This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

In the half century since James Coleman and his colleagues first documented racial gaps in student achievement, education researchers have done little to help close those gaps. Often, it seems we are content to recapitulate Coleman’s findings. Every two years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a misnomer, as it turns out) reports the same disparities in achievement by race and ethnicity. We have debated endlessly and fruitlessly in our seminar rooms and academic journals about the effects of poverty, neighborhoods, and schools on these disparities. Meanwhile, the labor market metes out increasingly harsh punishments to each new cohort of students to emerge from our schools underprepared.

At the dawn of the War on Poverty, it was necessary for Coleman and his colleagues to document and describe the racial gaps in achievement they were intending to address. Five decades later, more description is unnecessary. The research community must find new ways to support state and local leaders as they seek solutions.

If the central purpose of education research is to identify solutions and provide options for policymakers and practitioners, one would have to characterize the past five decades as a near-complete failure. There is little consensus among policymakers and practitioners on the effectiveness of virtually any type of educational intervention. We have learned little about the most basic questions, such as how best to train or develop teachers. Even mundane decisions such as textbook purchases are rarely informed by evidence, despite the fact that the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) have funded curricula development and efficacy studies for years.

The 50th anniversary of the Coleman Report presents an opportunity to reflect on our collective failure and to think again about how we organize and fund education studies in the United States. In other fields, research has paved the way for innovation and improvement. In pharmaceuticals and medicine, for instance, it has netted us better health outcomes and increased longevity. Education research has produced no such progress. Why not?

In education, the medical research model—using federal dollars to build a knowledge base within a community of experts—has manifestly failed. The What Works Clearinghouse (a federally funded site for reviewing and summarizing education studies) is essentially a warehouse with no distribution system. The field of education lacks any infrastructure—analogous to the Food and Drug Administration or professional organizations recommending standards of care—for translating that knowledge into local action. In the United States, most consequential decisions in education are made at the state and local level, where leaders have little or no connection to expert knowledge. The top priority of  IES and NSF must be to build connections between scholarship and decisionmaking on the ground.

Better yet, the federal research effort should find ways to embed evidence gathering into the daily work of school districts and state agencies. If the goal is to improve outcomes for children, we must support local leaders in developing the habit of piloting and evaluating their initiatives before rolling them out broadly. No third-party study, no matter how well executed, can be as convincing as a school’s own data in persuading a leader to change course. Local leaders must see the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of their own initiatives, as reflected in the achievement of their own students.

Instead of funding the interests and priorities of the  academic community, the federal government needs to shift its focus toward enabling researchers to support a culture of evidence discovery within school agencies.

An Evolving Understanding of Causality

In enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress mandated a national study on racial disparities in educational opportunity—giving Coleman and his colleagues two years to produce a report. The tight deadline allowed no time to collect baseline achievement data and follow a cohort of children. Moreover, the team had neither the time nor the political mandate to assign groups of students to specific interventions in order to more thoroughly identify causal effects. Their only recourse was to use cross-sectional survey data to try to identify the mechanisms by which achievement gaps are produced and, presumably, might be reversed.

Given the time constraints, Coleman used the proportion of variance in student achievement associated with various educational inputs—such as schools, teacher characteristics, student-reported parental characteristics, and peer characteristics—as a type of divining rod for identifying promising targets for intervention. His research strategy, as applied to school effects, is summarized in the following passage from the report:

The question of first and most immediate importance to this survey in the study of school effects is how much variation exists between the achievement of students in one school and those of students in another. For if there were no variation between schools in pupils’ achievement, it would be fruitless to search for effects of different kinds of schools upon achievement [emphasis added].

In other words, Coleman’s strategy was to study how much the achievement of African American and white students varied depending on the school they attended, and then use that as an indicator of the potential role of schools in closing the gap.

This strategy had at least three flaws: First, if those with stronger educational supports at home and in society were concentrated in certain schools, the approach was bound to overstate the import of some factors and understate it for others. It may not have been the schools, but the students and social conditions surrounding them that differed.

Second, even if the reported variance did reflect the causal effects of schools, the  approach confuses prevalence with efficacy. Suppose there existed a very rare but extraordinarily successful school design. Schools would still be found to account for little of the variance in student performance, and we would overlook the evidence of schools as a lever for change. Given that African Americans (in northern cities and in the South) were just emerging from centuries of discrimination, it is unlikely that any 1960s school systems would have invested in school models capable of closing the achievement gap.

Third, the percentage-of-variance approach makes no allowance for “bang for the buck” or return on investment. Different interventions—such as new curricula or class-size reductions—have very different costs. As a result, within any of the sources of variance that Coleman studied, there may have been interventions that would have yielded social benefits of high value relative to their costs.

The fact that some of Coleman’s inferences have apparently been borne out does not mean that his analysis was ever a valid guide for action. (Even a coin flip will occasionally yield the right prediction.) For instance, because there was greater between-school variance in outcomes for African American students than for white students (especially in the South), Coleman concluded that black students would be more responsive to school differences. At first glance, Coleman’s original interpretation seems prescient: a number of studies—such as the Tennessee STAR experiment—have found impacts to be larger for African American students. However, such findings do not validate his method of inference. The between-school differences in outcomes Coleman saw might just as well have been due to other factors, such as varying degrees of discrimination in the rural South.

While there were instances where Coleman “got it right,” in other cases his percentage-of-variance metric pointed in the wrong direction. For example, in the 1966 report, the between-school variance in student test scores was larger for verbal skills and reading comprehension than for math. Coleman’s reasoning would have implied that verbal skills and reading would be more susceptible to school-based interventions than math would. However, over the past 50 years, studies have often shown just the opposite to be true. Interventions have had stronger effects on math achievement than on reading comprehension.

It was not until 2002, 36 years after the Coleman Report, that the education research enterprise finally began to adopt higher standards for inferring the causal effects of interventions. Beginning with the leadership of Russ Whitehurst at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES has begun shifting its grants and contracts away from correlational studies like Coleman’s and toward those that evaluate interventions with random-assignment and other quasi-experimental designs.

As long as that transition toward intervention studies continues, perhaps it is just a matter of time before effective interventions are found and disseminated. However, I am not so confident. The past 14 years have not produced a discernible impact on decisionmaking in states and school districts. Can those who argue for staying the course identify instances where a school district leader discontinued a program or policy because research had shown it to be ineffective, or adopted a new program or policy based on a report in the What Works Clearinghouse? If such examples exist, they are rare.

Federal Funds for Education Research

The Coleman Report is often described as “the largest and most important educational study ever conducted.” In fact, the 1966 study cost just $1.5 million, the equivalent of $11 million today. In 2015, the combined annual budget for the Institute of Education Sciences ($578  million) and the education research conducted by the National Science Foundation ($220 million) was equivalent to the cost of 70 Coleman Reports. Much more of that budget should be used to connect scholarship with practice and to support a culture of evidence gathering within school districts and state agencies.

As illustrated in Figure 1, the budget for the Institute of Education Sciences is allocated across four national centers. The largest is the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with a total annual budget of $278 million. Roughly half of that amount ($140 million) pays for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which provides a snapshot of achievement nationally and by state and urban district. Most of the remainder of the NCES budget goes to longitudinal surveys (such as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of the kindergarten class of 2011 and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009) and cross-sectional surveys (such as the Schools and Staffing Survey and National Household Educational Survey). Those surveys are designed and used by education researchers, primarily for correlational studies like Coleman’s.

The National Center for Education Research (NCER) is the second-largest center, with an annual budget of $180 million. NCER solicits proposals from researchers at universities and other organizations. In 2015, NCER received 700 applications and made approximately 120 grants. Proposals are evaluated by independent scholars in a competitive, peer-review process. NCER also funds postdoctoral and predoctoral training programs for education researchers. Given its review process, NCER’s funding priorities tend to reflect the interests of the academic community. The National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), analogous to NCER, funds studies on special education through solicited grant programs.

The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) manages the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)—an online library of research and information—and the What Works Clearinghouse. NCEE also funds evaluation studies of federal initiatives and specific interventions, such as professional development efforts. In principle, NCEE could fund evaluation studies for any intervention that states or districts might use federal funds to purchase.

The Disconnect between Research and Decisionmaking

While the federal government funds the lion’s share of education research, it is state and local governments that make most of the consequential decisions on such matters as curricula, teacher preparation, teacher training, and accountability. Unfortunately, the disconnect between the source of funding and those who could make practical use of the  findings means that the timelines of educational evaluations rarely align with the information needs of the decisionmakers (for instance, the typical evaluation funded by NCEE requires six years to complete). It also means that researchers, rather than policymakers and practitioners, are posing the questions, which are typically driven by debates within the academic disciplines rather than the considerations of educators. This is especially true at NCER, most of whose budget is devoted to funding proposals submitted and reviewed by researchers. At NCES as well, the survey data collection is guided by the interests of the academic community. (The NAEP, in contrast, is used by policymakers and researchers alike.)

As mentioned earlier, fields such as medical and pharmaceutical research have mechanisms in place for connecting evidence with on-the-ground decisionmaking. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration uses the evidence from clinical trials to regulate the availability of pharmaceuticals. And professional organizations draw from experts’ assessment of the latest findings to set standards of care in the various medical specialties.

To be sure, this system is not perfect. Doctors regularly prescribe medications for “off-label” uses, and it often takes many years for the latest standards of care to be adopted throughout the medical profession. Still, the FDA and the medical organizations do provide a means for federally funded studies to influence action on the ground.

Education lacks such mechanisms. There is no “FDA” for education, and there never will be. (In fact, the 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reduces the role of the federal government and returns power to states and districts.) Professional organizations of teachers, principals, and superintendents focus on collective bargaining and advocacy, not on setting evidence-based professional standards for educators.

By investing in a central body of evidence and building a network of experts across a range of research topics, such as math or reading instruction, IES and NSF are mimicking the medical model. However, the education research enterprise has no infrastructure for translating that expert opinion into local practice.

To be fair, IES under its latest director, John Easton, was aware of the disconnect between scholarship, policy, and practice and attempted to forge connections. NCES, NCER, and NCEE all provide some amount of support for state and local efforts, as Figure 1 highlights. For instance, the majority of NCEE’s budget ($54 million out of a total of $66 million) is used to fund 10 regional education labs around the country. Each of the labs has a governing board that includes representatives from state education agencies, directors of research and evaluation from local school districts, school superintendents, and school board members. However, the labs largely operate outside of the day-to-day workings of state and district agencies. New projects are proposed by the research firms holding the contracts and must be approved in a peer review process. For the most part, the labs are not building the capacity of districts and state agencies to gather evidence and measure impacts but are launching research projects that are disconnected from decisionmaking.

While NCEE is at least trying to serve the research needs of state and local government, less than 13 percent of the NCES and the NCER budgets is allocated to state and local support. NCES does oversee the State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grant program. With funding from that program, state agencies have been assembling data on students, teachers, and schools, and linking them over time, making it possible to measure growth in achievement. Those data systems—developed only in the past decade—will be vital to any future effort by states and districts to evaluate programs and initiatives. However, the annual budget for the SLDS program is just $35 million of the total NCES budget of $278 million. For the moment, the state longitudinal data systems are underused, serving primarily to populate school report-card data for accountability compliance.

NCER sets aside roughly $24 million per year for the program titled Evaluation of State and Local Programs and Policies, under which researchers can propose to partner with a state or local agency to evaluate an agency initiative. Such efforts are the kind that IES should be supporting more broadly. However, because the program is small and it is scholars who know the NCER application processes, such projects tend to be initiated by them rather than by the agencies themselves. It is not clear how much buy-in they have from agency leadership.

A New Emphasis on State and Local Partnerships

IES must redirect its efforts away from funding the interests and priorities of the research community and toward building an evidence-based culture within districts and state agencies. To do so, IES needs to create tighter connections between academics and decisionmakers at the state and local levels. The objective should be to make it faster and cheaper (and, therefore, much more common) for state and local leaders to pilot and evaluate their initiatives before rolling them out broadly.

Taking a cue from NCER’s program for partnerships with state and local policymakers, IES should offer grants for researchers to evaluate pilot programs in collaboration with such partners. But to ensure the buy-in of leadership, state and local governments should be asked to shoulder a small portion (say, 15 percent) of the costs. In addition, one of the criteria for evaluating proposals should be the demonstrated commitment of other districts and state agencies to participate in steering committee meetings. Such representation would serve two purposes: it would increase the likelihood that promising programs could be generalized to other districts and states, and it would lower the likelihood that negative results would be buried by the sponsoring agency. As the quality and number of such proposals increased, NCER could reallocate its research funding toward more partnerships of this kind.

However, if the goal is to reach 50 states and thousands of school districts, our current model of evaluation is too costly and too slow. If it requires six years and $12 million to evaluate an intervention, IES will run out of money long before the field runs out of solutions to test. We need a different model, one that relies less on one-time, customized analyses. For instance, universities and research contractors should be asked to submit proposals for helping state agencies and school districts not just in evaluating a specific program but in building the capacity of school agencies for piloting and evaluating initiatives on an ongoing basis. The state longitudinal databases give the education sector a resource that has no counterpart in the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Beginning with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, U.S. students in grades 3 through 8 have been tested once per year in math and English. That requirement will continue under the 2015 reauthorization bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Once a set of teachers or students are chosen for an intervention, the state databases could be used to match them with a group of students and teachers who have similar prior achievement and demographic characteristics and do not receive the intervention. By monitoring the subsequent achievement of the two groups, states and districts could gauge program impacts more quickly and at lower cost. The most promising interventions could later be confirmed with randomized field trials. However, recent studies using randomized admission lotteries at charter schools and the random assignment of teachers has suggested that simple, low-cost methods, when they control for students’ prior achievement and characteristics, can yield estimates of teacher and school effects that are similar to what one observes with a randomized field trial. Perhaps nonexperimental methods will yield unbiased estimates on other interventions as well.

