Coleman Report Research Articles

Education Reform: What Is Really Achieved by Trying to Close Achievement Gaps?

In this article, I trace the history of the substitution of education reform for economic reform in order to ask, and answer, this question: why do we continue to imagine that (higher) education is where we, finally, achieve equality? The substitution of education reform for economic reform begins in the early 1960’s with the landmark “Coleman Report.” I argue that this report, and others that followed, show conclusively that economic inequality simply reproduces itself, and no amount of educational reform can make up for its devastating effects. However, at this very same time, education reformers begin to believe that educational “achievement” is the cause of increased economic opportunity and equality, rather than an effect of (un)equal economic status. This confusion of cause and effect not only distracts us from meaningful economic reform, it also puts tremendous pressure on teachers and institutions. Finally, and fatally, substituting educational reform for economic reform remakes equality itself into something that is earned rather than given.

The empty form of fairness: Equality of educational opportunity as an instrumentalizing force in education

The article investigates the instrumentalizing and ontological effects of the concept of equality of educational opportunity (EEO). Starting with the Coleman report ( Coleman et al., 1966 ), through the democratization of secondary and tertiary education, and reading it in light of the recent debate on educationalization of social problems ( Smeyers and Depaepe, 2008 ), the text inquires what has become of education under the influence of this powerfull concept. The evolution of this becoming is shaped by the paradox of equal treatment and selection, two fundamental principles on which the EEO ideal is based. ( Dubet, 2008 ). The objectivity of evaluation and comparability of results that this ideal implies sets EEO as one of the most important bases for the development of quantitative evaluation and testing, thus transforming the curriculum and shaping educational practices ( Stańczyk, 2013 ; Terrail, 2002 ). Moreover, the EEO principle brings the educational system to legitimize social inequalities: since it means treating students equally while they have to be ranked and come out segregated, the belief in inequality of intelligence is being reinforced, and inequalities are educationalized instead of being alleviated. Finally, the research shows that EEO policy and the EEO concept is pedagogically empty, mainly serving as an expression, or allegory of our concern with social inequalities ( Labaree, 2008 ; Rancière, 2002 ), with no real educational means serving this concern. The good news here is that such emptiness leaves room for practices of pedagogical equality being invented and introduced into the school.

Not Where You Start, but How Much You Grow: An Addendum to the Coleman Report

The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (1966)—the Coleman Report—lodged a key takeaway in the minds of educators, researchers, and parents: Schools do not strongly shape students’ achievement outcomes. This finding has been influential to the field; however, Coleman himself suggested that—had longitudinal data been available to him—decomposing the variance in students’ growth rates rather than their levels of achievement would have provided a clearer insight into school effects. Inspired by an intriguing finding from an earlier study conducted in 1988 by Bryk and Raudenbush, we take up Coleman’s suggestion using data provided by NWEA, which has administered over 200 million vertically scaled assessments across all 50 states since 2008. We replicated Bryk and Raudenbush’s surprising finding that most of the variation in student learning rates lies between rather than within schools. For students moving from Grades 1 through 5, we found 75% (math) to 80% (English language arts) of the variance in achievement rates is at the school level. We find similar results in preliminary analyses of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class 1998-99 (ECLS-K:99). These results are intriguing because they call into question one of the dominant narratives about the extent to which schools shape students’ achievement; however, more research is needed. Our goal is to invite other scholars to conduct similar analyses in other data contexts. We delineate four key dimensions along which results need to be further probed, first and foremost with an eye toward the role of test score scaling practices, which may be of central importance.

Do Enhanced Funding Policies Targeting Students in Poverty Close Achievement Gaps? Evidence from the American States, 1996–2015

Public concern stemming from the wide disparities in academic achievement based on student poverty status extends back at least to the issuing of the Coleman Report in 1966. The Coleman Report found large and persistent achievement gaps between economic and racial subgroups, yet, perhaps surprisingly, did not find large gaps in funding. The achievement gaps identified in the Coleman Report persist today. Since the NCES began tracking poverty gaps with the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in the 1990s, the disparities in achievement based on poverty have been large and statistically significant. In response, many states began enacting school funding mechanisms to direct additional resources to high‐poverty schools. Currently, 41 states have employed funding enhancements for poor students (EdBuild, 2018). Are these mechanisms effective at reducing the disparity in achievement for poor versus non‐poor students? Using data from the Urban Institute (2017), we find that states that have directed additional resources towards poor students effectively reduced the disparity between poor and non‐poor students in NAEP fourth‐ and eighth‐grade math and reading exams. Whereas the results are large and statistically significant, the costs associated with fully eliminating the disparity between poor and non‐poor students are very high.

Introduction: What Difference Did the Coleman Report Make?

