Schools back in session, and it's time for a little history lesson. Have you heard of the Coleman Report? If not, that's totally fine. I'll give you a little primer. In 1966, the Federal Government commissioned a huge survey with the hopes of solving education and equality. What they got instead was the Coleman Report. A controversial deep dive into how race, resources, and access have shaped American education. Our friends at Thru Line did a whole episode on how the report came together and what followed after it was published. It's a pretty wild story. You can listen to it right now. Thomas Coleman can still remember the trip that he took with his father to an amusement park when he was a kid. Gwynach's amusement park was a little bit on the outskirts of Baltimore, I guess. It was a small amusement park that was segregated in the 1960s. The All White Park was a 20-minute drive from the family's house in Maryland. His father was a prominent sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. It was July 4th weekend in 1963, as Thomas tells it, "The family took a trip to the amusement park, but not to go on rides to protest segregation. It would draw national attention." So you would walk up, they would pair a white family and a black family, and they would ask you, "Are you here to go to the amusement park or are you here to be arrested?" You know, we were there to be arrested. And there's a picture that was on the front page of the second section of the Baltimore Sun of us, the family, being led away. The Coleman family, mom, dad, Thomas, and his brothers, were led to detention at an armory. "So I was asleep on the fence, but my brother, John, was awake and got to go over with my parents to be fingerprinted." His father, James Coleman, was one of hundreds on the ground demanding change for equality. A few years later, again over July 4th weekend, a landmark report bearing his name would be published. It was a massive data dump that would transform the trajectory of American public education for generations to come. It was called the "Equality of Educational Opportunity," or simply the Coleman report. "He said, "This is the data. This is the evidence. You may like it, you may not like it, but this is what it is." And that data has been debated by educational scholars and historians ever since. This was the first large-scale effort to measure the sources and the extent of educational inequality in the U.S. And it launches a thousand ships of questions, of research agendas, of new places for scholars to investigate. I'm Randall Duttfeta. On this episode of "Throughline from NPR," we tell the story of that 60-year-old report that investigated inequity in American schools. Its findings raise complicated questions, why are schools broken? How do we fix them? And what is school even for? Questions? We're still trying to answer today. Part 1 Section 402 Picture the American classroom. Desks, pencils, pictures of American presidents, maps of the nation, but behind all that is a political battle, one about what our children should become. It's a battle that goes back two centuries. A lot of people would argue the starting point is actually the 19th century. And the question becomes, how do you create a citizen? Victoria Cain is a history professor at Northeastern University, and she studies the history of education. How do you provide opportunity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all your citizens? It's the way we build democracy. It's an ocean that Thomas Jefferson championed until his death. Education is fundamental to the prosperity of a democratic state. Schools would unite everyone with a shared national identity striving to build this new country. As the 19th century rolled forward and waves of immigrants started coming to America, the government needed public schools to do more, starting with how to speak, read, and write in English. Americans become convinced that public school systems are the way to transform the immigrant poor into Americans. Look, we will build a school and we will transform society eventually through that school. By 1918, going to school was mandatory, but the reality was that economic hardship shaped access to schools. And for black kids in particular, there was segregation. Under the civil war, there's an influx of money spent on creating schools for black students in the south. Over the decades, Jim Crow laws slowly eat at that system. Across America, schools were resourced very differently depending on where they were. Affluent communities fared well. Schools and impoverished communities not so much. The NAACP starts bringing lawsuits. They turn to the courts to try to integrate schools and try to ensure that black students can get the resources or access to well-resourced schools. There's a major victory in 1954. The Supreme Court finds that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. But after Brown v Board of Education, integration stalls and the federal government knows it needs to act. So, nearly a decade later, in the summer of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law. I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every America. Now the United States will legally end state sanctioned Jim Crow segregation. With Johnson Signature, the federal government was tackling racial inequality head on. The Civil Rights Act was a part of his broader great society project, which outlined racial injustice and poverty as two sides of the same coin. So things like unemployment, poor schools and lack of healthcare were not standalone problems, but the direct result of systemic inequality and discrimination. And one of the key goals of this project was public education. To fix the nation's schools, the Johnson administration now has two weapons to tackle that problem. One is in the courthouse with the backing of the Civil Rights Act, and the second is money. Lots and lots of money. With the passing of something called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the administration has a huge budget line for school funding, more than a billion dollars to spend. He just needs to know how. At the time, no one really knew what was going on in American schools, that the schools were unequal was a given. The people passing the Civil Rights Act are really hoping to gather some data to make an airtight case for the necessity of integration. Johnson focuses on poverty and the disparity in resources as the root of America's problems. Racial justice, equal education, those things would flow from economic prosperity for all. Johnson's solution for the classroom was to integrate. And he wants to send resources to schools that need help. Now his administration just needed proof of how segregated schools were. The problem, there wasn't any data available. So the Office of Education spends many months coming up with a plan for how to get the information they need. They want to establish that segregation by race remains widespread throughout the country. They also want to establish that the schools attended by black children are inferior to schools attended by white children. And having hard data is going to prove this. If you read the fine details on the Civil Rights Act, there's a tiny clause within it. Buried deep inside its passages. Section 402, it's this dry little paragraph. And it requires that the Commissioner of Education conduct a survey and report to the President and Congress, quote, "concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions." Because with this document in hand, the Johnson administration would have a green light to spend all of that money. It will allow the federal government to take final and decisive action. The federal government can start cutting off funds from segregated systems. This tiny passage is hiding a gargantuan task, survey schools across the entire US. And through that data, figure out just how unequal the schools are. Plus, the clause stipulated a pretty urgent deadline.