In addition, IES should invite universities and research firms to submit proposals for convening state legislators, school board members, and other local stakeholders to learn about existing data on effective and ineffective programs in a particular area, such as preschool education or teacher preparation. IES should experiment with a range of strategies to engage with state and local agencies, and as effective ones are found, more of its budget should be allocated to such efforts.

Although the federal government provides the lion’s share of research funding in education, state and local governments make a crucial contribution. Until recently, the primary costs of many education studies—including the Coleman Report—derived from measuring student outcomes and, in the case of longitudinal studies, hiring survey research firms to follow students and teachers over time. With the states investing $1.7 billion annually on their assessment programs, much of that cost is now borne by states and districts.

Reason for Optimism

Fifty years after the Coleman Report, racial gaps in achievement remain shamefully large. Part of the blame rests with the research community for its failure to connect with state and local decisionmakers. Especially now that the federal government is returning power to states under Every Student Succeeds, federal efforts should be refocused to more effectively help states and districts develop and test their initiatives. The stockpiles of data on student achievement accumulating within state agencies and districts offer a new opportunity to engage with decisionmakers. Local leaders are more likely to act based on findings from their own data than on any third-party report they may find in the What Works Clearinghouse. If the research community were to combine IES’s post-2002 emphasis on evaluating interventions with more creative strategies for engaging state and local decisionmakers, U.S. education could begin to make more significant progress.

There is reason for optimism. Indeed, the Coleman Report’s conclusion that schools had little hope of closing the achievement gap has been proven unfounded. In recent years, several studies using randomized admission lotteries have found large and persistent impacts on student achievement, even for middle school and high school students. For instance, students admitted by lottery to a group of charter schools in Boston increased their math achievement on the state’s standardized test by 0.25 standard deviations per year in middle school and high school. Large impacts were also observed on the state’s English test: 0.14 standard deviations per year in middle school and 0.27 standard deviations per year in high school. Similarly, a Chicago study of an intensive math-tutoring intervention with low-income minority students in 9th and 10th grades suggested impacts of 0.19 to 0.31 standard deviations—closing a quarter to a third of the achievement gap in one year. Now that we know that some school-based interventions can shrink the achievement gap, we need scholars to collaborate with school districts around the country to develop, test, and scale up the promising ones. Only then will we succeed in closing the gaps that Coleman documented 50 years ago.

Thomas J. Kane is the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. 

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

When I started graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1979, I knew James Coleman by reputation only. As a college student in sociology, I had read about his work on Equality of Educational Opportunity and the controversy it had generated. When I got to know Coleman as a teacher, a mentor, and a colleague, the experience was transformative.

In the introductory course “Sociological Inquiry,” which Coleman co-taught, I saw that his approach to teaching sociology was unique. First, he expected his students to produce clear, concise writing on real social problems, omitting jargon and grand, abstract theory. Second, he was intrigued by the realities of society, and found comparative-historical and ethnographic approaches to sociology just as engaging as the large-scale quantitative data analyses and mathematical formulations for which he was famous. Third, he conveyed a strong sense that something important was at stake in sociological research, that understanding what was going on in the world made a difference, and that getting it right was imperative.

I had initially planned to earn a master’s degree and teach social science in high school. But by the end of the first quarter, I realized that my graduate program in the sociology of education had little to do with teaching high school and everything to do with learning how to conduct rigorous social research from real masters of the craft. I also realized that I needed money to live on. In January 1980, I went to see Coleman to inquire about a job. In my interview, he asked about my undergraduate studies, and found it genuinely interesting that I had spent four years reading Durkheim, Sartre, Marx, Weber, and Freud. He never mentioned probability, statistics, calculus, or programming—but he must have surmised that I had little of the technical knowledge and skills so central to his research. Nor did he ask for my views on the proper role of private schools in American education, or even how I thought private schools compared with public schools.

But Coleman hired me, and before long he asked me to work with him on one of five reports commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to conduct baseline analyses of the data derived from the “High School and Beyond” surveys. Our report would center on a comparison of public and private high schools.

Coleman had a relentless work ethic and adherence to deadlines that swept the whole project along through weeks of outlines, analyses, informal presentations, drafts, rewrites, and more rewrites. He would go through every detail of the graduate assistants’ drafts, and sometimes, particularly in the early stages, he would restructure and rewrite nearly every paragraph and sentence. His approach and standards were clearly illustrated with a lot of red ink.

Late one night I mentioned to Coleman that I was having “a little trouble” keeping up with my graduate courses while doing all of this. He expressed genuine sympathy but pointed out that I was learning much more about social research on his project, and that I shouldn’t worry if some of my coursework wasn’t as good as I’d like it to be: “This work will get you through grad school just fine,” I recall him saying. “Remember that the best graduate student is one who is finished.”

When our report on public and private schools became a lightning rod for policy and research debates, Coleman placed his graduate students squarely in the middle of the storm, expecting us to participate in conferences and symposia. At the same time, he was a strong advocate of integrating the research experience with the graduate school requirements of exams, course papers, and theses. When I asked him if he thought it was acceptable for me to build my master’s thesis around a chapter in the 1980 Public and Private Schools report on which I’d worked especially long and hard, he responded, “The research work you’re doing isn’t a sideshow, it’s the core. The more you can build on it, the better.” A few years later, as I began to develop my doctoral dissertation, he gave me essentially the same advice.

Today, James Coleman is remembered as an extraordinary thinker and empirical researcher. To those of us who were lucky enough to work and study with him, his abundant generosity in sharing his expertise and knowledge is just as memorable.

Tom Hoffer is a senior fellow in the Department of Education and Child Development of NORC at the University of Chicago.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

On the weekend before the Fourth of July 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a 737-page report that summarized one of the most comprehensive studies of American education ever conducted. Encompassing some 3,000 schools, nearly 600,000 students, and thousands of teachers, and produced by a team led by Johns Hopkins University sociologist James S. Coleman, “Equality of Educational Opportunity” was met with a palpable silence. Indeed, the timing of the release relied on one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook—announcing unfavorable results on a major holiday, when neither the American public nor the news media are paying much attention.

To the dismay of federal officials, the Coleman Report had concluded that “schools are remarkably similar in the effect they have on the achievement of their pupils when the socio-economic background of the students is taken into account.” Or, as one sociologist supposedly put it to the scholar-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Have you heard what Coleman is finding? It’s all family.”

The Coleman Report’s conclusions concerning the influences of home and family were at odds with the paradigm of the day. The politically inconvenient conclusion that family background explained more about a child’s achievement than did school resources ran contrary to contemporary priorities, which were focused on improving educational inputs such as school expenditure levels, class size, and teacher quality. Indeed, less than a year before the Coleman Report’s release, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, dedicating federal funds to disadvantaged students through a Title 1 program that still remains the single largest investment in K–12 education, currently reaching approximately 21 million students at an annual cost of about $14.4 billion.

So what exactly had Coleman uncovered? Differences among schools in their facilities and staffing “are so little related to achievement levels of students that, with few exceptions, their effect fails to appear even in a survey of this magnitude,” the authors concluded.

Zeroing In on Family Background

Coleman’s advisory panel refused to sign off on the report, citing “methodological concerns” that continue to reverberate. Subsequent research has corroborated the finding that family background is strongly correlated with student performance in school. A correlation between family background and educational and economic success, however, does not tell us whether the relationship between the two is independent of any school impacts. The associations between home life and school performance that Coleman documented may actually be driven by disparities in school or neighborhood quality rather than family influences. Often, families choose their children’s schools by selecting their community or neighborhood, and children whose parents select good schools may benefit as a consequence. In the elusive quest to uncover the determinants of students’ academic success, therefore, it is important to rely on experimental or quasi-experimental research that identifies effects of family background that operate separately and apart from any school effects.

In this essay I look at four family variables that may influence student achievement: family education, family income, parents’ criminal activity, and family structure. I then consider the ways in which schools can offset the effects of these factors.

Parental Education. Better-educated parents are more likely to consider the quality of the local schools when selecting a neighborhood in which to live. Once their children enter a school, educated parents are also more likely to pay attention to the quality of their children’s teachers and may attempt to ensure that their children are adequately served. By participating in parent-teacher conferences and volunteering at school, they may encourage staff to attend to their children’s individual needs.

In addition, highly educated parents are more likely than their less-educated counterparts to read to their children. Educated parents enhance their children’s development and human capital by drawing on their own advanced language skills in communicating with their children. They are more likely to pose questions instead of directives and employ a broader and more complex vocabulary. Estimates suggest that, by age 3, children whose parents receive public assistance hear less than a third of the words encountered by their higher-income peers. As a result, the children of highly educated parents are capable of more complex speech and have more extensive vocabularies before they even start school.

Highly educated parents can also use their social capital to promote their children’s development. A cohesive social network of well-educated individuals socializes children to expect that they too will attain high levels of academic success. It can also transmit cultural capital by teaching children the specific behaviors, patterns of speech, and cultural references that are valued by the educational and professional elite.

In most studies, parental education has been identified as the single strongest correlate of children’s success in school, the number of years they attend school, and their success later in life. Because parental education influences children’s learning both directly and through the choice of a school, we do not know how much of the correlation can be attributed to direct impact and how much to school-related factors. Teasing out the distinct causal impact of parental education is tricky, but given the strong association between parental education and student achievement in every industrialized society, the direct impact is undoubtedly substantial. Furthermore, quasi-experimental strategies have found positive effects of parental education on children’s outcomes. For instance, one study of Korean children adopted into American families shows that the adoptive mother’s education level is significantly associated with the child’s educational attainment.

Family Income. As with parental education, family income may have a direct impact on a child’s academic outcomes, or variations in achievement could simply be a function of the school the child attends: parents with greater financial resources can identify communities with higher-quality schools and choose more-expensive neighborhoods—the very places where good schools are likely to be. More-affluent parents can also use their resources to ensure that their children have access to a full range of extracurricular activities at school and in the community.

But it’s not hard to imagine direct effects of income on student achievement. Parents who are struggling economically simply don’t have the time or the wherewithal to check homework, drive children to summer camp, organize museum trips, or help their kids plan for college. Working multiple jobs or inconvenient shifts makes it hard to dedicate time for family dinners, enforce a consistent bedtime, read to infants and toddlers, or invest in music lessons or sports clubs. Even small differences in access to the activities and experiences that are known to promote brain development can accumulate, resulting in a sizable gap between two groups of children defined by family circumstances.

It is challenging to find rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental evidence to disentangle the direct effects of home life from the effects of the school a family selects. While Coleman claimed that family and peers had an effect on student achievement that was distinct from the influence of schools or neighborhoods, his research design was inadequate to support this conclusion. All he was able to show was that family characteristics had a strong correlation with student achievement.

Separating out the independent effects of family education and family income is also difficult. We do not know if low income and financial instability alone can adversely affect children’s behavior, emotional stability, and educational outcomes. Evidence from the negative-income-tax experiments carried out by the federal government between 1968 and 1982 showed only mixed effects of income on children’s outcomes, and subsequent work by the University of Chicago’s Susan Mayer cast doubt on any causal relationship between parental income and child well-being. However, a recent study by Gordon Dahl and Lance Lochner, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in the Earned Income Tax Credit, provides convincing evidence that increases in family income can lift the achievement levels of students raised in low-income working families, even holding other factors constant.

Parental Incarceration. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 2.3 percent of U.S. children have a parent in federal or state prison. Black children are 7.5 times more likely and Hispanic children 2.5 times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent. Incarceration removes a wage earner from the home, lowering household income. One estimate suggests that two-thirds of incarcerated fathers had provided the primary source of family income before their imprisonment. As a result, children with a parent in prison are at greater risk of homelessness, which in turn can have grave consequences: the receipt of social and medical services and assignment to a traditional public school all require a stable home address. The emotional strain of a parent’s incarceration can also take its toll on a child’s achievement in school.

Quantifying the causal effects of parental incarceration has proven challenging, however. While correlational research finds that the odds of finishing high school are 50 percent lower for children with an incarcerated parent, parents who are in prison may have less education, lower income, more limited access to quality schools, and other attributes that adversely affect their children’s success in school. A recent review of 22 studies of the effect of parental incarceration on child well-being concludes that, to date, no research in this area has been able to leverage a natural experiment to produce quasi-experimental estimates. Just how large a causal impact parental incarceration has on children remains an important but largely uncharted topic for future research.

Family Structure. While most American children still live with both of their biological or adoptive parents, family structures have become more diverse in recent years, and living arrangements have grown increasingly complex. In particular, the two-parent family is vanishing among the poor.

Approximately two-fifths of U.S. children experience dissolution in their parents’ union by age 15, and two-thirds of this group will see their mother form a new union within six years. Many parents today choose cohabitation over marriage, but the instability of such partnerships is even higher. In the case of nonmarital births, estimates say that 56 percent of fathers will be living away from their child by his or her third birthday. These patterns can have serious implications for a child’s well-being and school success (see Figure 1). Single parents have less time for the enriching activities that Robert Putnam, Harvard professor of public policy, has called “Goodnight Moon” time, after the celebrated bedtime storybook by Margaret Wise Brown. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 1- to 2-year-olds who live with two married parents are read to, on average, 8.5 times per week. The corresponding statistic for their peers living with a single parent is 5.7 times. And it’s likely that dual-parent families in general have many other attributes that affect their children’s educational attainment, mental health, labor market performance, and family formation. More-rigorous quasi-experimental evidence also documents significant negative effects of a father’s absence on children’s educational attainment and social and emotional development, leading to increases in antisocial behavior. These effects are largest for boys.

Recent research by MIT economist David Autor and colleagues generates quasi-experimental estimates of family background by simultaneously accounting for the impact of neighborhood environment and school quality to investigate why boys fare worse than girls in disadvantaged families. Comparing boys to their sisters in a data set that includes more than 1 million children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002, the authors demonstrate a persistent gender gap in graduation and truancy rates, incidence of behavioral and cognitive disabilities, and standardized test scores.

