The school report that changed public education

11:44Thomas Kane:The commissioner of education and his team had to go out and find somebody who had run a big study like this. And James Coleman was one of the few that had.

11:53Victoria Cain:He is a gifted, well-respected mathematical sociologist. James Coleman was studious, unassuming, and a guy who really loved numbers as a way to understand people.

12:03Thomas Kane:He is somebody who pays attention to the quantitative, but he is keenly aware of cultural influence, cultural impact.

12:14Victoria Cain:And what catches the Commissioner of Education's attention was a big study Coleman had recently published about how nerds and jocks behave differently in high schools. I know, it sounds like something out of a 1990s John Hughes movie. But it gave Coleman street cred. It involved crunching a lot of data about kids in schools. So James Coleman agrees to take on the big assignment, survey as many American public schools as he can to find out to what degree they're still segregated, and more importantly, to figure out what's contributing to educational inequity.

12:49Thomas Kane:Even today, like if you told me, go out and design a study and survey 600 ,000 students and have a report ready in the next 16 months, I would have told you. That's huge. That's going to be really hard to pull off.

13:08Victoria Cain:After the break, James Coleman tries to pull off one heck of an all-nighter.

13:18Victoria Cain:Hi, this is Maria Montalvo from Chicago, Illinois. You are listening to ThruLine at Ampera.

13:44Thomas Kane:and feel your sheets get softer with every wash. Discover the difference with 15 % off your first order at bowlandbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details. Canada and tariffs, Venezuela and oil, the war in Iran. These are big, complicated stories, and they're changing fast. To stay ahead, start your day with Up First from NPR. New episodes are available each weekday when you wake up. So when news shifts overnight, you always have the latest info. Up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:22Victoria Cain:Part two, the report. It's 1965 when James Coleman starts working on the survey. In 16 months, he was expected to produce a report and hand it to then-President Lyndon Johnson. The administration thinks that the data James Coleman collects is going to tell them something they already know. That they need to send more resources to schools that need support. And that they'll withhold funding from schools who are discriminatory. Basically, they want to throw money at the inequity plaguing schools and hope that it makes a dent. And the government is confident in what they think the data will show.

14:59Thomas Kane:That marginalized communities will be sent to separate schools and those schools will be badly funded. and that is why those kids will be performing poorly on tests. That is the story that they are assuming they will find.

15:13Victoria Cain:Now, the language in Section 402 is a little vague. It doesn't quite stipulate how to measure schools or how to go about designing a study of this size. And so to some extent, James Coleman can design what he wants. Imagine the education system is this giant machine. He needed to collect data about all the mechanical things the machine needs to do its work.

15:36Thomas Kane:The idea is to measure educational inputs.

15:39Victoria Cain:Conditions and resources that help a student achieve their learning goals. Things like...

15:44Thomas Kane:Books in the library. The quality of educational facilities. Does your school have a science lab? Dollars in the school budget. How many movie projectors with sound equipment does your school have? How many cataloged volumes are in your school library?

16:02Victoria Cain:To measure these inputs and whether certain schools have better inputs than others, James Coleman writes up all these kinds of questions in his survey. But Coleman goes beyond what the law requires. He also wants to look at something no one is really paying attention to, something called educational outputs.

16:22Thomas Kane:Educational outputs are how effective the education a student has received in school is. Those are harder to measure.

16:35Victoria Cain:Harder to measure because they address how a student has changed as a result of their schooling. Coleman really wants to understand aspects of the student's life experience that tests or inputs couldn't reveal much about. So he writes questions that try to address a student's lived experience. Like, how many people are in your family? How far in education did your parents go? Where does the money come from in your family to pay for things like groceries? Did anyone at home read to you before you went to school?

17:05Thomas Kane:So in many ways, what Coleman is doing in asking students about their own educational expectations or their family's educational achievement or background, but also what is the impact of racism? What is the impact of educational inequality?

17:28Victoria Cain:He even asks students about their own perception of their futures.

17:32Thomas Kane:Whether they feel like they have control over their own success.