line. The results of that ambitious project needed to be delivered to the government in a report within two years. The clock started ticking in the summer of 1964. This is Thomas Kane. He's an economist and the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. 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. 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. He has somebody who pays attention to the quantitative, but he is keenly aware of cultural influence, cultural impact. And what catches the Commissioner of Education's attention was a big study Coleman had recently published about how nerds and jocks behaved differently in high schools. I know, it sounds like something out of a 1990s John Hughes movie. But it gave Coleman street cred and 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. 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 going to be really hard to pull off. To the break, James Coleman tries to pull off one heck of an all-nighter. 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. 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. 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 the 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. The idea is to measure educational inputs, conditions and resources that help a student achieve their learning goals, things like 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? 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 with the law requires. He also wants to look at something no one is really paying attention to. Something called educational outputs. Educational outputs are how effective the education a student has received in school is. Those are harder to measure. 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 an 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? 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? He even asks students about their own perception of their futures, whether they feel like they have control over their own success. So okay, he has a survey filled with questions for elementary, middle, and high schools across the country. 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. And he's solving 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. A lot of schools in the South refuse 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 LA. But they still got a lot of responses. Eventually, he gets questionnaires from 600,000, first, third, sixth, ninth, and 12th graders, 60,000 teachers 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. 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, oh no, we have to scramble to get the boxes back. Now he has to crunch the data. He's 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. Remarkably in 1966, just two short years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, James Coleman had finished his report. It's less a report than it is a data dump, 700 plus pages of data. The evidence that the Johnson administration expected and wanted to find is not what they read in Coleman's report. These findings are totally explosive and they are not what he or anybody else has anticipated. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 didn't school, they just didn't feel like they had much power over their own fate. It seemed to undercut the promise of education itself. It's just tremendously sad. 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. 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. Instead of clarity and answers, the Johnson administration now has a quagmire to wait through. They are so worried about the controversy that they think that this report is going to unleash that they effectively bury it. They try to quietly release the findings over 4th of July weekend, hoping no one will notice or care. That's not what happens. 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 Pondress, Equality of Educational Opportunity. It's a 700-page document filled with technical tables, charts, and statistics. The media glams 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. To many, the Coleman report raises more questions than it answers. The Coleman report is nothing if not a worse such test. People find in it what they find. It seems to have something from everyone's point of view. 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. 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. Some question its validity altogether. 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. 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. As debates about what the report says and what to do with it heat up, racial tensions in the country are also heating up. This is going to happen all over May. 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. Protesters are demanding that President Johnson deliver on his promises. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turns up the volume. For each enemy, we kill and Vietnam. While we spend in the so-called war on poverty in America, only about $53 for each person classified as poor. And it all comes to a fever pitch on April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. And Kermann Walter Cronkite broke the news to millions of CBS viewers. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. 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, Kermann is watching. Debates on what his findings mean are spiraling beyond his control. Then Kermann decides to weigh in with his opinion on what he thinks all of the SATA is pointing to. If this country means to have equal opportunity for school children, integrations said Professor Coleman is the only way to get it. Part three. Consequences. There's a battle underway these days, which challenges some of the most sacred assumptions of the great American dream. In the wake of Coleman's findings in the 1970s, there's debate about how to fix American public education. The battleground is a little red or white or blue schoolhouse. 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. What do you think about this busing thing? Well, I think we'll make the first few days, but the rest of them will be kind of tough. 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. To ensure people have opportunity, we need to bus. We need to mix people up by class and race. And the public reacts. It's on the news every day. Do you think it's bothering many of the parents? Yes, dad. Oh, it bothers me that my kid has to change. The district is out. 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 educational we're going to receive. Coleman's data starts getting cited in core-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. He actually opposes it. He writes op-eds and he publishes editorials opposing busing, not because he is opposed to integration. 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 soon called to testify before Congress to explain his point of view. 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. 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 narratives 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, 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. But Coleman wasn't conducting a scientific experiment that could prove cause and effect. Really, his approach was just a snapshot of a system. It didn't come with a roadmap that tells you where to go. You know, for decades, people thinking they knew the answer to questions that actually correlational studies can't answer. And history showed answers weren't easy by the 1980s and '90s more ideas. 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. And then rigorous school testing a decade later. The long tail impact of the Coleman report is when we are arguably still living through today. 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. How do we create a world where all students can have access to genuine educational opportunity? That is the very question that sent Coleman on his initial quest. We haven't found the answer yet. And that's it for today's show. I'm Rendad de Fettach, through line was created by me and Romteen Atta-Blui. This episode was produced by me and Tami Padula. Jasmine Romero, Julia Redpath. Molly Marcelo, Sarah Wyman, Liana Simström, Irene Naguchi. Thank you to Johannes Dergi 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, Allison Ballos, Derek Neal, as well as Sheila Griffin, Anthony Brick, Richard Marnane, Paul E. Peterson, Steve Drummond, and Cory Turner. Music for this episode was composed by Romteen in his band Drop Electric, which includes-- Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at
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