The Coleman report made headlines in the months after its publication for what it said: that family background, not schools, explained most of the gap in achievement between American’s white and black students.
Although this sharply contradicted the orthodoxy in both academic and policy circles, it took months for this information to penetrate public discourse, in part due to prevailing political winds and in part to academics’ hesitance to rush to judgment. When it did, however, it shaped both social policy — the 1970s push for busing and integration was founded in part on the report — and the future of education research.
But first, some background. Congress commissioned the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In many ways, Coleman was a logical choice to lead the study. A polymath with interests in sociology, mathematics and economics, he had completed a Ph.D. in Columbia University’s prestigious sociology department. Coleman had experience with large-scale quantitative data collection and analysis, having recently finished a survey and then book on adolescent culture. Coleman was also known to support civil rights; in 1963, he and his family had been arrested for demonstrating outside an amusement park that refused to admit African-Americans.
The study itself was massive. In the fall of 1965, Coleman and his team collected data from 4,000 schools, 66,000 teachers and almost 600,000 first, third, sixth, ninth and 12th graders — one of the largest stand-alone testing and survey efforts ever undertaken in U.S. schools.
Coleman and his team also produced the data and subsequent report within a remarkably compact timeline. By way of comparison, modern studies that enroll more than a few hundred students can take up to (or more than, if we’re talking about my own studies) two years to conceptualize and design. By contrast, Coleman’s study took just over a year to fashion from stem to stern.
The looming July 1966 deadline led Coleman, according to David Cohen, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, to “hole himself up in a hotel with a very large supply of bourbon and deliveries of printouts” in order to write his portion of the report. The resulting tome was well north of 700 pages, much of it devoted to thorough analysis of statistical tables and graphs.
In some respects, Coleman’s analysis found what you would expect looking backwards toward 1960s America: mostly segregated schools, disparities favoring white children in some resources like class size, school facilities and the availability of advanced coursework, and heavy race-based inequality on tests of academic achievement.