” said Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, an
education historian at Harvard. “I don’t think there’s been a Coleman seminar
since, or anything equivalent to it.”
Findings
Wide-Ranging
The
Coleman Report’s conclusion on schools’ relative ineffectiveness at overcoming
the academic disparities that children bring with them was just one of many
findings in the study.
It
found, for instance, that the next-most important determinant of academic achievement
after family characteristics was a student’s sense of control over his or her
own destiny.
The
report also found that, more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954
decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation
case, most American students still attended schools populated mainly with
students from the same racial group. More surprisingly, though, the study found
that school segregation was just as pervasive in the North as it was in the
South.
And
the achievement disparities the report documented were troublingly large. In
6th grade, the authors found, the average African-American 6th grader lagged
1.9 years behind his or her white counterpart. By 12th grade, the statistics
suggested, the average gap had widened to nearly four years.
As
expected, the report also showed that black children typically attended schools
that were more poorly equipped than those attended by whites. They had less
access to physics, chemistry, and language laboratories, for instance, and
fewer books per pupil. But the differences were much smaller than expected, and
particularly so for white and black schools in the same geographic regions.
“Congress
really expected to see the South shortchanging black schools, and we didn’t
have much evidence of that at the time,” Mr. McPartland said.
In
retrospect, though, some scholars suggest that the disparities may have failed
to emerge because of limitations in the survey.
“One
person’s science lab may be another person’s closet,” said Marshall S. Smith, who
was the research director for the Harvard seminar as a young faculty member
there. “Some of that was also partly due to the fact that the South had been
gearing up since Brown to provide better resources to black schools in
the hope that they could convince courts not to desegregate,” said Mr. Smith,
who later became Stanford University’s education dean and served as the deputy
secretary and undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education under
President Clinton.
In
any event, the study found that few school-related “inputs” seemed to matter
much in terms of improving student achievement. Only teachers’ verbal ability
seemed to be linked to higher student test scores.
Schools
where teachers scored high on a 10-item verbal test embedded in the survey
tended also to have students who scored high on academic tests. And having
those so-called “good” teachers seemed to be more important for black students
than for white students—a finding that subsequent studies have echoed.
The
Coleman team also found that whom students went to school with was
almost as important as family background in predicting academic success.
Black
students did better in schools that were predominantly middle-class than they
did in lower-class schools, even though the improvements were not large enough
to make up for achievement differences due to family background. Since students
in majority-minority schools also tended to be poorer than average, that
finding was later seen as a plus for the desegregation movement as it began to
switch into high gear.
Schools’
Effect Muted
What
most people took away from the report, however, was the notion that “schools
don’t matter.”
Some
politicians, in fact, later used that argument in opposing increased funding
for education. But the scholars who were involved in the report and its
subsequent reanalysis say that the “schools don’t matter” interpretation was
greatly oversimplified.
“This
is absurd,” Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Mosteller wrote later. “Children don’t think
up algebra on their own.”
What
the study found, specifically, was that differences in achievement varied as
much within schools as they did from school to school.
What
that means, Mr. McPartland says, is that schools tend to have a uniform effect
on everyone: Students come to school with academic differences and learn, more
or less, at the same rate.
“I
had to think through the next two or three years on why I still thought schools
could make a difference,” said Mr. Tucker. “What the study was showing, though,
was what happened in average, ordinary schools. But it could never look at the
effects of a particular intervention.”
The
findings related to schools’ demographic composition were less in dispute,
according to Mr. Cohen of the University
of Michigan
Called
“Racial Isolation in the Public Schools,”the 1967 report took the next step and
concluded that, at least at the 9th grade level, black students learned more in
majority-white classrooms.
Later
characterized by the education historian Diane Ravitch as the “bible of
integrationist forces,” the racial-isolationstudy provided fodder for the
desegregation movement for years to come.
Mr.
Coleman himself was labeled a traitor to that cause years later, after he
published a different study that concluded the mandatory-busing movement was
contributing to “white flight” from urban neighborhoods.
Data
Flaws Cited
In
the end, the scholars who participated in the Harvard seminar identified some
methodological flaws in the Coleman study but, in the main, affirmed its
conclusions.
With
additional foundation support, Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Mosteller gathered the
reanalysis in a book, On Equality of Educational Opportunity, which was
published in 1972, putting the Coleman Report back in the public eye again.
“In
retrospect, it’s fair to say there are some pretty serious weaknesses in the
data,” said Karl L. Alexander, a Johns Hopkins sociologist who now teaches an
upper-level undergraduate course on Mr. Coleman’s work.
Weaknesses
that he and other experts cite include the use of per-pupil-spending data for
districts rather than individual schools, an insufficient response rate to the
surveys, improper sampling procedures, and flawed testing instruments.
“By
today’s standards, that kind of analysis would not have passed muster, but it
was in the vanguard then,” Mr. Alexander said. “I think we are getting better
at asking the questions and understanding how to do analyses that are more
compelling.”
He
said the report also reframed many scholars’ thinking in the field.
“If
the resource differences were not that pronounced,” he said, “people thought
then perhaps we needed to start looking inside schools.”
Other
researchers, most notably the late Ron Edmonds of Harvard University
Gaps
Persist
Mr.
Jencks said the Harvard seminar experience led him to make permanent his switch
from journalism to academia and to undertake quantitative research in public
policy.
“Just
the idea that you could take social-science evidence and bring it to bear on
policy issues was really inspiring,” he said. “I had been in Washington
With
Mr. Smith and Mr. Cohen, Mr. Jencks went from the seminar to found the Center
for Education Policy Research at Harvard.
As
for the black-white achievement gap that the Coleman Report documented, the
organizers of the Harvard seminar, at least, appeared to be confident that the U.S.
“It
may be hoped that before the century is out the great gaps will have
disappeared,” Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Mosteller predicted in On Equality of
Educational Opportunity.
“It
may also happen that in the process a general theory of education will have
evolved, been tested, replicated, and accepted,” they concluded.
On
both counts, scholars agree, the nation is not there yet.