17:36Victoria Cain:So, okay, he has this survey filled with questions for elementary, middle, and high schools across the country. But it's not just students he's testing. He also includes a 30-item fill-in-the-blank for teachers to gauge their verbal skills. ETS, the educational testing service, distributed the survey. When the request to participate in the study first goes out, he gets zero responses. A student on his team has to write schools a note saying, this is an act of Congress, please call ETS this week. Finally, responses start rolling in.

18:10Thomas Kane:involving more than half a million students in thousands of schools. And he spends the fall of 1965 collecting data. And it's hard because no one has ever launched a national data collection effort in schools like this before.

18:33Victoria Cain:A lot of schools in the South refused to take part in the study, afraid they'd be seen as deeply segregated. But it wasn't just the South. Other places withheld data, too, like in Chicago and L.A. But they still got a lot of responses.

18:48Thomas Kane:Eventually, he gets questionnaires from 600 ,000 1st, 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th graders. 60 ,000 teachers.

18:58Victoria Cain:And roughly 4 ,000 schools. Coleman has thousands of pages of questionnaires coming and going from schools across the nation. Hundreds of boxes of documents to compile and review. And wrangling all those boxes isn't easy.

19:12Thomas Kane:One of his postdoctoral researchers talks about bringing all of these boxes on the train and then leaving them on a train seat. And they end up going one direction and Coleman ends up going the other. So he has to scramble to get the boxes back.

19:29Victoria Cain:Now he has to crunch the data.

19:31Thomas Kane:He is using computers, huge mainframes in Princeton, New Jersey that are associated with ETS. But these are primitive. He doesn't have the full range of statistical tools that we have today, nor does he have the computing capacity that we take for granted today. You probably have more computing power in your iPhone than he has at his disposal to crunch all of these numbers. And then he has to write the report. He locked himself up. And he's surrounded by boxes and he's got bottles of bourbon to take the edge off at night. And they are just working nonstop around the clock to try to make sense of these hundreds of thousands of tests and questionnaires.

20:25Victoria Cain:Remarkably, in 1966, just two short years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, James Coleman had finished his report.

20:36Thomas Kane:It's less a report than it is a data dump. 700 plus pages of data.

20:45Victoria Cain:The evidence that the Johnson administration expected and wanted to find is not what they read in Coleman's report.

20:53Thomas Kane:His findings are totally explosive and they are not what he or anybody else has anticipated.

21:02Victoria Cain:The data tells a complicated story. Yes, the schools were still segregated. That is true across the country, in both the North and the South. And Black children were performing several grades behind their white peers. This is what we now call the achievement gap. But the report also tells a story of why they are behind that nobody expected.

21:24Thomas Kane:What he finds instead is that two factors really seem to influence the educational achievement of students of color or low-income students. First, a family's socioeconomic background and their educational aspirations. That is revealed to be extraordinarily powerful.

21:49Victoria Cain:Really important. So how a student grew up, what life experiences they've already had, greatly influenced their learning outcomes. It's something we take for granted now. But at the time, nobody knew this.

22:03Thomas Kane:And second, a diverse socioeconomic mix in the classroom. A place where poor kids and kids who think they're never going to college, they are rubbing up against kids who are from affluent homes, who value education, who take college or high school graduation or honors classes just as a given. And those two factors he finds in his data seem to be the most important predictors of children's school performance.

22:39Victoria Cain:The bottom line? Student learning does not just improve when you increase resources. And beyond that, the report told a story about what students thought about their own futures.

22:50Thomas Kane:And his report reveals this feeling of resignation or even despair among low-income students of color. They didn't feel like their educational futures was something they could influence. Regardless of how hard they worked or how well they did in school, they just didn't feel like they had much power over their own fate.

23:11Victoria Cain:It seemed to undercut the promise of education itself. It's just tremendously sad.

23:17Thomas Kane:It seems to betray the whole idea of the American dream, that if you work hard and you play by the rules, then you'll get ahead. But that's not the world that these kids are living in, and they don't expect for that to happen to them.

