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.

Plasticity of Intelligence, Education Reform, and the Disadvantaged Child

This chapter takes up the pressure under which preschool enrichment programs like Project Head Start—promoted by President Johnson as signature components of his War on Poverty—found themselves, in needing to demonstrate that they were worthy of investment, rather soon after they had been launched. A most significant turning point came in 1966 with the Equality of Educational Opportunity report (better known as the Coleman Report). Expected to demonstrate that students in segregated schools lagged in IQ scores, the Coleman Report instead had the effect of calling into question the conviction, so essential for advocates of desegregation and early enrichment alike, that children’s brains were malleable and that changing their environments improved their IQs. At the same time, a host of seemingly unrelated psychological theories – e.g. “locus of control”, learned helplessness, the interpersonal expectancy effect (better known as the Pygmalion effect) – got swept into controversies over the potential effectiveness of compensatory education.

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.

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.