Policies to Counter Family Disadvantage

Policymakers who are weighing competing approaches to countering the influence of family disadvantage face a tough choice: Should they try to improve schools (to overcome the effects of family background) or directly address the effects of family background?

The question is critical. If family background is decisive regardless of the quality of the school, then the road to equal opportunity will be long and hard. Increasing the level of parental education is a multigenerational challenge, while reducing the rising disparities in family income would require massive changes in public policy, and reversing the growth in the prevalence of single-parent families would also prove challenging. And, while efforts to reduce incarceration rates are afoot, U.S. crime rates remain among the highest in the world. Given these obstacles, if schools themselves can offset differences in family background, the chances of achieving a more egalitarian society greatly improve.

For these reasons, scholars need to continue to tackle the causality question raised by Coleman’s pathbreaking study. Although the obstacles to causal inference are steep, education researchers should focus on quasi-experimental approaches relying on sibling comparisons, changes in state laws over time, or policy quirks—such as policy implementation timelines that vary across municipalities—that facilitate research opportunities.

Given what is currently known, a holistic approach that simultaneously attempts to strengthen both home and school influences in disadvantaged communities is worthy of further exploration. A number of contemporary and past initiatives point to the potential of this comprehensive approach.

Promise Neighborhoods

“Promise Neighborhoods,” which are funded by a grant program of the U.S. Department of Education, serve distressed communities by delivering a continuum of services through multiple government agencies, nonprofit organizations, churches, and agencies of civil society. These neighborhood initiatives use “wraparound” programs that take a holistic approach to improving the educational achievement of low-income students. The template for the approach is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a 97-block neighborhood in New York City that combines charter schooling with a full package of social, medical, and community support services. The programs and resources are available to the families at no cost.

Services available in the HCZ include a Baby College, where expectant parents can learn about child development and gain parenting skills; two charter schools and a college success office, which provides individualized counseling and guidance to graduates on university campuses across the country; free legal services, tax preparation, and financial counseling; employment workshops and job fairs; a 50,000-square-foot facility that offers recreational and nutrition classes; and a food services team that provides breakfast, lunch, and a snack every school day to more than 2,000 students.

Research by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer demonstrates that the impact of attending an HCZ charter middle school on students’ test scores is comparable to the impressive effects seen at  high-performing charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (known as KIPP schools). Students who win admission by lottery and attend an HCZ school also have higher on-time graduation rates than their peers and are less likely to become teen parents or land in prison. Although some community services are available to HCZ residents only, results show that students who live outside the HCZ experience similar benefits simply from attending the Promise Academy. That is, Dobbie and Fryer do not find any additional benefits associated with the resident-only supplementary services that distinguish the Promise Neighborhoods approach.   (In many instances, the mean scores for children who live within the zone are higher than those for nonresidents, but these differences are not statistically significant.)

There are two caveats to keep in mind in regard to this finding that support the case for continued experimentation with and evaluation of Promise Neighborhoods. First, many of the wraparound services offered in the HCZ are provided through the school and are thus available to HCZ residents and nonresidents alike. For instance, all Promise Academy students receive free nutritious meals; medical, dental, and mental health services; and food baskets for their parents. The services that nonresidents cannot access are things such as tax preparation and financial advising, parenting classes through the Baby College, and job fairs. It may be that both groups of students are accessing the most beneficial supplementary services.

The second caveat is that the HCZ is a “pipeline” model that aims to transform an entire community by targeting services across many different domains. Therefore, we may have to wait until a cohort of students has progressed through that pipeline before we can get a full picture of how these comprehensive services have benefited them. The first cohort to complete the entire HCZ program is expected to graduate from high school in 2020.

The main drawback of the Promise Neighborhoods model is its high cost. To cover the expenses of running the Promise Academy Charter School and the afterschool and wraparound programs, the HCZ spends about $19,272 per pupil. While this price tag is about $3,100 higher than the median per-pupil cost in New York State, it is still about $14,000 lower than what is spent by a district at the 95th percentile. If future research can demonstrate that the HCZ positively influences longer-term outcomes such as college graduation rates, income, and mortality, the model will hold tremendous potential that may well justify its costs.

Early Childhood Education

Early childhood programs can provide a source of enrichment for needy children, ensuring them a solid start in a world where those with inadequate education are increasingly marginalized. Neuroscientists estimate that about 90 percent of the brain develops between birth and age 5, supporting the case for expanded access to early childhood programs. While the United States spends abundantly on elementary and secondary schoolchildren ($12,401 per student per year in 2013–14 dollars), it devotes dramatically less than other wealthy countries to children in their first few years of life.

Four years before James Coleman released his report, a group of underprivileged, at-risk toddlers at the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly selected for a preschool intervention that consisted of daily coaching from highly trained teachers as well as visits to their homes. After just one year, those in the experimental treatment group were registering IQ scores 10 points higher than their peers in the control group. The test-score effects had disappeared by age 10, but follow-up analyses of the Perry Preschool treatment group revealed impressive longer-term outcomes that included a significant increase in their high-school graduation rate and the probability of earning at least $20,000 a year as adults, as well as a 19 percent decrease in their probability of being arrested five or more times. Similar small-scale, “hothouse” preschool experiments in Chicago, upstate New York, and North Carolina have all shown comparable benefits.

Unfortunately, attempts to scale up such programs have proved challenging. Studies of the Head Start program, for instance, have uncovered mixed evidence of its effectiveness. Modest impacts on students’ cognitive skills mostly fade out by the end of 1st grade. Such results have led many to question whether quality can be consistently maintained when a program such as Head Start is implemented broadly. Indeed, recent research has revealed considerable differences in Head Start’s effectiveness from site to site. Variation in inputs and practices among Head Start centers explains about a third of these differences, a finding that may offer clues as to the contextual factors that influence the program’s varying levels of success.

Although the policymaker’s challenge is to figure out how to expand access to such programs  while preserving quality, evidence suggests that investment in early childhood education has the potential to significantly address disparities that arise from family disadvantage.

Small Schools of Choice 

Traditional public schools assign a child to a given school based exclusively on his family’s place of residence. As Coleman pointed out, residential assignment promotes stratification between schools by family background, because it creates incentives for families of means to move to the “good” school districts. Under this system, schools cannot serve as the equal-opportunity engines of our society. Instead, residential assignment often replicates within the school system the same family advantages and disadvantages that exist in the community.

The most promising social policy for combating the effects of family background, then, could well be the expansion of programs that  allow families to choose schools without regard to their neighborhood of residence.  An analysis of more than 100 small schools of choice in New York City between 2002 and 2008 revealed a 9.5 percent increase in the graduation rate of a group of educationally and economically disadvantaged students, at no extra cost to the city. Positive results have also been observed with respect to student test scores for charter schools in New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.

Small schools of choice might also build the social capital that Coleman considered crucial for student success. First, small schools are well positioned to build a strong sense of community through the development of robust student-teacher, parent-teacher, and student-student relationships. Helping students to cultivate dense networks of social relationships better equips them to handle life’s challenges and is particularly vital given the disintegration of many social structures today. While schools may not be able to compensate fully for the disruptive effects of a dysfunctional or unstable family, a robust school culture can transform the “social ecology” of a disadvantaged child.

A small school of choice also engenders a voluntary community that comes together over strong ties and shared values. Typically, schools of choice feature a clearly defined mission and set of core values, which may derive from religious traditions and beliefs. The Notre Dame ACE Academy schools, for instance, strive for the twin goals of preparing students for college and for heaven. By explicitly defining their mission, schools can appeal to families who share their values and are eager to contribute to the growth of the community. A focused mission also helps school administrators attract like-minded teachers and thus promotes staff collegiality. A warm and cohesive teaching staff can be particularly beneficial for children from unstable homes, whose parents may not regularly express emotional closeness or who fail to communicate effectively. Exposure to well-functioning adult role models at school might compensate for such deficits, promoting well-being and positive emotional development.

Implications for Policy

Determining the causal relationships between family background and child well-being has posed a daunting challenge. Family characteristics are often tightly correlated with features of the neighborhood environment, making it difficult to determine the independent influences of each. But getting a solid understanding of causality is critical to the debate over whether to intervene inside or outside of school.

The results of quasi-experimental research, as well as common sense, tell us that children who grow up in stable, well-resourced families have significant advantages over their peers who do not—including access to better schools and other educational services. Policies that place schools at center stage have the potential to disrupt the cycle of economic disadvantage to ensure that children born into poverty aren’t excluded from the American dream.

In opening our eyes to the role of family background in the creation of inequality, Coleman wasn’t suggesting that we shrug our shoulders and learn to live with it. But in attacking the achievement gap, as his research would imply, we need to mobilize not only our schools but also other institutions. Promise Neighborhoods offer cradle-to-career supports to help children successfully navigate the challenges of growing up. Early childhood programs provide intervention at a critical time, when children’s brains take huge leaps in development. Finally, small schools of choice can help to build a strong sense of community, which could particularly benefit inner-city neighborhoods where traditional institutions have been disintegrating.

Schools alone can’t level the vast inequalities that students bring to the schoolhouse door, but a combination of school programs, social services, community organizations, and civil society could make a major difference. Ensuring that all kids, regardless of family background, have a decent chance of doing better than their parents is an important societal and policy goal. Innovative approaches such as those outlined here could help us achieve it.

Anna J. Egalite is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at the College of Education, North Carolina State University. 

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

When I reflect on James Coleman and the “Equality of Educational Opportunity”study (EEOS), I am immediately inclined to quote Ecclesiasticus 44:1: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Coleman is the father of much social scientific analysis of education. There is a great deal to admire in his work, and, thus, this essay begins in praise. Remember that, reader, because—though I might wish otherwise—it cannot continue in a strain of unmitigated praise throughout. First the praise, however.

Fifty years on, the sheer scale and thoroughness of the EEOS remain mind-boggling. Despite all of today’s talk of “big data,” there is no contemporary survey-based data set of education that is on a comparable scale to the EEOS. It dwarfs recent surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The workhorse version of the EEOS contains 567,148 students, 44,193 teachers, and 3,941 principals. In comparison, today’s Education Longitudinal Study comprises only about 15,000 students in 750 schools. The accomplishment that the EEOS represents remains immense. Perhaps 1960s scholars had no sense of limits and thus conquered all? Perhaps 1960s survey respondents were incredibly cooperative? In any case, if Coleman were to return in ghostly form and ask me to lead such a study today, I would certainly light all the lamps in the hope of dispelling his apparition.

Prior to the EEOS, government agencies gathered data, but they used it almost exclusively to publish aggregate statistics. The EEOS aspired to analyze student data in a deeper way, by correlating achievement and other factors at an individual level. In so doing, it illuminated a world of student heterogeneity that had remained obscure until then. It is not merely that the EEOS data were subsequently used in a great deal of research; it is that such research and much research based on other data would have remained unimaginable without the EEOS. Here endeth the first note of praise.

I am too young to have known Coleman personally as a scholar, but I have heard from numerous scholars who did know him that he commenced the EEOS thinking that it would demonstrate, among other things, the importance of school inputs: teacher characteristics, class size, and the like. Of course, it did nothing of the sort. Yet, despite my arguing below that much of Coleman’s analysis was not only wrong but generated misunderstandings that remain sadly pervasive today among naive scholars, I admire Coleman’s courage and empiricism. Given his understanding of statistics and social scientific analysis, he let his conclusions accurately reflect what he believed he had found. About how many social scientists can we say something comparable? So many scholars enter studies with preconceived notions and force those same notions out at the exit, allowing no room in between for true empiricism to alter the preordained conclusions. Coleman was a true social scientist for his day, and for more than that we cannot ask. Here endeth the second note of praise.

A Flawed Analysis

Coleman did nearly all of his work before the advent of the causal revolution in social science and seems not to have anticipated it. Like many other statistically minded social scientists of his time, he thought of regression and analysis of variance as tools that did not merely break an outcome, such as achievement, into partial correlations. He thought these tools generated coefficients that magically represented causal effects. Thus, although Coleman’s descriptions of data may be praiseworthy, his analysis and interpretation are wrong. More precisely, although his conclusions may be correct (some are, in my estimation), they are unwarranted based on his research.

It is worthwhile elaborating on the last point. The problem with Coleman’s work and much of the work spawned by the EEOS is not that it necessarily came to the wrong conclusions, but that the methods were so flawed that the conclusions were unjustified. It is far more intellectually damaging to scholarship to push a conclusion that happens to be right but is unwarranted based on the research than it is to push a conclusion that is wrong but is based on sound methods and that went astray for some extraordinary reason (such as data that were accidentally jumbled without the researcher’s knowledge). The latter type of error is easily corrected by other later scholars, who adopt sound methods. The former type of error produces scholarly and intellectual confusion for decades, as Coleman did, and to some extent still does.

To see the flaws in Coleman’s reasoning, consider an archetypal analysis in the style of the EEOS and the studies it spawned. It is a regression in which student achievement is explained by a combination of school inputs (resources such as funding per student, class size, teacher qualifications, etc.) and the characteristics of peers (percentage of schoolmates who are white and who are black, etc.), families (race, ethnicity, parents’ education, number of siblings, etc.), and neighborhoods (the share of households who rent versus own, etc.). Coleman found that family and peer characteristics explained a statistically and consequentially significant amount of variation in the measure of achievement. School inputs and neighborhood characteristics did so to a much lesser extent. So far as an analysis of variance goes, all this is correct. But Coleman then concluded that families and peers had an effect on achievement that schools and neighborhoods did not.