23:33Thomas Kane:And the Johnson administration is not happy. It was naive to think it was all just about spending, because they had been making the case that we have to equalize the funding available to high-poverty schools. That's the way that we're going to deliver educational opportunity.

23:53Victoria Cain:Instead of clarity and answers, the Johnson administration now has a quagmire to wade through.

23:59Thomas Kane:They are so worried about the controversy that they think that this report is going to unleash that they effectively bury it.

24:07Victoria Cain:They try to quietly release the findings over Fourth of July weekend, hoping no one will notice or care. That's not what happens.

24:16Thomas Kane:The federal government has published a massive study challenging widely held beliefs on educating the poor. It's called The Coleman Report. The Coleman Report doesn't make light reading. Its official title is Ponderous, Equality of Educational Opportunity. It's a 700-page document filled with technical tables, charts, and statistics.

24:40Victoria Cain:The media gloms on. On that Independence Day weekend in 1966, the New York Times, in a tiny article, characterizes Coleman's findings incorrectly. Running under the headline, Negro education is found inferior. It says that predominantly black schools are inferior to those attended by white students and that this widens the achievement gap between the races. TV News also digs into the report.

25:08Thomas Kane:To many, the Coleman report raises more questions than it answers. The Coleman report is nothing if not a Worsach test. People find in it what they find. It seems to have something from everyone's point of view.

25:22Victoria Cain:Once it was released, anyone who gets their hands on data, from the federal government, social scientists, local politicians, they also start to cherry-pick the results of what he found, plucking out what they think the report means. And they are using it to tell whatever story they really want to tell. Depending on who is holding the report in their hands, any number of arguments can be made about how to approach segregation and the endemic inequality in schools. Conservatives interpret the report to mean that money doesn't matter.

25:55Thomas Kane:Oh, schools don't make any difference. And that's not at all what he was saying. But that interpretation gets enlisted by a lot of people who want to lower their taxes, want to stop the federal government from shoveling money towards schools.

26:12Victoria Cain:Some question its validity altogether. there.

26:15Thomas Kane:Others argue that actually the report is damaging, that it doesn't take into account the importance of the feeling of confidence or security that a Black child might have in a largely Black classroom with a Black teacher. This is the moment of community control, of nationalist liberation movements in the Black community, of Black power. Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed. We want Black power. We want Black power. We want Black power. And they argue that the Coleman report is really disparaging. Black children don't need white children to learn. This report really fragments along racial lines.

27:01Victoria Cain:As debates about what the report says and what to do with it heat up, racial tensions in the country are also heating up.

27:08Thomas Kane:This is going to happen all over America. It's going to be a hot world, not a hot summer. It's a hot world. This is the beginning of the long, hot urban summers.

27:18Victoria Cain:Protesters are demanding that President Johnson deliver on his promises. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turns up the volume.

27:25Thomas Kane:The bombs in Vietnam exploded home. They destroyed the dream and possibility for a decent America. It is estimated that we spend$322 ,000 for each enemy we kill in Vietnam, while we spend in the so-called war on poverty in America only about$53 for each person classified as poor.

28:05Victoria Cain:And it all comes to a fever pitch on April 4th, 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Anchorman Walter Cronkite broke the news to millions of CBS viewers.

28:18Thomas Kane:Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

28:27Victoria Cain:In the aftermath of King's assassination, the nation's schools erupt. There are walkouts. There's enormous pressure on school boards to make changes. And through it all, Coleman is watching. Debates on what his findings mean are spiraling beyond his control. Then Coleman decides to weigh in with his opinion on what he thinks all of this data is pointing to.

28:52Thomas Kane:If this country means to have equal opportunity for schoolchildren, integration, said Professor Coleman, is the only way to get it.

29:01Victoria Cain:That's coming up.

29:08Victoria Cain:This is Justin Whitlow from Leicester, North Carolina, and you are listening to ThruLine.

