Educational Inequality: The Coleman Report and After

In 1964 the United States Congress, as part of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, commissioned a nationwide study of inequality in American schooling. The statute directed the U.S. Commissioner of Education to report on 'the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin.' The expectation among legislators and civil-rights advocates was that the study would document starkly unequal school resources — decaying buildings, underqualified teachers, outdated textbooks — available to Black and minority students, and thereby justify federal intervention to equalize those inputs.

The study was led by James S. Coleman, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, working with a team that included Ernest Campbell and others. The resulting 1966 report, Equality of Educational Opportunity (familiarly known as the Coleman Report), was one of the largest social-scientific studies ever undertaken in the United States. It surveyed roughly 645,000 students in 4,000 schools, along with teachers, principals, and facilities data. It included measures of student achievement (reading comprehension, mathematics, verbal ability), family background (parental education, occupation, household possessions), peer composition, teacher qualifications, per-pupil expenditures, and physical facilities.

The report's empirical findings proved startling and, to many readers, unwelcome. Differences in measured school resources between white and Black schools, while real, were smaller than expected — and, more importantly, school resources explained only a small fraction of differences in student achievement. The dominant predictors of achievement were student family background and the socioeconomic composition of classmates. A child's reading scores were better predicted by what her parents read at home and by the family backgrounds of her schoolmates than by whether her school had new textbooks or better-paid teachers.

One passage, often quoted, summed up the uncomfortable message: 'Schools bring little influence to bear on a child's achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.' The sentence would shape a half-century of debate in sociology, economics of education, and education policy. Coleman himself spent much of his subsequent career qualifying, extending, and defending the report's conclusions.