James S. Coleman - Equality and Achievement in Education

, Marta Tienda and David B. Grusky

At the start of the 1990s, the issues of educational achievement and inequality of educational opportunity remain as salient as they were in the mid-1960s, the era of the Great Society. In some ways, these issues are even more conspicuous because of the changed skill demands of the work force and because of mounting evidence that educational inequities have increased for some groups. While race, ethnic, and gender differentials in average attainment levels have narrowed since 1960, high school noncompletion rates are alarmingly high among Hispanics and blacks, and college enrollment rates of blacks have begun to decline. Moreover, there are signs of widening differentials in educational outcomes between private and public schools, between schools located in inner cities and those located in affluent suburbs, and between those whose student body is largely minority and those whose student body is largely majority. The state of American schooling is problematic enough that a recent report characterized us as a "nation at risk"one ill-prepared to face the close of the current century let alone the challenges of the next century.

There is, of course, an important difference between the 1960s and the present: We now have a reasonably large amount of empirical evidence that sheds light on the processes that generate and maintain educational inequities and that can inform policy bodies about appropriate strategies to reverse these troubling trends. This was not the case in 1964, when James S. Coleman began his distinguished research career focused on educational achievement. His pioneering study, Equality of Educational Opportunity, served as a benchmark in multiple ways: It marked a turning point in redefining the domains of social policy research and the relationship between the federal government and private research institutions; it broadened the conception of school quality and the ways in which we measure and assess educational inputs and outputs; and it redefined the domains of inquiry by asking new questions and by insisting on scientific evidence as a basis for decision-making.

That social policy can be informed in useful ways by empirical social science research is a generally accepted, if not a well-defined, tenet in both academic and policy circles as the 1990s begin. Some twenty-five years ago, when the federal government initiated massive social change programs, this was not the case. Hindsight aids in appreciating that the relationship between social sciences and policy research has matured, and Coleman's role in shaping this relationship testifies that the maturation process was rocky. Always controversial initially, his work has withstood the test of time and replication, setting a new agenda for research and public policy time and again.

The history of how we came to know as much as we currently do about the social forces that generate educational inequities is well known only by those who have followed Coleman's voluminous scholarly works and government reports over the past thirty years. The current volume traces this history by compiling several of his contributions from the first (1966) to the third (1981) Coleman Report and by providing a context for interpreting the evidence. This volume is a unique resource for students of social inequality and public policy, for educators, and for those engaged in the formidable task of restructuring educational opportunities in America. It is an appropriate flagship for a series on social inequality.

Marta Tienda
University of Chicago

David B. Grusky
Stanford University

The essays and analyses in this book might be said to have had their origins in a telephone call I received on a day in February 1965 from Alexander Mood. Mood was assistant commissioner for statistics of the United States Office of Education (OE), and shortly after the telephone call, he asked if I would direct a survey of the lack of equality of educational opportunity for OE. Section 402 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 directed the commissioner to carry out such a survey and to report the results to Congress and the president by July 2, 1966. I agreed to do so and enlisted Ernest Campbell, a sociologist from Vanderbilt University, to serve as codirector. This was the beginning, for me, of research into equality and achievement in education. It was also the beginning, or nearly so, of a new relation of social science to government policy, and the beginning, or nearly so, of a new orientation to research on the quality of education provided by schools. The work reported here, spanning more than twenty years, covers the period of these extensive changes in the relation of social science to social policy and in research on education. This volume covers three areas of research in concludes the book with an examination of the relations between equality and achievement and between families and schools.

The chapters of this book are reprinted without change from the originals, with the following exceptions:

1. All misspellings and grammatical errors have been corrected.
2. The term "Negro," used in those selections written when that term was a standard convention, has been replaced by "black."
3. consist of excerpts from the original longer reports. Deleted text and footnotes have been indicated with ellipses.

James S. Coleman

In 1964, Section 402 of the Civil Rights Act directed the commissioner of education to carry out a survey on the lack of equality of educational opportunity. Previously, governmental social policy (other than economic policy) had incorporated very little social science; what little there was consisted principally of consultation with leaders in the social science disciplines. Policymakers usually aimed to obtain the advice of "wise men" in the field on a specific topic. For some years, social scientists had been doing applied research in education, mental health, and other areas that were subject to government policy, and some of this research was funded by government agencies. The research, however, was initiated by social scientists and focused on problems that interested them; the results made their way into the disciplines of social science but seldom into social policy. The congressional request in Section 402 was, or at least could be interpreted as, the beginning of a new mode of interaction between social science and social policy: the initiation of "social policy research," as it has been called, designed to inform government policy in specific areas.