What Matters for Student Achievement: Updating Coleman on the Influence of Families and Schools.
THE COLEMAN REPORT, "Equality of Educational Opportunity, "is the fountainhead for those committed to evidence based education policy. Remarkably, this 737 page tome, prepared 50 years ago by seven authors under the leadership of James S. Coleman, still gets a steady 600 Google Scholar citations per year. But since its publication, views of what the report says have diverged, and conclusions about its policy implications have differed even more sharply. It is therefore appropriate from the Olympian vantage point a half century provides not only to assess the Coleman findings and conclusions but also to consider how and where they have directed the policy conversation. It must be said from the outset that the Coleman team relied on a methodology that was becoming antiquated at the time the document was prepared. Almost immediately, econometricians offered major critiques of its approach. But even with these limitations, as an education policy research document, the report was breathtakingly innovative, the foundation for decades of ever improving inquiry into the design and impact of the U.S. education system. Outside the scientific research community, the Coleman Report had, if anything, an even broader impact. Reporters, columnists, and policymakers turned their understanding of results and conclusions into conventional wisdoms simplified, bumper sticker versions of the report's conclusions. Partly reflecting the nature of the document, not all of them agreed on which of the findings to emphasize. For example, early on, President Lyndon Johnson's administration said the report endorsed its desegregation efforts by showing that blacks benefited from an integrated educational experience while whites did not suffer from it. This message dovetailed with the administration's efforts to implement the Civil Rights Act, a topic discussed by Steven Rivkin in an accompanying essay (see "Desegregation since the Coleman Report," Spring 2016) Later, two other, more lasting conclusions attributed to the report gradually emerged: 1) families are the most important influence on student achievement, and 2) school resources don't matter. I focus on these two conclusions. The greater significance of the Coleman Report what makes it a foundational document for education policy research lies not in any of these interpretations or conclusions, however. More importantly, it fundamentally altered the lens through which analysts, policymakers, and the public at large view and assess schools. Before Coleman, a good school was defined by its "inputs" per pupil expenditure, school size, comprehensiveness of the curriculum, volumes per student in the library, science lab facilities, use of tracking, and similar indicators of the resources allocated for the students' education. After Coleman, the measures of a good school shifted to its "outputs" or "outcomes" the amount its students know, the gains in learning they experience each year, the years of further education graduates pursue, and their long term employment and earnings opportunities. Historical Context The Coleman Report was mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act gave the U.S. Office of Education two years to produce a report that was expected to describe the inequality of educational opportunities in elementary and secondary education across the United States. Congress sought to highlight, particularly in the South, the differences between schools attended by whites and those attended by blacks (referred to as "Negroes," as was standard at the time) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But Congress, and the nation, got something very different from what most people expected. Working quickly as soon as the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, the Coleman research team drew a sample of over 4,000 schools, which yielded data on slightly more than 3,000 schools and some 600,000 students in grades 1, 3,6,9, and 12. The team asked students, teachers, principals, and superintendents at these schools a wide range of questions.