29:13Thomas Kane:Thank you so much. This message comes from Bowlin Branch. Change the way you sleep with soft, 100 % organic cotton bedding from Bowlin Branch, designed to help you fall asleep faster and never sleep hot, while wrapped in luxurious comfort, airy blankets, cloud-like duvets, and breathable sheets. Experience pure comfort and feel your bedding get softer with every wash. Discover the difference with 15 % off your first order at bowlandbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details. This message comes from Instacart. Instacart makes grocery shopping easier. And just because you're not doing the shopping yourself doesn't mean you don't care how it's done.

29:57Thomas Kane:With Instacart Shopper Notes, you can add details about what you want right in the app, like extra crispy rotisserie chicken or lettuce you'd pick yourself. Just leave a note so your shopper can get it right without having to ask. Download the Instacart app and shop today. Part 3. Consequences There's a battle underway these days which challenges some of the most sacred assumptions of the great American dream.

30:25Victoria Cain:In the wake of Coleman's findings in the 1970s, there's debate about how to fix American public education.

30:33Thomas Kane:The battleground is a little red or white or blue schoolhouse.

30:36Victoria Cain:The issue is whether or not what's taught inside that schoolhouse makes a difference to the students and to the society in which they live. Everyone agrees there's a problem. Schools are unequal. There's an achievement gap. What's not clear? The solution. Lawmakers decide busing kids to different school districts is one path forward.

30:56Thomas Kane:What do you think about this busing thing? Well, I think we'll make it the first few days, but the rest of them will be kind of tough.

31:03Victoria Cain:That's because in 1971, the Supreme Court had weighed in, deciding that busing is a constitutional remedy to achieve racial desegregation in public schools. Kids must start getting on buses to attend new schools, sometimes far from where they lived.

31:19Thomas Kane:To ensure people have opportunity, we need to bus. We need to mix people up by class and race. Do you think it's bothering many of the parents? Yes. Oh, it bothers me that my kid has to change the district, is all. As far as going with the color, no. I'm concerned about my schoolmates and everything, and I'm concerned about how we'll be treated and everything like that. and very much concerned about the education we're going to receive.

31:52Victoria Cain:Coleman's data starts getting cited in court-ordered busing mandates. While Coleman was very much for integration, he starts voicing concern almost immediately after the Supreme Court's decision on busing. It was not the answer, he said, taking issue with how judges used his data.

32:10Thomas Kane:He actually opposes it. He writes op-eds and he publishes editorials opposing busing, not because he is opposed to integration.

32:20Victoria Cain:But because Coleman worries that instead of creating more opportunity, busing would lead to even more segregation. To him, busing is going to lead to white flight. And it did. Coleman, still a believer that schools should be integrated, is alarmed. So he goes back to what he does best. He collects more data. Another solution, he argues, is needed. In 1975, he publishes a follow-up study, this time making the case against busing. And he's soon called to testify before Congress to explain his point of view.

32:55Thomas Kane:Kentucky Senator Walter Huddleston asked Coleman what alternatives are available to those who want to end busing other than through a constitutional amendment. My hope is that the Congress might attempt to provide a kind of alternative to full-scale racial balance through compulsory busing that would provide increased rights for blacks rather than restricted rights for both blacks and whites.

33:20Victoria Cain:It's not a popular opinion, and his reputation suffers. There's even an effort to expel him from the American Sociological Association. The genie is out of the bottle. Coleman couldn't control the narrative swirling around his data or around him. And yet he doggedly continues to publish more studies and crunch more data in the hopes of finding a solution the government can use. Sociologist James Coleman, principal author of Public and Private Schools. His critics say he's doing superficial and misleading research.

33:54Thomas Kane:Bumper sticker sociology, one critic calls it. Robert Crane of the Rand Corporation is harsher. He says Coleman set out to advance the cause of private schools. If you go to Congress and you say, I'm a scientist, and here's what I have to say, then you have to be a scientist.

34:14Victoria Cain:But Coleman wasn't conducting a scientific experiment that could prove cause and effect. Really, his approach was just a snapshot of the system. It didn't come with a roadmap that tells you where to go.