The Coleman ReportFor this History of Education Quarterly Policy Forum, we look at the historical significance of the 1966 Coleman Report from several different perspectives. The four main essays published here originated as presentations for a session on “Legacies of the Coleman Report in US Thought and Culture” at the History of Education Society annual meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in November 2016. Presenters for that session— Zoë Burkholder, Victoria Cain, Leah Gordon, and Ethan Hutt—went on to participate in an HES-sponsored session entitled “Currents in Egalitarian Thought in the 1960s and 1970s: The Coleman Report in American Politics, Media, and Social Science” at the Organization of American Historians meeting in New Orleans in April 2017. Thinking that their reflections on the reception and influence of the Coleman Report in different contexts would be of broad interest to HEQ readers, we asked members of the panel to comment on each other's papers and revise them for this Forum. We then invited Harvey Kantor of the University of Utah and Robert Lowe of Marquette University to write an introduction summarizing the origins and findings of the Coleman Report, along with their own assessment of what the presenters’ essays teach us about its long-term significance. What follows are Kantor and Lowe's Introduction, “What Difference Did the Coleman Report Make?,” together with substantive essays by Zoë Burkholder of Montclair State University, Victoria Cain of Northeastern University, Leah Gordon of Amherst College, and Ethan Hutt of the University of Maryland.

“Seeing Like a State” in the Postwar Era: The Coleman Report, Longitudinal Datasets, and the Measurement of Human Capital

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FromSesame Streetto Prime Time School Television: Educational Media in the Wake of the Coleman Report

From<i>Sesame Street</i>to Prime Time School Television: Educational Media in the Wake of the Coleman Report

The Perils of Integration: Conflicting Northern Black Responses to the Coleman Report in the Black Power Era, 1966–1974

The Perils of Integration: Conflicting Northern Black Responses to the Coleman Report in the Black Power Era, 1966–1974

The Courts’ Consensus: Money Does Matter for Educational Opportunity

Over the half century since the Coleman Report was issued, there has been an extensive debate among scholars, policy-makers, and the courts about the extent to which “money matters” in education. This article briefly reviews the relevant academic literature and then analyzes the forty state court education funding litigations that have considered whether there is a correlation between educational expenditures and improved student outcomes. I find that that there is now an overwhelming consensus that, of course, money matters—when it is used well. This result indicates that policy-makers and judges should shift from continuing a fruitless abstract discussion of whether money matters and concentrate instead on the significant accountability questions of what resources are needed to provide all students a meaningful educational opportunity and how these resources can best be used to maximize student success, especially for students from poverty backgrounds and students of color.

The Coleman Report, 50 Years On: What Do We Know about the Role of Schools in Academic Inequality?

Achievement outcomes for U.S. children are overwhelmingly unequal along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Whether and how schools contribute to educational inequality, however, has long been the subject of debate. This article traces the debate to the Coleman Report’s publication in 1966, describing the report’s production and impact on educational research. The article then considers the field’s major findings—that schools equalize along class lines but likely stratify along racial and ethnic lines—in light of current policy debates.

New Tools for Old Problems: Inequality and Educational Opportunity for Ethnic Minority Youth and Parents

Fifty years after the Coleman Report delineated deep inequities across race and ethnicity in school contexts and outcomes, American families still navigate largely inequitable educational systems. The Coleman Report—with only slightly veiled surprise—also revealed the deep value African Americans place on education, their strong motivation to succeed, and the high expectations that they have for academic success. This article provides a critical analysis of the policies designed to increase equity in and access to high-quality education. With a special focus on adolescents, we show how these policies are experienced differently by families in ways that sustain inequities across ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic background. We also review research on the experiences of students in schools, arguing that policy attempts to mitigate disparities in educational experiences across race and socioeconomic condition have had little if any effect.

The State of Unequal Educational Opportunity: Introduction to the Special Issue on the Coleman Report 50 Years Later

The State of Unequal Educational Opportunity: Introduction to the Special Issue on the Coleman Report 50 Years Later

The State of Unequal Educational Opportunity: Conclusion to the Special Issue on the Coleman Report 50 Years Later

The State of Unequal Educational Opportunity: Conclusion to the Special Issue on the Coleman Report 50 Years Later

Doing the Impossible: The Limits of Schooling, the Power of Poverty

The idea that schools can have little influence on children coming from poor homes and neighborhoods is often attributed to the 1966 Coleman Report. At one time, this position was clearly favored by conservatives seeking to minimize public investments; more recently, it has been embraced by progressives arguing to increase public investments in poor children. In either form, arguments about the inability of schools to effectively speak to the needs of poor students are often poorly specified and are increasingly in tension with the best available evidence. No matter how well-intentioned they are, these arguments may inadvertently reinforce some very problematic ideas about the potential impact of schools on the academic performance of disadvantaged youngsters. We argue that while the power of poverty to stunt growth is undeniable, we have to be more willing to learn from contemporary evidence that suggests schooling can significantly mitigate the negative effects of poverty.