Coleman’s conclusion was wholly unjustified, because little or none of the EEOS variation in families, schools, peers, or neighborhoods came from true experiments, policy experiments, natural experiments, or any other plausibly exogenous source. If the EEOS had wanted to draw conclusions about the effects of families, schools, peers, and neighborhoods, it would have needed to conduct or locate experiments for each variable whose effect it wanted to identify. For instance, to identify the effect of family income, researchers need an experiment in which some families are arbitrarily given an income shock (as in the Income Maintenance Experiments of 1968 through 1979). To identify the effect of school spending, they need credibly exogenous variation in districts’ funding (such as sometimes arises through quirks in a state’s school-finance formula). To identify the effects of peers, they need to find situations in which students have been arbitrarily or randomly shifted among classrooms or schools. For example, Gretchen Weingarth and I, in “Taking Race Out of the Equation: School Reassignment and the Structure of Peer Effects,” exploit random variation in school assignments generated by Wake County’s efforts to keep its schools similarly diverse on racial and economic grounds. To identify the effect of neighborhoods, researchers need something like the Moving to Opportunity experiment, in which randomly selected low-income households were induced to reside in different neighborhoods.

The Wrong Takeaways

It would have been very difficult for the EEOS to satisfy all of these needs at the same time, but this is what would have been necessary to justify its conclusions. In retrospect, it is painfully obvious that much of the debate touched off by the Coleman Report was not necessary at all. Scholars were debating conclusions that were unwarranted in the first place, and their debates were often as uninformed by causal methods as the EEOS conclusions.

To see how problematic Coleman’s lack of differentiation between causality and correlation was, consider one of the most often cited EEOS “takeaways”: families matter a great deal, and schools do not. Given its analysis, the Coleman Report should have concluded only that family characteristics explain achievement through

1) direct channels (for instance, the educated parent reads to her children in a more instructive manner);

2) the indirect channel that works through families’ choices of schools, in which the school characteristics relevant to achievement are more fully captured by what parents observe than by the short list of school descriptors in the regression (for instance, well-educated parents choose teachers with higher value-added); or

3) other indirect channels that work through families’ choices of neighborhoods, extracurricular activities, religious participation, and so on.

Since people tend to become confused about the direct and indirect channels and how they relate to a regression, it is worthwhile elaborating on the statements in the previous paragraph. First, why is an indirect channel that works through family choices not equivalent to the direct channel? (That is, if something is the result of family choices, how is this different from saying that it is something that the family itself does?) The indirect channels are different because, if we shut down the choices, families would be unable to generate the same effects on their own. For instance, suppose that our society disallowed schools with a sound curriculum (as China arguably did during the Cultural Revolution). Or, suppose that there were no teachers with high value-added because selection or preparation of teachers was extremely poor. Then, regardless of how advantaged parents were, they would find it hard to generate high achievement in their children. That is, it is very difficult for good parents to be good if we preclude their access to good schools and teachers. Better parents can make better choices only if those choices are available to them.

Second, why did I specify school characteristics “relevant to achievement [that] are more fully captured by what parents observe than by the short list of school descriptors”? Regressions only operate with the measures we give them, and these measures are typically crude and erroneous versions of the true variables we wish to capture. For instance, in EEOS, school quality is measured by variables like teachers’ years of experience that are much coarser (and different) than what a parent observes when she interacts with her child’s teacher, principal, and school. The point is that the regression will award the explanatory power to whichever measures best capture the variation in the true variables. The regression does not care whether the measure is labeled “family” or “school.” If a family measure captures school quality better than the school measures, the regression assigns the schools’ explanatory power to the family. I suggest that, as imperfect as family measures are, they may be more correlated with both the true family measures and the true school qualities than are the crude school measures.

My teacher example was deliberate. Coleman concluded that teachers did not matter because their characteristics (including years of experience in teaching; localism of teacher; teacher’s own education; and vocabulary score) explained only a small amount of the variation in achievement. This false analysis was repeated again and again by later scholars who ran Coleman-like regressions. This finding puzzled families because they believed that some teachers were much better than others. Today, we know that the families were right and Coleman was wrong. Numerous rigorous analyses of value-added demonstrate that teachers matter a great deal. How could Coleman have misled so many scholars? He failed to see that “good” families might be those who could discern which teachers were effective and get their children into those teachers’ classes. Thus, part of the apparent family effect was really a choose-effective-teachers effect. Indeed, since parents have opportunities to observe teachers directly, no one should be surprised if parents’ characteristics are more correlated with teachers’ value-added than are coarse background measures. But because Coleman did not think about selection, he thought that he had rigorously tested teachers’ effects. He was wrong, and his specious conclusions may have misdirected policy for decades. Only very recently have policymakers begun to focus on identifying and retaining teachers with high value-added.

Similarly, Coleman’s conclusion that schools did not matter may have forestalled wise policymaking for decades. Rigorous lottery-based evaluations now consistently suggest that charter schools with no-excuses philosophies can greatly raise the achievement of disadvantaged urban students. Yet the vast majority of these students still do not have the opportunity to choose such schools, and Coleman is part of the reason they do not. Because he did not consider the possibility that advantaged children might have had high achievement precisely because their parents could choose good schools and ditch bad schools, policymakers felt comfortable denying school choice to disadvantaged families for decades. Perhaps if he had taken selection seriously, school choice experiments might have taken place much earlier.

Yet another example of the problems caused by Coleman’s lack of differentiation between causality and correlation is another of the most-cited EEOS takeaways: minority children were better-off in desegregated schools. Coleman’s interpretation was that this phenomenon occurred through peer effects: black students’ achievement improved when they had white classmates. This second conclusion had an enormous influence on policy, spawned any number of subsequent studies, and was the topic of much of Coleman’s own post-EEOS research. But nothing in the EEOS warranted the conclusion in the first place. The study did not rely on policy experiments such as students being quasi-randomly assigned. Instead, it relied on existing school environments that were the result of individual household choices. While it is possible that the black children in integrated schools had higher achievement because their white classmates causally affected them, it is just as possible that the sort of black families who were motivated and able to live in integrated neighborhoods were advantaged in numerous hard-to-observe ways. This is especially significant because the EEOS data predate nearly all desegregation orders that were sufficiently mandatory to have generated any quasi-random variation. Instead, the EEOS reflects an era when desegregation took voluntary forms. Looking back, it is obvious that this early and voluntary desegregation was dominated by selection, that is, families’ own choices. It is not that schools desegregated by literally hand selecting black families, but the mechanisms in place favored black families who were unusually prepared to live with whites. Often, the blacks were professionals who already spent most of their working lives among whites, had white friends, and participated in mixed-race church and social groups. At least that was the case in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the community in which I attended a voluntarily integrated school district.

Further, my own research, documented in the paper mentioned above, demonstrates that, when students are randomly assigned to schools, it is the achievement and not the race of their peers that matters. In other words, evidence based on more scientific methods suggests that Coleman’s conclusions were misleading.

Putting Coleman in the Past

I have provided examples in which Coleman’s specious methods caused decades of confusion and policy misdirection, but I would derogate his methods even if they had happened to produce findings that were consistently confirmed by better methods. Getting it right by chance is not a justification for methods that can mislead. Indeed, I now look back with some concern on a piece I wrote in 2001 titled, “If Families Matter Most, Where Do Schools Come In?” In it, I demonstrated that one could use modern data and easily reproduce EEOS-type correlations that, if interpreted naively, suggest that families matter and that schools and neighborhoods do not. I have deliberately abstained from such a demonstration in this article because that earlier demonstration apparently obscured the whole point of that piece. (Approximately 99 percent of readers misunderstand it.) The piece was intended to demonstrate that 1) good outcomes are associated with good choices made by families and thus 2) we cannot conclude that schools and neighborhoods do not matter because such conclusions are invalidated by selection; that 
3) we cannot tell whether “bad” families are inefficacious because they only have bad choices open to them or because they would make bad choices even if offered good ones; and 4) we ought to be far more open to any policy that makes better choices available to families who now have little or no choice open to them.

I hope that I have now made these points clearly. I blame myself for making them too gently before: as a young scholar, I was averse to censuring Coleman’s faulty reasoning. This time, however, I want to incur no blame if scholars continue to be confused about the conclusions (or lack thereof) that we can derive from the EEOS. It is time that we, respectfully, ring down the curtain on the EEOS. Henceforth, let us dedicate all our efforts to analyses of families, schools, neighborhoods, and peers that employ credibly causal methods.

Caroline M. Hoxby is professor of economics at Stanford University.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

The study for which James S. Coleman is best known today makes no mention of private education. The 1966 “Equality of Educational Opportunity” (EEO) study—better known as the Coleman Report—focused exclusively on the distribution of resources and student achievement in America’s public schools.

But the report’s ink was barely dry before Coleman injected the issue of school choice into the discussion. “The public educational system is a monopoly,” he wrote in 1967, offering choice only to “those who [can] afford to buy education outside the public schools” and thereby amplifying the influence of family background on student achievement. Later, he amended that observation, noting that the opportunity to choose one’s residence permits school choice within the public sector as well. But in reality, only the middle class and the affluent can fully exercise that choice, he pointed out. “Public schools are no longer a ‘common’ institution,” Coleman wrote. “Residential mobility has brought about a high degree of racial segregation in education, as well as segregation by income … and it is the disadvantaged who are least able to select a school … that continues to function reasonably well.”

With such concerns in mind, Coleman jumped at the opportunity when the U.S. Department of Education in 1979 asked him to lead another national survey of American students, known as “High School and Beyond,” that would follow young people as they progressed from 10th to 12th grade and on into college. Unlike the EEO study, “High School and Beyond” was to include both public and private schools. The study team looked closely at Catholic schools, since Coleman deemed the sample of non-Catholic private schools too unrepresentative to warrant close analysis. They reported that students in Catholic high schools both learned more 
and had higher graduation rates than their public-school peers. Minority students in particular appeared to benefit from the Catholic school experience.

Both Coleman’s methodological approach and his conclusions about the superior effectiveness of Catholic schools sparked controversy at the time and remain contentious today. Yet Coleman’s work triggered an avalanche of research comparing the success of public, private, and (later) public charter schools in preparing students for college and adulthood. The best of this work has taken advantage of the lottery-based admissions processes used by many school-choice programs, enabling researchers to draw far stronger conclusions about how schools affect student outcomes than the methods Coleman employed, which relied on simple regression techniques to adjust for differences in students’ family background. By comparing students who won the opportunity to attend a school of choice to applicants who missed out, scholars have provided experimental evidence roughly akin to that generated by the randomized clinical trials used in medical research.

This research does not show that private or charter schools are always more effective than district schools in raising student performance on standardized tests—the indicator that is often put forth as a measure of a school’s success. In fact, there is little evidence that using a voucher to enroll in a private school improves student test scores, and any differences in the average performance of charter and traditional public schools by this metric are modest relative to the amount of variation in performance within the charter sector.

The modern literature on school choice does, however, confirm two promising patterns that Coleman was the first to document: First, the benefits of attending a private school are greatest for outcomes other than test scores—in particular, the likelihood that a student will graduate from high school and enroll in college. Second, attending a school of choice, whether private or charter, is especially beneficial for minority students living in urban areas. These findings support the case for continued expansion of school choice, especially in our major cities. They also raise important questions about the government’s reliance on standardized test results as a guide for regulating the options available
to families.

Coleman’s untimely death in 1995 kept him from witnessing the developments that brought school choice out of the realm of academic theorizing and to the forefront of efforts to equalize opportunity for American students. His pioneering research, however, spurred the development of an evidence base that has enlarged our understanding of how school choice is changing American education.

A Catholic School Effect?

Even before Coleman embarked on “High School and Beyond,” the role of private schools had become a salient topic in federal policy debates. Enrollment in urban Catholic schools, originally designed for an immigrant population, was falling, as Catholic families moved from central cities to the suburbs (see Figure 1). This decline prompted leading members of Congress to propose a federal tax credit for private school tuition. Meanwhile, evangelical private schools in many southern states were attracting more students, as white families fled desegregated public systems. That trend invited a proposal by the Internal Revenue Service in 1979 to require that private schools meet strict racial-enrollment requirements in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. Data from “High School and Beyond” were expected to shed light on these and other hotly contested questions.

The study surveyed some 70,000 students in more than 1,000 public and private high schools in the spring of 1980. Coleman and a team of graduate students, including Sally Kilgore and Thomas Hoffer, issued their initial findings the next year. Many non-Catholic 
private schools had refused to participate in the study, so the researchers focused on Catholic schools, which at the time still represented more than 60 percent of private school enrollment.

Their findings stunned education researchers and the public. The Coleman team reported that sophomores and seniors at Catholic schools outperformed their public-school peers by roughly a full grade level after adjusting for differences in an extensive set of family background measures. They also found that achievement gaps along lines of parental education, race, and ethnicity were all smaller in Catholic schools than in public schools. In other words, they ironically concluded, “Catholic schools more nearly approximate the ‘common school’ ideal of American education than do public schools.”

The findings came as no surprise to Coleman, but they sent shock waves through the broader education-research community. As Paul E. Peterson, Harvard professor of government, recounts, “It was about as dramatic as the first proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity.” The tacit assumption in the field was that most families enrolled their children in Catholic schools out of religious conviction, often at the expense of their academic success. Coleman and his colleagues were subjected to blistering attacks in both academic journals and the popular press, many of them questioning whether the analysis had adequately controlled for the self-selection of students from more-advantaged families into the tuition-charging Catholic sector.

The second round of data from “High School and Beyond” enabled Coleman to provide a partial response to his critics. Rather than merely studying the level at which sophomores were achieving, he could now track the growth 
in their achievement between 10th and 12th grade—effectively using initial performance levels to better capture differences in family background between Catholic and public school students.

Results based on this second wave of data, published with Thomas Hoffer in 1987, seemed to confirm Coleman’s prior findings about Catholic schools’ success in boosting the achievement of minority students. (Any test-score gains for white students were modest at best.) More important, the results showed that students in Catholic schools were far less likely to drop out of school before graduating, and these positive effects were again more pronounced for black and Hispanic students. Coleman and Hoffer showed that Catholic schools had stronger disciplinary standards than public schools and that their students were more likely 
to take advanced courses. But above all, they attributed the success of Catholic schools 
to the high levels of “social capital” available in the tight-knit communities that many of these schools served.

