Jorge Werthein

Paul Peterson, cientista político de la Universidad de Harvard, escribe
sobre el legado de James Coleman. Fascinante!

Education Next

Spring 2010 / Vol. 10, No. 2

A Courageous Look at the

American High School

The legacy of James Coleman
Paul Peterson

Excellence was seldom to be found in 2006, when David Ferrero, an
officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reviewed five
firsthand, book-length accounts of teaching and learning at individual
high schools. In one account, a rookie teacher, telling her own story,
“struggles to establish authority in her classes and generally
fails;…her students ritually defy her, going so far as to openly declare
their intention to get her fired for the sheer sport of it.” At another
school, “numerous attempts” by well-meaning, hardworking teachers fail
“to coax students out of their shells, engage them in important issues,
and motivate them to perform on tests.” On and on such tales go. A
powerful but hostile peer group seemed in charge of the learning process.

According to Cornell economist John Bishop, the problem begins in middle
school, where “nerds” are harassed. “Studiousness is denigrated…in part
because it shifts up the grading curve and forces others to work harder
to get good grades…. Victims of nerd harassment hardly ever tell their
parents, their siblings, or their friends. Most accept the proposition
that…acting like a dork is bad…. Complaining to a teacher is
self-defeating. Squealing on classmates only exacerbates [the situation].”

The problem did not appear suddenly at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Fifty years earlier James Coleman, reflecting on his own
adolescence, had detected something quite similar and then provided a
sociological explanation for the phenomenon.

James S. Coleman

Born in 1926, Coleman began his graduate studies in sociology at
Columbia University in 1951, one year before [John] Dewey died at the
age of ninety-two. The two intellectuals had much in common. Both came
from ordinary, small-town families, but they both had entrepreneurial
spirit, tremendous energy, and personal fortitude that belied their
surface modesty. Neither was a brilliant lecturer, but both were kind,
gentle, supportive mentors, surrounded by devoted graduate students.
Like most Americans, both were pragmatists—concerned less about
systematic theory than about learning what worked in practice. Neither
saw his work on education as the centerpiece of his life’s work. Dewey
was a philosopher, Coleman a social theorist and mathematical
model-builder. Yet neither man would have made as lasting a contribution
were it not for his work on schools.

Despite the similarities, Dewey and Coleman walked in contrasting
intellectual worlds. If Dewey’s thinking was shaped by Rousseau, Hegel,
and the Romantic tradition more generally, Coleman’s owed more to two
Scottish empiricists: David Hume and Adam Smith. The “Emile” of
significance to Coleman was not Rousseau’s mythical child but Emile
Durkheim, a sociologist whose point of departure was not the state of
nature but a well-defined community context. Coleman’s work was more
disciplined than was Dewey’s. Trained in survey research and modern
analytic techniques—random sampling, systematic data collection,
rigorous comparisons—taking hold at Columbia, Coleman was able to test
his ideas in ways unavailable to Dewey. Most important, Dewey and
Coleman had separate agendas: Dewey’s ideas shaped the public schools of
the twentieth century; Coleman deconstructed what Dewey had built.

Unlike Dewey, Coleman never became a household name, yet his impact on
American education has been immense. At his memorial service in 1995,
New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the man they were
remembering was among “a very small number of people who end up defining
a major part of the intellectual agenda for their times. Their work is
both so powerful and so well argued…that others are inspired to focus on
these same issues.” Coleman’s impact was not without its ironies,
however. His research served the civil rights movement King had begun
but also the reaction that was to follow. His studies first accelerated
and then helped put the brakes on school desegregation. A part of his
work has been taken to mean that schools are insignificant, while
another part suggests they are decisive. Coleman himself saw no
contradictions.

We know few details about Coleman’s early educational experiences, in
part because Coleman himself wanted us to believe that at age
twenty-five he had sprung directly from the head of—well, not Zeus, but
Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, two men in Columbia’s sociology
department whom many students thought had godlike qualities. Reflecting
back on what seems to have been something like a conversion experience,
Coleman said: “I left a job as a chemist…and took on a new life…. The
transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin
who lived far away in the Midwest and South), I shed all prior
associations…. [After] the resocialization I underwent at Columbia from
1951 to 1955… I was a different person.” It was Merton’s social-theory
course that did the trick, “a conversion experience for those of us
eager for conversion.”

The grandson of an evangelical preacher, Coleman certainly knew the
religious meaning of the concept he was invoking. But his first
twenty-five years left more of a mark on him than he was willing to
acknowledge. Born in Bedford, Indiana, he began high school in
Greenhills, Ohio, a place he wrote about almost wistfully: “School life
had, for a few of us, a more academic focus, in retrospect surprisingly
so.” Shortly thereafter his father took a job as a factory foreman in
Louisville, Kentucky, a city that had two public high schools for boys:
“Male (with a college preparatory curriculum) and Manual (with
vocational and pre-engineering curricula).”

Coleman adjusted to his new school [Manual High] by becoming a member of
the school’s football team. The “boys who counted in the school,” he
writes, “were the first-string varsity football players,” because “Male
and Manual were locked in a fierce football rivalry that culminated
every Thanksgiving Day but flavored the whole school year.” He was
quickly drawn in. “[The] environment had shaped [his] own investment of
time and effort, intensely focused on football, although arguably [his]
comparative advantage lay elsewhere.” Otherwise, high school “failed”
him. Apart from an eleventh-grade algebra class, he could not find
anything “to excite my interest and capture my full attention.” One day,
while hitchhiking to football practice, he thought longingly: “If only
they would not destroy in us the interest with which we came to school,
I would ask for nothing more.” Only when Coleman arrived at Columbia did
he find faculty members with a “personal (that is, selfish) interest in
some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students
in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade,” perhaps because
“graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality.”

