Coleman Report

The Equality of Equal Opportunity survey (more commonly known as the Coleman Report after its lead researcher, James S. Coleman) was a study authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Released in 1966, the Coleman Report attempted to measure educational opportunities for students, especially African Americans, on the basis of the quality of the schools they were attending as well as other factors such as the racial, ethnic, and social class backgrounds of their classmates. It resulted in a 700-page report involving test and questionnaire data from 150,000 students in Grades 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12. This seminal report was widely quoted regarding factors that affected student achievement. One principle that guided the report was that equal educational opportunity could not be measured by equality of inputs, but by the equality of outputs or results.

The most significant of the study's findings was that the social class composition of a student's school had the largest effect on academic achievement. Many cited this finding to support public school integration. The Coleman Report indicates that if African American students continued to attend largely segregated and low-income schools, there would be a long-term negative impact on their academic achievement. Another finding was that only approximately 10% of student achievement could be attributed to the quality of schooling. This second finding was quickly cited by some political leaders who argued that the essence of quality education (such as student commitment and family support) was found outside of schools. They suggested that additional funds in public education could not be expected to significantly raise student achievement. The Coleman report was widely misinterpreted to mean that the quality of schools does not affect student achievement, that what matters is only the family background of one's school peers.

Other scholars have reexamined the Coleman Report. The Harvard University Seminar on the Coleman Report met for more than a year to analyze the report's methodology and findings. They discovered a coding error in the data that had produced greater evidence of the effect of peers on learning than was actually the case. Ronald Carver examined the Coleman report and noted that the test data used came from what were mainly aptitude tests, but these data were interpreted as representing achievement data. He critiqued the small (10%) variance attributed to school effects by pointing out that the nature of the tests used tended to maximize individual differences and thus minimize school effects. Because the Coleman Report used aptitude instead of achievement test data, Carver observed that its findings were misleading. He stated that it is unrealistic to expect schools to eliminate differences among individuals with respect to their propensity for learning tasks.

Geoffrey Borman and N. Maritza Dowling at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research reanalyzed the Coleman Report data and concluded that attending a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a major negative effect on student achievement above and beyond the effect of a student's individual or minority status. They also found that the racial and ethnic compositions of a student's school are 150% more important than an individual student's race, ethnicity, or social class background. The conclusions reached by Borman and Dowling support the Coleman Report's major finding that the most important element in the education of African American students was the social class composition of the schools they attended. However, U.S. public schools have become more segregated in the past 3 decades.

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