How have Coleman’s conclusions about Catholic high schools held up over time? Dozens of studies have sought to confirm or refute them, using either the original “High School and Beyond” data or subsequent federal surveys tracking more-recent student cohorts. The most widely cited among them is a 2005 paper by a trio of scholars who employed advanced econometric techniques to analyze data from a national survey of the graduating class of 1992. They concluded that Catholic high schools “substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and, more tentatively, attending college” but found “little evidence of an effect on test scores.” Like virtually all prior work, their results suggested that the effect on educational attainment is largest for urban minority students.

Experimenting with Vouchers

Of all the critiques of Coleman’s research on Catholic schools, one was particularly cogent. Studying how Catholic schools affect students who already attend is an imperfect way to learn about what would happen if the government were to expand access to private schools through vouchers or tuition tax credits. Students who are able to enroll in private schools only with government support could well differ from tuition-paying students in ways that make them less likely to reap the same benefits. And nonreligious private schools might not be able to draw on the community sources of social capital that Coleman deemed vital to Catholic high schools’ success. Only once policymakers began experimenting with school vouchers in the 1990s did it become possible to study the consequences of expanding access to private schools to families who could not afford that option on their own. As of 2014, 19 states operated one or more school-voucher programs, enabling some 140,000 students to attend private schools with government support.

In an authoritative 2015 review of the literature on school vouchers, economist Dennis Epple and colleagues concluded that “the evidence does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve their educational outcomes.” But the researchers tempered this negative conclusion, saying, “There is also evidence that in some settings, or for some subgroups or for specific outcomes, vouchers can have substantial positive effects.”

The federal government’s official evaluation of the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program points to a common pattern that has emerged amid these mixed results. Using an experimental design, the study found no clear effects of using a voucher to enroll in a private school on students’ test scores four years later. Yet the evaluation also found that using a voucher improved students’ chances of graduating by as much as 21 percentage points.

Other studies corroborate these positive effects on educational attainment. For instance, a 2015 study of a privately funded voucher program in New York City found that being offered a voucher to attend a private school increased college enrollment rates among black and Hispanic students by 4.4 percentage points, a 10 percent gain relative to the control group, and also increased bachelor’s degree completion rates among black and Hispanic students by 2.4 percentage points, a 27 percent gain. As in the case of the Washington, D.C., program, however, the students did 
not experience test-score gains as a result of the program.

The latest research on the nation’s longest-running school-voucher initiative, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, although based on nonexperimental methods, shows a similar pattern of results. A 2013 study found that students using vouchers to attend private schools, 70 percent of whom were black, were 5 percent more likely to enroll in a four-year college after graduating than were a carefully matched sample of students in Milwaukee public schools. The same program in recent years has generally not shown positive effects on students’ test scores.

What explains the positive impacts of private schools on the amount of schooling students complete, even in the absence of test-score gains? Many private schools do lay claim to a broader range of educational goals than do their public-sector counterparts. Schools affiliated with Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education, for example, aim to prepare students for “college and heaven.” It has been difficult to study the effects of private school attendance on indicators of students’ character development, such as their behavior in school, owing to differences in disciplinary norms between sectors. However, a study by economists David Figlio and Jens Ludwig shows that students who attended a Catholic high school in the early 1990s were less likely to be arrested and to engage in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity and cocaine use. Thomas Dee has found that students who attended Catholic high schools are more likely to vote as adults. And in numerous experimental studies, voucher parents express far more satisfaction with their child’s education than do their public-school counterparts—particularly in areas such as discipline and safety.

Empirical research of the kind Coleman initiated will never be able to offer a comprehensive assessment of how private school attendance, with or without the assistance of a voucher, affects students’ development across all relevant dimensions. Indeed, the fact that families differ in the weight they place on different educational goals is a key rationale for policies that expand parental choice. What is clear, however, is that both Catholic schools and voucher programs for low-income families show stronger effects on students’ educational attainment than on their achievement as measured by standardized tests. Research that focuses solely on the latter is likely to understate the benefits conferred by schools of choice.

Lotteries for Charter Schools

In recent years, most of the growth in school choice has come through the charter sector. Forty-three states have laws permitting charter schools, which now enroll roughly 5 percent of American students. Charter schools are privately managed and typically enjoy more autonomy than their district-run counterparts. Unlike most private schools, however, they are required to participate in state testing systems and can be closed by their authorizers if they fail to meet performance goals.

How does the performance of charter schools compare to that of the traditional public schools their students would otherwise attend? Again, the best evidence on charter school performance comes from studies exploiting the lottery-based admissions processes of schools that are oversubscribed. As in the case of private schools, the only short answer is: it depends.

Consider a series of recent studies of Massachusetts charter schools conducted by researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and MIT. They demonstrate that attending an oversubscribed charter middle or high school has a clear positive effect on students’ math and reading achievement, but also find that this “on-average” result obscures dramatic variation. In Boston and the state’s other urban centers, each year of attendance at an oversubscribed charter middle school increases students’ achievement by roughly 15 percent of a standard deviation in reading and 32 percent of a standard deviation in math. The latter result is large enough to close more than two-thirds of the black-white achievement gap in the state while students are in middle school. In contrast, attending a charter middle school in a suburban or rural area lowers students’ achievement in both reading and math—despite the fact that these schools are popular enough to hold admissions lotteries (see Figure 2).

This pattern of test-score effects—showing positive results in urban areas with many low-income students, but neutral or even negative effects elsewhere—also appears in a national study of oversubscribed charter middle schools funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Why the drastic differences? Urban charter schools are more likely to take a “no-excuses” approach that features high expectations, strict student discipline, and longer school days and years—a formula that seems to offer a reliable path to higher test scores. In nonurban areas, where many students achieve at reasonably high levels even without a charter school option, parents may not be looking for this approach. Indeed, many nonurban charter schools have a distinctive curricular emphasis, such as a focus on the arts, that may explain their sustained popularity despite a lack of success in improving test scores.

Of course, the lottery-based approach to studying charter schools has a significant drawback: it can only be used where schools are oversubscribed, and focusing only on the most popular charter schools may well provide too rosy a view of the sector’s performance. But a large body of evidence based on nonexperimental methods paints a consistent picture of the effects of charter schools. A comprehensive 2013 study of charter schools in 27 states conducted by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that charter schools, on average, have no effect on students’ math achievement and only a small positive effect in reading. Yet this same study showed more-substantial positive effects in both subjects for low-income black and Hispanic students. And a separate CREDO study that focused on charter schools in 41 urban areas with a large charter presence found that, on average, charter schools in these cities have strong positive effects on achievement that are again largest for low-income black and Hispanic students (see Figure 3). In short, when it comes to improvements in student test scores, the benefits of charter school attendance are clearly greatest for low-income urban minority students.

Nascent research on the effects of urban charter schools on other outcomes also shows promising results. Students at the same Boston charter high schools that have boosted test scores are also more likely to take and pass Advanced Placement courses and to enroll in a four-year rather than a two-year college. In a study of the Promise Academy middle school in the Harlem Children’s Zone, economists Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer found that attending the oversubscribed school sharply reduced the chances of teenage pregnancy (for girls) and incarceration (for boys). Promise Academy students were also more likely to enroll in college immediately after high school and to choose a four-year school. These effects are all larger than what would have been predicted based on the same students’ test-score gains, leading the researchers to conclude that “high achieving charter schools alter more than cognitive ability.” Finally, the only study to have estimated the effect of charter school attendance on students’ job prospects, although based on nonexperimental methods, finds that attending a Florida charter school increased students’ earnings as adults despite having no impact on their standardized test scores. Once again, the broader lens offers the more favorable view of school choice.

Choice among Choice

As the evidence on school choice continues to grow, it is tempting to compare the results achieved by school voucher programs to those of charter schools—to ask whether one option or the other represents a more promising avenue for expanding educational opportunity. School reform advocates and policymakers need to decide where to invest their energies, and the charter sector’s growth does appear to have played a role in the recent decline in private school enrollment. Most obviously, some Catholic schools have elected to convert themselves into charters, sacrificing their religious identity (at least during school hours) to gain access to a stable funding stream.

In my view, the available research does not point to a clear winner. Indeed, the findings show striking similarities between the results of the two approaches. The chief beneficiaries of policies that expand parental choice appear to be urban minority students—precisely the group that Coleman argued has the least choice in a public school system in which school assignment depends on where a family lives. And the benefits of school choice 
for these students extend beyond what tests can measure.

Policymakers continue to wrestle with the question of how best to regulate systems of school choice. In recent years, charter school authorizers in some cities have taken on a more active role in managing the options available to families—closing some charter schools and allowing others to expand, using student test results as the primary yardstick of success. Meanwhile, some states have required private schools accepting voucher students to participate in state testing systems, blurring what had been a distinction between the two approaches. These efforts aim to produce more consistent quality among both charter and private schools and to equip parents with information to make sound decisions regarding their child’s schooling. Yet such measures, when used to limit the options available to families, assume that overall test score results at a particular school can accurately indicate the long-term benefits for an individual child of attending that school. Increasingly, researchers are casting doubt on that assumption.

Test scores are strong predictors of a student’s success in college and the labor market, and ensuring transparency about how students in schools of choice are faring academically is essential. Schools that consistently fail to equip many of their students with basic skills should not receive public funding. But policymakers should keep in mind that parents may be the best judges of whether a specific school is a good fit for their child—an environment that will keep the student engaged through graduation and increase the likelihood that he or she will attend college.

The question of how we can most effectively broaden school choice for America’s families lies at the heart of the movement to reform K–12 education. Only continued experimentation with multiple approaches will make it possible to inform this debate with evidence. Were he still alive, James S. Coleman would surely be leading the effort to do just that.

Martin R. West is associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

Fifty years after the release of  “Equality of Educational Opportunity”—widely known as the Coleman Report—much of what James Coleman and his colleagues reported holds up well to scrutiny. It is, in fact, remarkable to read through the 700-plus pages and see how little has changed about what the empirical evidence says matters. The report’s conclusions about the importance of teacher quality, in particular, have stood the test of time, which is noteworthy, given that today’s studies of the impacts of teachers use more-sophisticated statistical methods and employ far better data. Moreover, many of the Coleman findings foretold debates over school and teacher policy that continue to rage today.

What the Report Didn’t Say

The Coleman Report focused on differences in schooling resources available to white and minority students and on the degree of racial segregation in America’s public schools. It was also the first major, large-scale study to try to document the influence of schooling resources on student achievement, and how the influence of schooling resources compares to the influence of student background and socioeconomic status. This comparison resulted in the oft-cited finding that “schools don’t matter.” Interestingly, that quote does not appear in the Coleman Report, yet it is widely interpreted as a central conclusion. The actual text is far more nuanced, suggesting that

schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of students is taken into account.… When these factors are statistically controlled…it appears that differences between schools account for only a small fraction of differences in pupil achievement.

The phrases “small fraction” and “between schools” are important. The finding that differences between schools only explain a small fraction of the variation in student achievement does not suggest that policymakers wishing to improve the lives of students are necessarily hamstrung. That differences in resources do not explain a large share of the differences in test scores between white and minority students (the report focused on African American students) does not necessarily mean those resources do not affect student achievement. Not only do we now know more definitively that the quality of schools and teachers do matter, but also, importantly, these are resources over which policymakers have direct control (at least more so than socioeconomic status). And the fact that the Coleman findings are based on differences between schools means that it ignores important differences in resources—teacher quality in particular—that we know today exist within schools.

What Did Coleman Say about Schooling and Teacher Quality?

Beyond the headline finding about the impact of schooling overall, the report contains a fair amount of nuance on which school characteristics do (and, importantly, which do not) predict student achievement. The primary analytical technique used involved assessing the proportion of the variation in student achievement explained by different factors. Across grades and different student subgroups, the Coleman study found that most of the variation in student achievement is within rather than between schools, but a larger share of the variation is found between schools in earlier grades and among more disadvantaged subgroups. Regarding teacher quality specifically, one of the key conclusions is that

the quality of teachers shows a stronger relationship [than school facilities and curricula] to pupil achievement. Furthermore, it is progressively greater at higher grades, indicating a cumulative impact of the qualities of teachers in a school on the pupil’s achievements. Again, teacher quality seems more important to minority achievement than to that of the majority.

The finding that “teacher quality is one of the few school characteristics that significantly affects student performance” is quite consistent with more-recent research. Also in line with current studies is the report’s finding that “for any groups whether minority or not, the effect of good teachers is greatest upon the children who suffer most educational disadvantage in their background, and that a given investment in upgrading teacher quality will have most effect on achievement in underprivileged areas.” Recent studies, for instance, find that higher funding levels, smaller classes, and more-qualified teachers all have larger effects on disadvantaged students than on other students.

What characteristics of teachers are predictive of student achievement? The report includes various caveats about the findings, including that “many characteristics of teachers were not measured in this survey; therefore, the results are not at all conclusive regarding the specific characteristics of teachers that are most important.” But of the characteristics and attitudinal factors that were measured, “those that bear the highest relationship to pupil achievement are first, the teacher’s score on the verbal skills test, and then his educational background—both his own level of education and that of his parents.” Also measured were teaching experience (in years), professional journals read, and teachers’ perceptions of the ability and effort levels of their students.

