Coleman Report – Equality of Educational Opportunity (COLEMAN) Study (EEOS), 1966 (ICPSR 06389)
The piece of the report, that holds up today, is that appropriate teacher interaction with students advances student success outcomes
It can be erroneously used to sidestep efforts towards teacher accountability/responsibility and incorrectly blame the lack of advances in student success on poverty
Coleman Report – Principal Investigator(s): Coleman, James S., Johns Hopkins University
The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (EEOS), also known as the “Coleman Study,” was commissioned by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1966 to assess the availability of equal educational opportunities to children of different race, color, religion, and national origin. This study was conducted in response to provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and serves as an example of the use of a social survey as an instrument of national policy-making. The EEOS consists of test scores and questionnaire responses obtained from first-, third-, sixth-, ninth-, and twelfth-grade students, and questionnaire responses from teachers and principals. These data were obtained from a national sample of schools in the United States. Data on students include age, gender, race and ethnic identity, socioeconomic background, attitudes toward learning, education and career goals, and racial attitudes. Scores on teacher-administered standardized academic tests are also included. These scores reflect performance on tests assessing ability and achievement in verbal skills, nonverbal associations, reading comprehension, and mathematics. Data on teachers and principals include academic discipline, assessment of verbal facility, salary, education and teaching experience, and attitudes toward race.
Pioneers of Advocacy
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The Social Side of Schooling
By Barbara J. Kiviat ’01
S�rensen and others describe the former high school football player as “overwhelming”–both physically and intellectually. “He would call you up at all hours and ask you to come to the computer because he had found something,” says S�rensen. “He had an enormous amount of energy, and he was extraordinarily smart.”
Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, worked with Coleman during the last years of his career there, and describes him as a man who never forgot the human element behind his science. “He felt that the work he was doing was for the good of society. He felt the most important thing was to change people’s lives.”
That desire to have an impact was what originally drew Coleman to sociology. He graduated from Purdue University in 1949 with a degree in chemical engineering, but after working only briefly at Eastman Kodak he realized that he did not want a career in industry. Instead, he wanted a field that combined science with questions of moral importance–a field that addressed issues of people and their social interactions and organization. So he turned to sociology.
He earned his graduate degree in sociology from Columbia University and then spent three years on Chicago’s faculty before coming to Hopkins in 1959.
During his years at Homewood, Coleman was among the first to examine education within a social framework. “There is a whole social context that frames how education works,” says Karl Alexander, a Hopkins sociology professor who was Coleman’s colleague during the early 1970s, and who now teaches an entire class based on his works. “Coleman, more than anyone else, was at the forefront of directing the importance of the social context of education.”
Equality of opportunity, for instance, was traditionally taken to mean equality of schools’ resources, such as the number and quality of textbooks. Unlike his predecessors, who focused on the equality of what was going into the school system, Coleman evaluated the equality of what was coming out. He also examined student performance, for the first time using test scores as an indicator of equality. In launching CSOS, says McPartland, Coleman intended “to not just use hearsay and testimony but real scientific method to better schools.”
Coleman returned to Chicago in 1973 and continued his research. The third and final Coleman Report, Public and Private Schools, came out in 1981. In what proved to be yet another controversial study, Coleman found that even after family background factors were controlled, private and Catholic schools provided a better education than public schools.
As with his earlier reports, Coleman’s bold conclusions shook up basic assumptions about the nature of the American education system. In both academic and public circles, Coleman’s findings sparked criticism and debate that continues through the present day.
“A whole industry of social science research is trying to better understand and argue with his findings,” says McPartland. “We are continuing to see the impact of his work, and we will for many years.”