Dealing fairly with winners and losers in school: Reframing how to think about equality of educational opportunity 50 years after the Coleman Report

Although the policy and methodological legacy of Equality of Educational Opportunity, the so-called Coleman Report published by the US Department of Education in 1966, is widely recognized, the way in which it played a role in shaping theorizing about equality of educational opportunity has been less well-explored. This article reconsiders the Coleman Report in light of how it has contributed to the framing of how we think about the very idea of equality of educational opportunity and its normative capacity to evaluate the education system. The main argument is that the Coleman Report helped to crystallize the concept of equality of educational opportunity as being fundamentally about how education provides ladders of opportunity and enables upward mobility for socially disadvantaged students. This framing has, however, created certain normative blind spots that have seriously impeded its ability to engage certain issues in education. The normative blind spot singled out, in particular, is the competitive structure of the current education system – the school system is structured so that some children win, while some lose. The competitive nature of schools has often been challenged, from a wide range of perspectives, but rarely utilizing an equality of opportunity framework. Given this normative blind spot, the more constructive dimension of the article is to advance an alternative theory of equality of educational opportunity that is better able to function as a regulative ideal for competition in the education system, one that identifies standards or principles of fairness to guide policy on how to deal fairly with winners and losers.

The Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity

July 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Equality of Educational Opportunity (hereafter EEO), commonly known as the Coleman Report after the lead investigator of the research team, James S. Coleman (Coleman et al. [1966][1]). The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty

First- and Second-Order Methodological Developments from the Coleman Report

Equality of Educational Opportunity was a watershed for sociological engagement with public policy, yet the questions the project addressed drew attention to several challenging methodological issues. Statistical advances, such as the multilevel model, were important first-order developments from the Coleman Report. Second-order developments, however, may be far less visible but perhaps even more important. Second-order developments of the Coleman Report stem from two sources: (1) social scientists’ reactions to proposed resolutions of the statistical challenges that the report navigated, and (2) Coleman’s own (perhaps implicit) theoretical response to criticisms of such works as Equality of Educational Opportunity. Heightened interest in the challenge of identification serves as an example of the former type of second-order effect, whereas “Coleman’s boat” (Coleman 1990)—and the social analytics that adopt, among other approaches, simulation strategies of inquiry consistent with Coleman’s typology of causal pathways—serves as an example of the latter. First-order developments take the questions as given and see the challenge as a practical, technical issue; second-order developments explicitly or implicitly reassess the question, treating the challenge as epistemological or social-theoretic. Second-order developments therefore may change the game, upsetting or rejecting routine practice at a fundamental level. I contend that as knowledge of second-order developments and their means of practical implementation in analyses diffuses among social analysts, they will prove of far more value than first-order developments to social understanding, sociology, and social policy.

What If Coleman Had Known About Stereotype Threat? How Social-Psychological Theory Can Help Mitigate Educational Inequality

The Coleman Report has inspired various lines of inquiry offering new understandings of inequality of educational opportunity and the persistent achievement gaps in American schools. Of the various models and theories, stereotype threat, which focuses on social-psychological dimensions of inequality, has received considerable attention over the past twenty years. But what if stereotype threat theory, and associated interventions to combat it, had existed fifty years ago? Using data from the original Equality of Educational Opportunity Study, we find, consistent with the stereotype threat literature, that African American students confronted with more threatening educational contexts are burdened by a less favorable self-image; this finding partially explains how students’ internalization of racial stereotypes depresses their test scores. Based on these findings and on results from numerous laboratory and field experiments documenting the impact of stereotype threat and how to mitigate it, we explore its usefulness for studying educational inequality in the years to come.

Still No Effect of Resources, Even in the New Gilded Age?

The Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry. Only for postsecondary educational attainment do we find any meaningful predictive power for expenditures, and here half of the association can be adjusted away by school-level differences in average family background. Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.

Educational Equality Is a Multifaceted Issue: Why We Must Understand the School’s Sociocultural Context for Student Achievement

The Coleman Report concluded that if students of color attended schools with more white students, they were likely to garner significantly better achievement results. Several contextual factors should be considered, however, before we make strong conclusions about the strength of the effect of racial and ethnic minority students attending school with white students. This paper makes a case for considering the necessity of both the “material” and “sociocultural” domains of schooling if we are to move toward a more holistic understanding of “school effects” on students’ academic well-being. Based on a case-study analysis of four high-performing, diverse schools in different regions, using ethnographic observations and random student surveys, this paper offers evidence that students who hail from similar socioeconomic and family backgrounds but who attend schools with different sociocultural contexts have disparate academic experiences. The findings draw our attention to new directions to consider as we seek...