The finding that teachers’ verbal skills appear to be predictive of student achievement is consistent with later reviews of the factors predicting student achievement and with evidence from the last decade showing that teachers’ licensure test scores are also predictive of achievement. There is far less evidence from research today that teachers’ educational background (having a master’s degree in particular) matters for students. One possibility is that teacher degree level was more predictive of teacher quality in the 1960s than it is today. School systems today are not very discriminating when it comes to crediting teachers with a master’s degree (with a substantial pay bump). Most reward the degree regardless of the focus of the master’s work—it is often unrelated to the teacher’s classroom assignment—and pay no attention to the quality of the institution granting the degree. Moreover, a far lower proportion of the teacher workforce had an advanced degree in the 1960s; obtaining such a degree may have been more likely to reflect the quality of those teachers who pursued this credential.

One finding from the Coleman Report that is rarely mentioned relates to the structure of the teacher labor market. The data collection for the Coleman Report included several questions about where teachers in a school grew up and went to high school and college. As is the case today, “In the Nation, there is considerable evidence that [minority students] are more likely to be taught by teachers who are locality-based, in the sense that they are products of the area in which they teach and that they secured their public school training nearby.” This finding reflects what is now popularly known as the “draw of home” in the teacher labor market. Like much in the world of education, this aspect of the teacher labor market appears not to be very different today than 50 years ago.

The Coleman et al. study has been subject to a number of critiques, including, for example, that the cross-sectional nature of the data used did not support causal claims about schooling effects, and that the percentage of variance explained by different subgroups of variables are sensitive to the order in which these are entered into statistical models. It is worth noting that the report itself addresses many of the issues brought up by critics. For instance, it reports the findings on the proportion of explained variation associated with entering explanatory variables in different order and notes the possibility that

school effects were not evident because no measurement of educational growth was carried out. Had it been, then some schools might have shown much greater growth rates of students than would others and these rates might have been highly correlated with school characteristics.

My interpretation of the Coleman Report findings is consistent with the reanalysis and reinterpretation by scholars in the early 1970s: in short, the findings hold up remarkably well.

What Have We Learned since Coleman about Teacher Quality?

New empirical work, using better data (e.g., that enable researchers to estimate the relative impact of factors affecting student achievement growth from year to year) and more-sophisticated statistical techniques has, in broad terms, reinforced the Coleman Report conclusion that teacher quality is the most important schooling variable.

Some of the acknowledged limitations of the data used in the Coleman study—the need to focus on the relationship between teacher variables averaged to the school level and student achievement, in particular—have been addressed by more-recent research. Specifically, the Coleman study was unable to explore the extent to which teacher quality varies within schools or estimate how much of the impact of individual teachers might be related to teacher attributes not associated with those school-level variables. Researchers today have the benefit of longitudinal data sets that link individual teachers and students over time. This allows for the use of statistical models to estimate the total contribution—that attributable to both observable and unobserved teacher attributes—of teachers toward student test-score gains (often referred to as “value added”). Although these models are controversial, the weight of the evidence suggests that they produce valid estimates of teachers’ contributions to student learning.

The importance of being able to estimate the value added of teachers for both policy and research cannot be overstated. Admittedly, many observable teacher characteristics—
gender, age, an advanced degree, or even state certification of competence—are not ordinarily found to be associated with effectiveness in the classroom. Yet qualities less easily (or commonly) quantified appear to matter a great deal, as the differences between individual teachers have been found to have profound effects. Not surprisingly, teachers who are successful with students in one year tend to be successful in other years; hence, measures of a teacher’s performance in the past tend to be a good predictor of how well future students assigned to that teacher will achieve. And recent studies that consider within-school differences in teacher effectiveness show just how important teachers are (see Figure 1). For instance, the median finding across 10 studies of teacher effectiveness estimates that a teacher who is one standard deviation above the average in terms of quality produces additional learning gains for students of 0.12 standard deviations in reading and 0.14 standard deviations in math. These within-school differences likely understate the overall import of teacher effectiveness because, as recent evidence suggests, there are also differences in teacher quality across schools. Despite this, the impact of having an effective teacher (one at the 85th percentile) in a particular school versus having an average teacher (one at the 50th percentile) is several times larger than the differences we typically observe between a novice and third-year teacher.

We also now know that it is difficult to enhance teachers’ performance by a substantial margin. Most studies find that teachers improve with additional experience only early on in their careers. Gains in average teacher quality after five years are seldom detected, however. This is despite the fact that school districts invest considerable resources in professional development in an effort to improve teacher performance. For instance, a 2015 study by The New Teacher Project found that districts spend an average of $18,000 per year per teacher on professional development, but most professional development programs fail to yield changes in teacher effectiveness that are detectable in student test scores.

Finally, although the lion’s share of teacher-quality research since the Coleman Report has focused on the connections between teacher quality and student test scores, new evidence is shining a light on the extent to which teachers affect other long-term non-test student outcomes as well. Important work by Stanford University researcher Raj Chetty and his colleagues finds that value-added measures of teacher quality predict students’ outcomes long into the future. Students assigned to high-value-added teachers are more likely to graduate from high school, go to college, be employed, and earn higher wages (see Figure 2). This has profound implications: Chetty and colleagues estimate that replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent of the distribution with an average teacher would increase the present discounted value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for a typical class (of 
28 students).

Coleman and Policy Debates Today

Have the last 50 years of education research led us to fundamentally different conclusions about the impact of teachers on the educational achievement of students? There is a bit more nuance to the answer than “not really,” but “not really” comes awfully close to hitting the mark. If anything, the half century of research on student achievement has strengthened arguments for a policy focus on teacher quality. More-sophisticated research has been conducted over the last two decades, since states began collecting longitudinal data that connect teachers and students. This work shows both how different teachers are from one another, in ways not readily captured by their qualifications, and how important these differences are for student achievement and long-term outcomes.

Those who buy the notion that the Coleman Report basically got it right might ask why we have not made more progress in improving the quality of the teacher workforce (or schools more generally). Certainly, one part of the problem is that, 50 years later, we are still debating the extent to which education policy ought to focus on teacher quality, and on the performance of individual teachers in particular. The research showing the important variation in teacher quality within schools and its connection not only to test scores but also to other important outcomes ought to strengthen arguments for teacher-oriented policy interventions. But it is precisely the focus on teacher evaluation—and whether it is connected to student test scores—that is at the center of the most hotly contested education policy debates.

Recent revisions to the most prominent federal law dealing with school quality—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—mark a sharp rollback of the federal role in teacher evaluation and accountability. It is not clear whether states and localities will consequently focus less attention on teacher quality, but if this is the outcome, policymakers will have failed to internalize the important lesson of both the Coleman Report and subsequent research: the main way that schools affect student outcomes is through the quality of their teachers.

Dan Goldhaber is director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at American Institutes for Research and director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

The aim of racial integration of our schools should be recognized as distinct from the aim of providing equal opportunity for educational performance.
To confound these two aims impedes the achievement of either.
–James S. Coleman,
“Toward Open Schools,” The Public Interest (1967)

Equality of Educational Opportunity, also known as the Coleman Report, sought answers to two burning questions: 1) How extensive is racial segregation within U.S. schools? 2) How adversely does that segregation affect educational opportunities for black students? In answering the first question, James S. Coleman and his co-authors documented the de facto segregation found in all parts of the United States, including the South, where the Supreme Court had declared de jure segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Regarding the second question, Coleman reported that families were more important for learning than were school resources, and, further, that school resources varied more by region than they did by a school’s racial composition within any specific region. Yet Coleman also noted that the composition of a student’s peer group was more important for learning than any other school-related factor, a finding used by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to reinforce their strenuous desegregation efforts in southern states.

Today, questions about the effects of changes in housing patterns and recent Supreme Court decisions that weaken desegregation efforts remain central to discussions of educational opportunity and racial achievement gaps. On the first issue, more specifically, have changes over time in housing and school attendance patterns reduced the isolation of black children in the public schools? The answer depends on the specific way progress is measured. If we ask whether the average black student is exposed to more white students in public school today than a half century ago, the answer is yes, although fewer than in the 1980s; after rising in the 1970s, the rate of exposure has declined markedly since 1988. Another measure of progress toward integration is the dissimilarity index, which measures how much the racial composition of the schools would have to change for each school to have the same percentage of whites and blacks as these groups constitute in the school-age population as a whole. By this measure, schools are closer to complete integration than ever before, and thus racial composition would have to change less now than when the report was released. How can two questions that seem so similar have such different answers? The explanation is in the changing demographic composition of the schools: the percentage of students who are white has declined dramatically over the past 50 years, while the percentage of students who are black has changed very little.

Detailing these changes is my first task. My second task is to inquire into the consequences for achievement of the racial segregation that still persists. Unfortunately, it is difficult to speak definitively about this matter. The required social scientific research has yet to be pursued adequately, despite the pathbreaking contribution of the Coleman Report and serious scholarly inquiry since. One can say—without much scholarly help at all—that racial segregation is undoubtedly harmful to the well-being of a multi-ethnic society that aspires to equal opportunity for all. But if one digs deeper to measure the adverse effects of segregation on the learning of African American students, a topic to which Coleman gave full attention, then one can only reach cautious judgments. The best answer, in my view, is that the consequences of racial segregation for student learning are probably adverse but not severely so.

School Enrollment Patterns since 1968

In 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education found legally segregated schools to be unconstitutional, but it was not until the legislative and executive branches put the full strength of the federal government behind desegregation efforts, by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that serious progress was made in the South. Even then, many hiccups occurred as public opinion wavered between the idealism of the civil rights years and the backlash instigated by civil unrest in major cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Courts, too, varied in their commitment to desegregation. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court found that de facto segregation, which occurred as the result of residential decisions made by individuals, did not violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. These were private decisions, not decisions made by government, and therefore not subject to constitutional constraint. Many white families left city schools for nearly all-white suburban districts when integration plans were put forward.

In the 1990s, the Court softened its previous position on desegregation in schools that once had had de jure segregation. It said that districts had merely to take all practical steps to end the legacy of segregation (Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, 1991). The Court also decided that school districts could not be held constitutionally responsible for low student achievement in segregated settings (Missouri v. Jenkins, 1995).

Given the ups and downs in the legal and political environments, it is entirely possible that both the rate and direction of school desegregation have fluctuated significantly over the 50 years since the Coleman Report. To ascertain whether this is the case, I draw on the best available public data on the racial composition of the nation’s schools: the Public Elementary and Secondary School Enrollment and Common Core of Data issued by the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education. To capture the shifts that took place during four distinctly different time periods, I identify the state of racial segregation in schools for the years 1968, 1980, 1988, 2000, and 2012. (Reliable information for the small number of students attending schools in districts with enrollment below 300 is unavailable for the years prior to 2000.)

Three interrelated pieces of information characterize school enrollment patterns, and I document changes over time in all three: the degree of interaction, as measured by black student exposure to white students; dissimilarity indexes for schools and districts; and overall demographic composition. For each of the five years, Figure 1 presents three data points:

1) The exposure index measures the likelihood that a black student will interact with white students, as measured by the average percentage of black children’s schoolmates who are white.

2) The dissimilarity index measures the extent to which schools and the overall student population are racially dissimilar, by calculating the percentage of blacks that would need to change schools if all schools were to have the same percentage of black students. The index is equal to 0 if there is complete integration and 100 if there is complete segregation. As the potential for desegregation efforts is determined by the distribution of students among districts, I report the index for districts as well as for schools.

3) A simple demographic indicator identifies the percentages of students who are black, white, or from another racial group.

Residential choices, school choices made by families, and district school attendance rules jointly determine student enrollment patterns. The enrollment data do not provide information on residential location or private school enrollment. A dissimilarity index at the district level, however, measures the dissimilarity of districts and the overall student population in the area, and provides information on changes over time in racial differences in the distribution of students among districts.

The Trend Data

I begin with a discussion of the exposure index, as contact between black students and white students was a major focal point of the Coleman Report. As Figure 1a shows, the exposure index rose rapidly between 1968 and 1980, from 22 percent to 36 percent, a change in the extent of racial interaction that has not been matched since. Over that period, the federal government was aggressively promoting school desegregation in the South, and civil rights groups were attempting to extend their efforts to other parts of the United States. Few remember that the Nixon administration conditioned federal aid to southern schools on their compliance with desegregation court orders; that policy appears to have aided the desegregation efforts that federal courts were insisting upon. The trend line stabilizes during the 1980s and heads downward after 1988, slipping to 31 percent by 2000 and 27 percent in 2012, landing above the level that existed at about the time the Coleman Report was released.

Figure 1b shows the dissimilarity index—the percentage of blacks who would need to change schools if blacks and whites were to attend each school in the same percentage as their percentage of public school enrollment. This school dissimilarity index fell from 81 percent to 71 percent between 1968 and 1980, when southern schools were taking strong steps to eliminate de jure segregation. And it continued to decline—albeit at a slower pace—after 1980, falling to 66 percent by 2012.

How is it that segregation continued to decline as the exposure rate fell? The explanation can be found in the dramatic change in the composition of the public school population (see Figure 1c). Between 1968 and 2012, the percentage white of overall student enrollment in public schools dropped from 80 percent to 51 percent. Between 1988 and 2012, when the exposure index slid 9 percentage points (from 36 percent to 27 percent), the white percentage of all public-school enrollment tumbled by 20 percentage points (from 71 percent to 51 percent). As the white population was becoming older, other groups were capturing an ever-larger share of the student population. African Americans were not replacing whites—their share of the school-age population edged upward by less than 1 percentage point over the entire 44-year time period. Rather, an influx of Hispanic and Asian families transformed the composition of the schools. The result is a declining black‒white exposure rate: it became increasingly difficult to increase interactions between blacks and whites because there were ever-fewer whites in the schools.

The steps taken to desegregate schools and increase black student exposure to white students were not strong enough after 1980 to offset the demographic shifts that were increasing the amount of contact between both whites and blacks and the children of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the decline in the exposure index prompted former Business Week correspondent William C. Symonds, in “Brown v. Board of Education: A bittersweet birthday” (May 2004), and others to decry the resegregation of America’s schools. That claim overlooks the powerful effect demographic change has had on the possibility of increasing black student exposure to white students.

