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Equality of Educational Opportunity (Perennial works in sociology)

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Milwaukee Public School (MPS) Board Director Leon Todd's review. E-mail <leontodd@execpc.com> A Review:

James S. Coleman was commissioned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to investigate the effects of the 1954 Brown Decision. The first national study on public education was conducted to validate the Supreme Courts decision that integration was a key variable in equality of educational opportunity and was in the public's best interest.

James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966), concluded that the effects of the school environment on student achievement, whatever its racial or ethnic composition, appear to come from the educational proficiency of the school student body. In addition to the achievement level of other students, the "realistic" aspirations of other students affect academic achievement. In other words, as the educational backgrounds and aspirations of other students increase, a student's academic achievement increases no matter what the individual student's social class, race or background.

These findings have had important implications concerning school race as a factor in student achievement since middle class overlaped with white and poverty class overlaped so well with students of color, particularly in the sixties.

While Coleman's results showed higher achievement for all racial and ethnic groups in schools with greater percentages of white or middle class students, they also indicated that the apparent beneficial effects of a student body with a high proportion of white students do not result from school racial or genetic composition, but from the higher educational aspirations and better educational backgrounds generally possessed by white or middle class students.

Since white students are more likely than black students to be middle class, it is reasonable to assume that schools with a higher percentage of white students would have student bodies with higher and more "realistic" educational aspirations and better educational backgrounds than black or poverty class students of color. The percentage of families owning encyclopedias, (2) transfers in and out of school, (3) average daily attendance, (4) percent of students in college curriculum, and (5) average hours spent on homework, were used to determine school social class. The socioeconomic mix of students in classrooms was cited as one of the school characteristics that increases academic achievement.

Coleman's (1966) first conclusion was that parents' education, variable defined as family background, has the highest relation to achievement for nearly all racial or ethnic groups, particularly in later years of public school education.

Coleman's second conclusion, which is the one that is almost more pertinent to his research, was that compared to the effects of family background, the effects of school staff and facilities on achievement are of minimal importance. In other words, improving the quality of schools attended by blacks alone will not reduce the gap between black and white achievement. Coleman (1966) concluded that school factors, particularly tangible facilities (age of the building, size of the library, currency of the text books, etc.), had little effect on student performance.

Coleman (1966) also reported that children from disadvantaged groups (including blacks) were more external in their control beliefs. Locus or center of control became a critical variable. The unresponsive nature of their environments was cited as one of the reasons (see page 16).

Christopher Jencks, Inequality (1972), reanalyzed Coleman's EEOC data and also concluded that the achievement of lower class students, both black and white, was fairly strongly related to the socioeconomic level of their classmates. This usually meant that a student's achievement was also related to the race or social class of his classmates, since black classmates tended to be poor classmates, and white classmates tended to be more middle class or vice versa.

James S. Coleman, et. al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966)

Americans have long held the judicious investments in education could be a powerful vehicle for progressive social change. In line with this, the civil rights act of 1964 mandated a national survey to document differences in the educational resources of predominately white and predominately black schools, subsequently titled Equality of Educational Opportunity.

When James Coleman and his associates reported that differences in resources were not nearly as great as had been assumed, they generated confusion and disbelief.

When they reported that schooling was not an effective agency for upward social mobility, that schooling could not sever ties between race and subsequent attainments, and that there were no universally applicable educational reforms, They generated a firestorm of criticism.

Coleman's findings, along with those of Christopher Jencks and his associates in Inequality (1972), gave rise for a time to the judgment that schools don't make a difference. Clearly that judgment was incorrect. Schools make all kinds of differences, but Coleman and Jencks said they didn't make the kinds of differences we thought they did.

Interestingly, a year after Coleman's Eduality of Educational Opportunity, Blau and Duncan published The American Occupational Structure. They found that social mobility, both upward and downward, was commonplace, and that investments in education were the most powerful predictors of upward mobility.

The contradiction between Coleman and Blau and Duncan may be explained as follows: The mid-60's were a time when good jobs were being created in abundance, and they absorbed aspirants who had invested in education. This is what persuaded Blau and Duncan that eduction worked as advertised.

Coleman, however, found that when people moved up, their positions relative to those above and below them did not change. This is what persuaded Coleman that education did not work as expected.

It's worth noting that Coleman's research was, by most standards, a methodological mess. Nevertheless, his conclusion seems to have been the correct one; why else would be still struggling with non-sensical programs such as No Child Left Behind?