A New Look at the Coleman Report

Forty years ago over the Fourth of July weekend, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a report that would shake the beliefs upon which many educators and social reformers had staked their work.  Looking back at the report, titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity," but better known as the Coleman Report, Education Week (June 21, 2006; www.edweek.org) observed….

“…the mammoth 737-page study reached the unsettling conclusion that school might not be society’s great equalizer after all….  The report found that black children started out school trailing behind their white counterparts and essentially never caught up — even when their schools were as well-equipped as those with predominantly white enrollments.  What mattered more in determining children’s academic success, concluded the authors, was their family backgrounds.”

Four decades later, however, Geoffrey D. Borman, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, claims that the results of the Coleman Report would be “markedly different” if its data were reanalyzed using today’s more sophisticated techniques.  Borman gained access to the original Coleman data and reanalyzed the data collected on a subset of 56,000 9th graders in the original study.  Education Week summarized his conclusions…

“Contrary to the findings of the original report, Mr. Borman concluded that school factors matter a lot in determining how students fare academically.  The researchers for the reanalysis found they could attribute up to 40 percent of the variation in achievement differences between students to such factors, rather than to differences in student’s family backgrounds…. The reanalysis also suggested that whom students went to school with was more important than the color of their own skin or their families’ income levels.”

Borman observed, ”It’s clear from these analyses that racially segregated schools compromised African-American students’ ability to achieve educational outcomes comparable to their white peers.”

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