Figure 2 shows trends in the demographic composition of schools in the four geographic regions of the U.S. The percentage of white students has fallen steadily in the Northeast and Midwest, with modest upticks in the proportion of students who are black, Hispanic, or from other groups. The West has seen the most dramatic decline in white students and the largest increase in Hispanic students. Schools in the South have arguably seen the greatest increase in diversity as the four trend lines come closest to converging.

White Flight and District Policies

A pronounced increase in Hispanic and Asian public-school enrollment and consequent decline in the white enrollment share, not a pattern of resegregation, has driven the fall in the exposure of black students to white schoolmates. This does not mean, however, that family decisions, court policies, and school board responses are irrelevant to the patterns of racial segregation that continue to persist. For example, white flight from integrating schools, a topic that Coleman (in other studies) explored in considerable depth, certainly slowed the rate of desegregation, especially during the years 1968 to 1980, when the most aggressive desegregation steps were being taken.

The 1974 Supreme Court decision in Millikin v. Bradley found no constitutional violation when de facto segregation resulted from the private choices of individuals to live in one part of a metropolitan area rather than another. As a result, white suburban school districts were under no constitutional requirement to integrate their schools when their new white students had fled a central-city school district that was promulgating a desegregation plan. Between 1968 and 1980, the district dissimilarity index (which measures the amount of black students who would have to move to another district in order to achieve the same percentage of whites and blacks in all districts) increased from 64 to 66 percent. Thus, by this measure, district segregation was increasing at the same time that the overall rate of school segregation was falling by 10 percentage points. This does not capture any movement of white students to private schools.

A closer examination of the district dissimilarity index offers some suggestive evidence as to the forces at work. Between 1968 and 1980, segregation by district increased, reflecting the effects of both white flight from desegregation and longer-term trends, including suburbanization. In contrast, following 1988, segregation by district fell by almost 10 percent, from 66 to 61. Black‒white segregation among districts in 2012 is roughly 5 percent lower than it was in 1968, prior to the onset of the most far-reaching desegregation efforts.

Housing patterns are the primary determinant of segregation among districts, but the district dissimilarity index provides only a crude measure of the extent of housing segregation. First, private school‒enrollment levels influence the measure of district segregation. Second, trends in segregation by district do not capture changes in residential segregation within districts. Therefore, it is important to examine residential segregation directly, and evidence clearly shows a decline in housing segregation during this period. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Census information, John Iceland and D. H. Weinberg in 2002 constructed dissimilarity indexes of residential segregation by census tract in 220 metropolitan areas in which at least 3 percent of the residents were black or which had at least 20,000 black residents in 1980. The median index declined from 0.75 in 1980 to 0.65 in 2000, a decrease of more than 13 percent. William Frey finds in a 2015 study that the decline in residential segregation continued to 2010, at least in the 102 metropolitan areas with populations greater than 500,000. Over that more recent decade, there was a decrease in residential segregation of 3.1 percent within these large metropolitan areas.

As Coleman observed, white flight from desegregation intensified segregation between districts. Finis Welch and Audrey Light published a study in 1987 that used 16 years of data on enrollments and desegregation program status to study in detail the changes in white enrollment surrounding the implementation of 116 major desegregation plans between 1967 and 1985. Among other findings, they concluded that 1) white enrollment declined much more in the year of plan implementation than in subsequent years, 
and 2) pairing and clustering, the desegregation technique that involved the joining of schools with initially very different black and white enrollment shares into a single attendance zone, produced the largest average white-enrollment losses surrounding plan implementation in the period of greatest desegregation activity. Because pairing and clustering mandates student involvement in desegregation and typically requires that students travel greater distances than under the redrawing of school catchment areas or other voluntary desegregation plans, the finding that this plan type produces the largest enrollment response is consistent with expectations.

It is not clear a priori whether white flight would be greater in urban districts surrounded by suburbs or in large countywide districts found in the South. The larger geographical spread of countywide districts raises the cost to families of moving out of the district but also raises transportation issues for school districts that want to desegregate throughout the entire county. Welch and Light found that white flight is generally less in countywide districts than in central-city districts (surrounded by a suburban belt) despite the fact that the countywide districts take stronger steps to reduce segregation within the schools. Apparently, the costs to families of moving out of the countywide district for predominantly white outlying areas are so large they more than offset any perceived advantage of escaping the changes in the demographic composition of the schools. Also, a separate study by Sarah Reber has shown that the more districts within a metropolitan area, the greater the white flight, another indication that families balance their school preferences against the cost of moving long distances. White flight almost certainly altered the effects of desegregation policies in 
many cities, especially in places such as the Northeast, where school districts within metropolitan areas tend to be small and numerous.

After 1980, district segregation stabilized and eventually began to subside (see Figure 1b). It is possible that whites became more tolerant of a black presence at school, or that districts began relying more extensively on voluntary tools to desegregate schools, avoiding the politically unpopular measures that provoked so much opposition in the years immediately following the release of the Coleman Report.

A growing number of school districts have been released recently from court supervision as the result of court decisions handed down during the 1990s, raising the possibility of resegregation of public school districts where desegregation had taken place. A small but growing body of research has investigated the effects of release. Studies by Sean Reardon and his colleagues in 2012 and Byron Lutz in 2011, using variation in the timing of court supervision to identify the effects on segregation, discern an increase in segregation following the cessation of court supervision, although the magnitude appears to be modest.

Academic and Social Outcomes

The Coleman Report revealed substantial achievement differences by school racial composition and emphasized the importance of considering various factors that contributed to those differences:

· different facilities and curricula in the school itself

·  variations in educational deficiency or proficiency of fellow students that are correlated with race

· effects due to racial composition of the student body apart from its level of educational proficiency.

Unfortunately, Coleman’s methodological approach was not capable of identifying the independent effect of each of these factors.

Subsequent research has grappled with these issues in one form or another in an effort to gain a better understanding of the determinants of racial differences in academic, economic, and social outcomes. But isolating the causal effect of school desegregation has proven difficult. Consider the substantial improvement of black students relative to white students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) during the 1970s and 1980s. The timing coincides with the desegregation of many school districts, especially in the South, but other policy, economic, and social changes may also have influenced the achievement gap. Most notably, economic and social opportunities were broadening for African Americans, the civil rights movement may have given the black community higher expectations for its youth, and white respect for black peers may have increased in the larger society, regardless of the racial composition of the school.

Despite the challenges of isolating the impact of school desegregation on student achievement, a small but growing body of research provides valuable evidence on the relationship between segregation policies and students’ academic and social outcomes. A 2009 study I conducted with Eric A. Hanushek and colleagues uses administrative data from the State of Texas Department of Education for multiple student cohorts to identify the effect of racial composition of the classroom on learning. By controlling for a wide variety of other characteristics, including the students’ own prior performance, our analysis is able to estimate the likely effect of desegregation within the school. We find that black achievement levels are negatively associated with the percentage black in a grade, indicating that desegregation policies that reduced this percentage were having the desired effect. Interestingly, those who had higher initial achievement levels benefited the most from a desegregated environment. These findings are based on variations in racial composition of grades within a given school. While informative, they do not conclusively show the effects of policies that alter the overall racial composition of a school through changes in attendance patterns, the policies that are of greatest concern to both the courts and to state and district policymakers.

A handful of experimental studies of desegregation programs compare participants with nonparticipants. Thomas Cook, writing in 1984, concludes that meta-analyses of results from all the studies, taken together, support the view that the effects on the mathematics and reading achievement in elementary school are quite small or even zero. The small sample sizes common to the studies he summarizes, however, make it difficult to identify potentially important effects. In addition, these studies capture only the most direct impacts of the desegregation program and are limited to a few interventions that may not be typical.

Several studies have examined the average effect of either the introduction or the removal of desegregation programs using variation in timing across districts. Jonathan Guryan in 2002 used the desegregation plan data assembled by Welch and Light to study the change in high-school dropout rates between 1970 and 1980, and found that the implementation of desegregation during the 1970s reduced the high-school dropout rate during that period. In addition, Lutz’s 2011 study found that resegregation increased the probability of dropping out for blacks living outside of the South. Even though these studies are among the most compelling in this area of research, the complications introduced by the purposeful choices and responses of families and schools temper the strength of the findings.

In a 2014 study, Stephen Billings and his colleagues used administrative data and variation in school assignments for students who lived on opposite sides of new catchment area boundaries in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, following the district’s release from court supervision to identify the effects of changes in racial composition and school resources. The paper reveals substantial evidence of resegregation and a significant increase in the probability of being arrested for black students, but no increase in the probability of dropping out of high school as a result of the change in the racial composition of the school. Importantly, it appears that changes in resources rather than peer composition drive the results.

Taken as a whole, the evidence on racial composition, desegregation, and resegregation effects suggests that desegregation had a positive but likely uneven effect on academic and social outcomes. It is very likely the case that program effects differ by both programmatic details and context, and consequently variation in findings does not constitute evidence that some studies must be flawed. The absence of an evaluation component from most desegregation programs has both complicated efforts to measure short- and long-term program effects and hindered the development of more effective strategies to improve outcomes and reduce achievement gaps.

Coleman’s Legacy

Half a century has passed since the publication of the Coleman Report, and the persistent racial gaps in achievement, academic attainment, earnings, crime, poverty, and extensive school segregation that remain provide prima facie evidence that equality of opportunity remains elusive. Nevertheless, the report served as a catalyst for a fundamental change in education research and the framework within which policymakers, educators, and citizens conduct debates over education policy. Such discussions are no longer conducted in a vacuum. On the contrary, requirements for the reporting of extensive information on academic outcomes and basic characteristics of schools, including their demographic composition, have been embedded in federal and state laws. The creation of the Institute of Education Sciences illustrates another legacy of the Coleman Report: a commitment to rigorous quantitative research.

The greater breadth of today’s research agenda is likely to move our understanding of the contemporary impact of racial isolation and the policies introduced to ameliorate it. Research on teacher quality, charter schools, school leadership, class size, and other factors in school quality is likely to be as or more important than research on race-specific policies for reducing gaps in student achievement. The legacy of the Coleman Report enhanced the research community’s commitment to improve the measurement of school and teacher performance. It also broadened public understanding of the types of interventions that will elevate the academic, social, and economic outcomes of disadvantaged students in a manner that will give meaning to the notion of equality of opportunity.

Steven Rivkin is professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

In 1959, six years before he authored the study that would remake America’s segregated public schools, James S. Coleman found himself face to face with a very different foe: the inscrutable desires, evolving tastes, and secret motivations of the post–World War II American teenager.

At the time, Coleman was head of Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Social Relations (later renamed the Department of Sociology). He had just spent two years studying the “climate of values” at several midwestern high schools, interviewing students about their academic lives, their social lives, school culture, and their rapidly evolving teen culture. Deep within the data, he found what he considered the root of the underachievement crisis in American high schools: a management structure that misunderstood teenagers and fundamentally misused student incentives.
For more than 50 years, Coleman’s findings in this study have been overshadowed by those of the Coleman Report. But scholars and educators would do well to revisit Coleman’s earlier focus on student culture and motivations if we’re to understand, in his words, “why and for whom educational institutions fail.”

That Coleman in 1959 saw a direct link between teen culture and high school achievement is significant. Though the first public high school opened in Boston in 1821, for more than a hundred years, the majority of American teens were otherwise engaged. Most didn’t hold a high school diploma until 1940. The byproduct of more universal schooling—or perhaps its main product—was the American teenager, “a New Deal project” much like the Hoover Dam, wrote cultural critic Thomas Hine. Actually, Hine noted, the word “teenager” first appeared in a 1941 Popular Science article. Compulsory education gave rise, inevitably, to mid-20th-century teen culture, and in quick succession, to nearly every cultural artifact we now associate with teens, most of them tied to breakthroughs in technology. Cheaper automobiles, color printing, and better amplification brought us car culture, comic books, and pop music—who can imagine a crooning Frank Sinatra screaming his way through the 1942 Paramount sessions? A generation later, another technological trio—birth control pills, synthesized LSD, and multitrack recording—brought us sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
Coleman hadn’t much cared for high school himself. Born in Indiana in 1926, he attended high school in Greenhills, Ohio, then in Louisville, where each year two rival schools fought bitterly on the football field. The teams’ annual face-off, played on Thanksgiving Day, “flavored the whole school year,” he later recalled. Coleman joined the team and would later write that the “boys who counted in the school were the first-string varsity football players.” Other than football, nearly nothing held his interest. Years later, he’d write of hitchhiking to football practice one day, thinking to himself: “If only they would not destroy in us the interest with which we came to school, I would ask for nothing more.”

Coleman ended up at Columbia University, where a chance dinner conversation with friends near the end of his tenure there got him thinking about how the culture of one’s high school can have a life-changing impact—actually, it was that conversation that got him studying schools in the first place. When he began interviewing high school students a few years later, he discovered that little had changed. In schools from the inner city to the most privileged suburbs, teens were intensely social, spending most of their free time playing sports and hanging out. “Adults often forget how ‘person-oriented’ children are,” he wrote in 1959 in the Harvard Educational Review. “They have not yet moved into the world of cold impersonality in which many adults live.”

The paradox of modern schooling after World War II, he found, was that just as our complex industrial society made formal education more important, adolescent culture was shifting teens’ attention away from education, prompting adolescents to squeeze out “maximum rewards for minimal effort.” One girl told him what it really took to be part of “the leading crowd” at her high school: “Don’t be too smart. Flirt with boys. Be cooperative on dates.”

Coleman found that in many schools, athletics ruled. More than 40 percent of boys, for instance, wanted to be remembered in school as a “star athlete,” but fewer than 30 percent favored the epithet “brilliant student,” despite the fact that, as Coleman observed, school was “an institution explicitly designed to train students, not athletes.”

Misbegotten Competition

Students understood that the reward system in high school was deeply unfair.