34:25Thomas Kane:You know, for decades, people thinking they knew the answer to questions that actually correlational studies can't answer.

34:36Victoria Cain:And history showed answers weren't easy. By the 1980s and 90s, more ideas.

34:42Thomas Kane:One of the newer ideas for how to build a better public school comes in the form of charter schools. These alternative, semi-autonomous public schools reject the idea that one size fits all.

34:54Victoria Cain:And then rigorous school testing a decade later.

34:57Thomas Kane:President Bush has signed into law one of the most far-reaching education bills in 35 years. The No Child Left Behind Act.

35:05Victoria Cain:That legislation updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed by President Johnson. It aimed to close the achievement gap through rigorous mandatory testing.

35:16Thomas Kane:The fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn. We expect every child to learn. And you must show us whether or not every child is learning. I think that one of the more damaging legacies of the Coleman report is this emphasis on quantitative testing as a measure of school quality. The idea of using a standardized test to gauge school quality, to examine how individual students are achieving, it's a pretty reductive measure. And it helps to flatten out the idea of what schools should do. It reduces them to places that can produce students who can achieve on a standardized test.

36:11Thomas Kane:You know, I think in a democracy, we want more from our schools than that.

36:16Victoria Cain:The long-tail impact of the Coleman Report is one we are arguably still living through today. And just as President Johnson did, and nine other presidents did after him, Donald Trump has brought the conversation front and center, driving the news cycle. What to do about American public schools?

36:35Thomas Kane:The Trump administration is stepping up its push to break up the Department of Education, transferring much of the agency's workload, including six offices, to other federal agencies.

36:46Victoria Cain:The Trump administration wants to make significant changes to Head Start. That's the country's early education and child care program for low-income families. Now, this program serves more than

36:57Thomas Kane:700 ,000 kids each year, from birth to age five, in both urban centers and rural areas. The greatest problem we have is the fact that children are punished in this country because of the zip code that they're born into.

37:15Thomas Kane:I think one of our big challenges in this country is that we cannot agree on what schools are for or what they should strive to be. That is a very American phenomenon. We love to think that schools will solve all of our problems, but we frequently ask schools for more than they are capable of providing. There's always this impulse to tinker towards utopia, to think that if we change this kind of curriculum or we alter this kind of budget, then we will achieve perfect schools that will help us achieve a perfect society. It's this long-held dream. The Coleman Report led to some misinterpretations of the evidence from the Coleman Report.

38:11Thomas Kane:It was just limitations of the research design, which contributed to a skepticism and a pessimism for several decades.

38:26Thomas Kane:How do we create a world where all students can have access to genuine educational opportunity?

38:37Victoria Cain:That is the very question that sent Coleman on his initial quest. We haven't found the answer yet.

38:49Victoria Cain:And that's it for today's show. Tune in to our next episode this coming Tuesday when we answer a listener's question. In a time when AI is revolutionizing how we live and work, they asked, where did the first Luddites come from? We have answers.

39:09Victoria Cain:I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Adabloui. This episode was produced by me and Amy Padula. Jasmine Romero.

39:20Thomas Kane:Julia Redpath.

39:21Victoria Cain:Molly Marcelo Sarah Wyman Liana Simstrom Irene Noguchi Thank you to Johannes Durgey and Cheyenne Butler. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Special thanks to Stephanie DeLuca, James Heckman, Alison Baulos, Derek Neal, as well as Sheila Griffin, Anthony Brick, Richard Murnane, Paul E. Peterson, Steve Drummond, and Corey Turner. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

39:58Victoria Cain:And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

40:46Thomas Kane:Discover the difference with 15 % off your first order at bowlandbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details. This message comes from Instacart. Instacart knows not all bananas are created equal. Some want them green, some ripe, some want them ready right now. With Instacart's preference picker, available at most retailers, you can choose preferences like avocado ripeness or deli thickness before your shopper starts. so instead of hoping for the best you get groceries picked the way you would pick them download the app and get bananas just how you like with Instacart