Because of its heavy reliance on academic letter grades, the typical American high school had created a kind of free market in which every student was competing against every other student for rank. Grades, he found, were almost completely relative—when one student achieved more, it “not only raise[d] his position, but in effect lower[ed] the position of others.”

Like factory workers or prison inmates, to which Coleman directly compared them, he found that most high school students in the 1950s had responded to school’s demands by “holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all.” The institutions may be different, he wrote, “but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands.” It was, Coleman suggested, a rational response to a system whose rewards sat on a bell curve. Students were protecting themselves from extra work by ostracizing high achievers, “constraining the fast minority,” and holding down the achievements of those who were above average, “so that the school’s demands will be at a level easily maintained by the majority.”

A few academically oriented, highly competitive “isolates” might prosper under this system, he found, but even the gifted high achievers, set apart with “special tasks,” usually found themselves unhappily separated from their peers. And the effort to serve gifted children, he wrote, “at its best probably misses far more potential scientists and scholars than it finds.”

The result of this misbegotten competition, even in the best suburban schools, was intense social pressure to minimize, not maximize, studying. Low achievement, in other words, wasn’t a bug in the high school system. It was an essential feature.

On the other hand, students didn’t think twice about honoring athletes. Coleman theorized that because most athletic events pit school against school, the achievements of star athletes bring prestige to the entire school, which benefits everyone. A student spending her lunch hour studying “is regarded as someone a little odd, or different, or queer,” he wrote. But the basketball player who shoots baskets at lunch “is watched with interest and admiration, not with derision.”

In high school athletics, Coleman wrote, “there is no epithet comparable to curve-raiser, there is no ostracism for too-intense effort or for outstanding achievement. Quite to the contrary, the outstanding athlete is the ‘star,’ extra effort is applauded by one’s fellows, and the informal group rewards are for positive achievement, rather than for restraint of effort.” The athlete’s achievements, he wrote, “give a lift to the community as a whole, and the community encourages his efforts.”

So Coleman challenged educators to rethink how they viewed competition.

Writing two years later in his 1961 book The Adolescent Society, he noted that educators had long been suspicious of academic competition, but that they unwittingly used it every day when handing out letter grades. The problem, he said, was that the competition in most classrooms was interpersonal. Shift the emphasis—make it interscholastic, that is, school versus school—and the suspicion gives way to celebration.

“When a boy or girl is competing, not merely for himself, but as a representative of others who surround him, then they support his efforts, acclaim his successes, console his failures,” Coleman wrote. “His psychological environment is supportive rather than antagonistic, is at one with his efforts rather than opposed to them. It matters little that there are others, members of other social communities, who oppose him and would discourage his efforts, for those who are important to him give support to his efforts.”

Coleman proposed that schools should replace the competition for grades with interscholastic academic games, “systematically organized competitions, tournaments and meets in all activities,” from math and English to home economics and industrial arts. These competitions, he predicted, would get both students and the general public more focused on academics and ensure all students a better education. It wouldn’t be easy, he predicted: schools would need “considerable inventiveness” to come up with the right vehicles for competition. But they already had a few good models, including math and debate competitions, as well as drama and music contests. He noted that the RAND Corporation and MIT had already established “political gaming” contests with great success.

In the early 1960s, Coleman developed six games and tested them in Baltimore schools. Teachers, he would later write, “came to share our enthusiasm for this reconstruction of the learning environment.” But he admitted that his vision was “not realized,” even though a handful of fellow researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere piloted academic games with great success.

A Research “Detour”

Actually, Coleman was deep into his work on games when he got the call to pursue the wide-ranging examination of school conditions and achievement that would eventually become “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” or EEO, more popularly known as the Coleman Report. He later recalled that he saw working on the massive EEO survey as “a detour in my research direction,” though he understood its importance.

The report’s results, released in 1966, popularized the idea that a student’s home life and family background mattered more than what happened at school. Most significantly, Coleman asserted that disadvantaged black students would do better academically if they attended schools in which the majority of their classmates were white. The Coleman Report would change American schooling forever, providing the theoretical basis for court-ordered busing plans, which gave rise to widespread, unintended “white flight” to suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. In a follow-up study nearly a decade after the release of EEO, Coleman concluded that busing had become an empty exercise.

Even as school systems redrew their boundaries, fired black teachers and principals, and tore up foundational enrollment structures to comply with desegregation orders, they largely ignored Coleman’s earlier research on motivation and academic achievement, which found that competition “has a magic ability to create a strong group goal.” Looking back 25 years later, Coleman himself would note that the Coleman Report’s focus on administrative issues had largely ignored what he had long considered key: the necessity of talking to students about the social systems of schools and how they actually felt, day to day, going to school. As a result, he concluded, the report “may have missed the most important differences between the school environments in which black and white children found themselves.” Had his seminal work focused on both the administrative problems and the social systems of school, Coleman later wrote, “our knowledge of how to overcome problems of racial segregation would be far more advanced than it is.” The result, he said, might have been more sturdily integrated schools without the racial backlash.

The irony of Coleman’s earlier findings is that, more than a half century later, students are, to no one’s surprise, still “person-oriented,” focusing more closely on their peers than on nearly anything adults ask them to consider. And schools still routinely use sports, games, social clubs, and band competitions, among other devices, to get students excited about coming to school. In fact, these activities are often the only ones that keep kids there long enough to graduate. Over the past few decades, many schools have embraced national and even international academic competitions such as the National Geographic Bee, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, MATHCOUNTS, National History Day, and Odyssey of the Mind, among others. But even though several of these competitions boast thousands or even millions of participants—the spelling bee claims that upward of 10 million children participate each year—schools have rarely used academic competition to improve instruction for more than just a few top students, in essence replicating the same old academic bell curve. Coleman would not be pleased.

Remaking School Culture

The need for such a new culture is huge: Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement has found, for instance, that 65 percent of students report being bored “at least every day in class.” Sixteen percent—nearly one in six students—are bored in every class.

Shawn Young, a 32-year-old Canadian physics teacher, has created a peer-driven classroom learning and management system, dubbed Classcraft, that resembles a low-tech, sword-and-sorcery video game. In it, students work in teams to meet the basic demands of school—showing up on time, working diligently, completing homework, behaving well in class, and encouraging each other to do the same—to earn “experience” and “health” points. These points help a small group, or “guild,” of classmates prosper in the game. The system, Young said, essentially replaces letter grades.

Echoing Coleman, Young told me most adults don’t understand how strongly teenagers feel the need to belong to a group, fighting together for a common cause. In that sense, he said, letter or percentage grades “are horrible as general motivators,” especially for struggling students. Going from a D to a B in a class is such a long-term endeavor that most feel it’s a lost cause. “If you’ve had Ds for five years, you’re convinced you’re a D student and you’ll always have Ds, because even if you do more work it’s not going to have an immediate repercussion.” He hopes Classcraft will help break the cycle. As students move up through the levels of the game, they actually pay less attention to grades and more attention to keeping their guild teammates “alive” and “healthy.”

There are many other initiatives that play upon Coleman’s basic thesis. In 2013, visiting Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, affectionately known as “TJ,” I watched as two members of the math team sat at computer terminals and worked through a set of high-level math problems. They were competing against a group of four other students who were sitting, at that moment, in a similar room in a similar high school 600 miles away, in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana. The opponents were simultaneously attacking the same set of problems. Each time someone solved one correctly, the digital score counter moved on all six screens.

Math Madness

If math ever becomes a spectator sport—and stranger things have happened—we can look back on these problem sets and the massive tournament they eventually spawned and thank Tim Kelley. He is the man who dreamed up Arete (originally named Interstellar), the curious piece of software that he hopes will change how students feel not just about math but about academics of nearly every sort. Kelley has spent most of the past six years cold-calling school administrators, flying around the United States, and figuring out how to build NCAA-style bracket competitions in academic subjects. In Kelley’s dream, Arete will pit class against class, school against school, and, someday, nation against nation.

A Chicago native and perpetual graduate student—he holds degrees in law and business, among others—Kelley got the inspiration for Arete while volunteering to help the rowing team train at his old high school. He watched as rowers took a routine but grueling endurance test, and felt that the atmosphere was “electric.” Though their scores didn’t mean anything in the long run, the rowers were obsessed with the task at hand, pushing to achieve their personal best. Kelley began to wonder how one might replicate that fighting spirit in the classroom. He soon imagined a computer application that would use students’ day-to-day results to match them up with comparably skilled contestants in head-to-head academic competition—in everything from classroom pickup games to bleacher-filling, live-broadcast amphitheater tournaments.

In September 2012, Kelley called Steve Dunbar, director of the American Mathematics Competitions, or AMC, an elite program sponsored by the nonprofit Mathematical Association of America, with the idea of a competition based on AMC problems. The competition, founded in 1950, enrolls about 400,000 students, but it still uses pencil and paper and can take weeks to score. Dunbar had actually been searching for a way to bring AMC into the 21st century, and as soon as Kelley described his vision, Dunbar knew that this was what he’d been looking for. In two months, Kelley had a prototype. In five months, he and Dunbar had selected 16 high schools to field-test the software. By February 2013, the first trials began.

To those who blanch at Coleman’s vision of making academics a spectator sport, Kelley says the focus of Arete, as with the rowers’ fitness test, is on helping students achieve “personal best” milestones, a strategy that most schools rarely use. “Once kids see they’re getting better, it just perpetuates improvement,” he said. When I met Kelley, he was working on a tool that would allow spectators to view Arete matches live online. He said he hoped that would “bring enough glory to the math department, or enough glory to the math students, that everybody else says, ‘I’d like to try this, too.’”

In September 2013, after the pilot testing, 468 schools showed up for the beginning of the first Arete fall competition, and Kelley soon had 10,000 kids on the platform weekly. By November, he had arranged the highest-scoring 384 teams into six 64-team brackets. Two weeks before Christmas, the Final Four teams in each of the six divisions fought for their division’s title. In the highest division, TJ actually made it to the Final Four, but was outscored by the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology in Hackensack, New Jersey. Hackensack lost in the finals to San Jose’s Harker School. The following September, nearly 600 schools and 15,000 students showed up to play, paying a modest fee of between $120 and $195 per school, for access to the platform for the entire season.

In October 2015, Kelley received a grant of nearly $150,000 from the National Science Foundation to further develop his project. Soon, students will be able to arrange matches on their own. What’s more, hundreds of thousands of 6th- to 12th-grade students will be able to compete simultaneously in a challenge that decides a national and eventually a worldwide champion. After implementing that feature, Kelley wants to expand the same tournament model to other school subjects and grades.

AMC’s Dunbar hopes that Arete will ultimately bring high-level math to a larger audience—the traditional AMC is focused on just the top 10 percent of students in the top 10 percent of schools. “One of the things that I do, one of the things that gets me up and here into the office every day, is that I want to get more good math in front of more kids, more often, in as many ways as I possibly can,” he said. International competitions pitting our best students against the best in the world could be thrilling. “If you look at the top level of competition, the United States is as strong as any other country in the world,” he said. “It would be good and it would be competitive. It would be exciting.”

Coleman would be pleased.

Greg Toppo is USA Today’s national education writer and the author of The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. Portions of this essay appeared in the book.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

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).

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. The study broadened the measures of school quality beyond what policymakers envisioned. The surveys gathered objective information about “inputs,” but they also asked about teacher and administrative attitudes and other subjective indicators of quality. The most novel aspect of the study was the assessment of students, who were given a battery of tests of both ability and achievement.

Coleman’s team collected these data from schools across the country, tabulated them, analyzed them, and produced the mammoth report (and a second 548-page volume with descriptive statistics) within the two-year period. This dizzying pace of research is almost inconceivable at a time when high-speed computers were yet to become available.

The focus on hard, quantifiable facts cannot be overemphasized. It is difficult to find two consecutive pages in the report that do not contain at least one table or figure. In fact, it is easy to find 10 consecutive pages of dense tables or figures. As a result, a large portion of the potential readership was immediately bewildered by statistics, many of which were not commonly employed or broadly understood even within the academic community. It is exceedingly unlikely that more than a very few people actually read the entire report rather than relying on summaries or a sampling of the document’s contents.

The difficulty of understanding the analysis and its implications was such that Daniel Patrick Moynihan organized a faculty seminar at Harvard that attracted some 80 researchers and met weekly for a year. Even among this erudite group, no clear consensus on what to make of the Coleman Report emerged. My own participation in this seminar as a graduate student set my entire career to the study of education policy.

A Summary

After 325 pages of charts, tables, and text, one gets to the enduring summary of the Coleman Report.

Taking all these results together, one implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.

Wrapped up in this statement are the ambiguities of meaning, the unclear translation into policies, and the inherent questions about analytical underpinnings that have persisted. For some, they point to the need for desegregation; for others, they suggest that schools do not matter; and for a third group, they highlight the overwhelming importance of the family.

One of Coleman’s principal findings—often overlooked in the focus on the role of families, schools, and desegregation—was the shocking achievement disparities across races and regions within the United States. In 1965, Coleman tells us, the average black 12th grader in the rural South registered an achievement level that was comparable to that of a white 7th grader in the urban Northeast. That gap and other similar performance gaps never received the attention they deserved.

As a result, the Coleman report failed to accomplish one of the key goals that led Congress to commission the report in the first place: a forward march toward equal educational opportunity across racial groups. That simply happened haltingly in most parts of the country.

In both math and reading, the national test-score gap in 1965 was 1.1 standard deviations, implying that the average black 12th grader placed at the 13th percentile of the score distribution for white students. In other words, 87 percent of white 12th graders scored ahead of the average black 12th grader. What does it look like 50 years later? In math, the size of the gap has fallen nationally by 0.2 standard deviations, but that still leaves the average black 12th-grade student at only the 19th percentile of the white distribution. In reading, the achievement gap has improved slightly more than in math (0.3 standard deviations), but after a half century, the average black student scores at just the 22nd percentile of the white distribution.