He nonetheless attended a small college before joining the Navy in the
middle of World War II. After his discharge, he used his benefits under
the voucher-like GI Bill to earn a B.S. degree in chemical engineering
from Purdue University. Though he was then hired by Eastman Kodak in
Rochester, New York, Coleman was still a frustrated product of Manual
High, a technician who wanted a more intellectual challenge. Despite his
limited resources, he made a dramatic career decision to pursue a Ph.D.
in sociology. Rejected by Harvard and Michigan, he won admission to the
overcrowded program at Columbia.

He could not have been more fortunate. In 1951, Paul F. Lazarsfeld was
using newly developed quantitative techniques to look at practical
topics: mass media, advertising and political campaigns. At the same
time, Robert K. Merton was systematizing his sense of the
ironic—unexpected things happen for reasons no one anticipates—to which
he gave the rather pompous label “latent-function theory.” Coleman drank
from both professorial wellsprings, but it was Merton who “provided the
inspiration for it all.” In his italicized words: “I worked with Lipset,
worked for Lazarsfeld, and worked to be like Merton.” Like Merton,
Coleman viewed the world with an outsider’s irony: things are not as
they seem, and consequences differ from what is expected. At a personal
level, Merton endeared himself to Coleman the day he asked the young man
about his dissertation plans. Told that none had been devised, Merton
suggested that Coleman simply use the chapters he had drafted for a
study of trade unions he was writing in collaboration with Seymour
Martin Lipset, the department’s up-and-coming assistant professor.
Acting on this advice, Coleman had his thesis completed just three years
after matriculation. Shortly thereafter, he submitted a research
proposal to the U.S. Office of Education’s new Cooperative Research Program.

Until this point, nothing in Coleman’s early career indicated he would
become the premier education sociologist of the twentieth century. No
one at Columbia specialized in educational sociology, a field Coleman
disparaged as languishing in the cellar of the discipline. But as he was
ruminating over possible topics for a federal grant proposal, Manual
High came up one night at a dinner party the Colemans were hosting for
Martin Trow (coauthor, with Coleman and Lipset, of the trade union
study) and his wife. The Trows had attended elite schools where sports
were subservient to academics, not only in the schools’ official focus
but also in the students’ interests and social relationships. How
different from Manual High!

Turning the conversation into a research proposal, Coleman laid out a
plan to study several schools in Illinois, near the University of
Chicago, where Coleman had been hired as an assistant professor. The
book that emerged, The Adolescent Society [1961], which is as much a
theoretical commentary on Manual High as an analysis of ten schools in
Illinois, remains Coleman’s masterpiece. According to Coleman, the focus
at these schools was on sports stars, cheerleaders, and other members of
the leading crowd, known more for smart dressing than for smarts per se.
Those who studied hard and got good grades were edged to the social
sidelines. For those who excelled scholastically, success must appear to
have been “gained without special efforts, without doing anything beyond
the required work.” Otherwise, one is socially isolated by “the crowd.”
Ostensibly, schools are educational institutions, but their latent
function is social and quite inimical to educational purposes. It is the
way in which U.S. schools are organized that is the problem, Coleman
says. They resemble jails, the military, and factories: all of these
institutions are run by an “administrative corps” that makes demands
upon a larger group (students, prisoners, soldiers, workers). In
response, the larger group develops a set of norms that govern the
choices individuals make. “The same process which occurs among prisoners
in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a
school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the
students develop a collective response to these demands. This response
takes a similar form to that of workers in industry—holding down effort
to a level which can be maintained by all. The students’ name for the
rate-buster is the ‘curveraiser,’…and their methods of enforcing the
work-restricting norms are similar to those of workers—ridicule,
kidding, exclusion from the group.” With his typical irony, Coleman
dedicated the book “To my own high school, du Pont Manual Training High
School, Louisville, Kentucky.”

The occasion for his contribution was provided by a little-noticed
clause buried in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which called for a
“survey concerning the lack…of equal opportunities…by reason of race,
color, religion or national origin in public education.” Though not a
prominent public figure, James S. Coleman was the logical choice for
directing the survey. He had been trained in survey research, was an
acknowledged expert on high schools, and was sympathetic to the civil
rights movement—he and his son had been arrested at a demonstration in
Baltimore. Coleman…agreed to take on the assignment only after “some
hesitation” and “extensive discussion” that transformed what at first
seemed to be nothing more than a collection of racial-segregation
statistics into the first nationwide study of the factors that affect
student achievement. Students at 4,000 randomly selected schools across
the country were tested in various subjects. The study also collected
information on characteristics of the schools the students attended:
racial composition, per-pupil expenditures, the college degrees teachers
had earned, teacher ability (as measured by performance on a test), the
number of books in the school library, and much more. Family background
information was collected as well.

The study was to go forward with more-than-deliberate speed, as results
were expected to reveal a need for federal action to equalize
educational opportunity, the keystone of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great
Society.” Imagine, then, the shock inside the White House when a draft
of the report began circulating inside the administration. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, one of Johnson’s top domestic advisers, gave a sense
of the reaction when he recalled being greeted in the spring of 1966 by
Harvard professor Martin Lipset with the query: “You know what Coleman
is finding, don’t you?” “I said, ‘What?’ He said: ‘All family.’ I said,
‘Oh, Lord.’” The next day Moynihan informed the secretary of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get ready, as the research project was
about to produce findings the administration “was not going to like.”
The project report [Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966], later
known as “Coleman I” after two additional reports appeared, was released
on Independence Day weekend, 1966. That was thought to be a good time to
announce negative news, since much of the press was on holiday. The
strategy worked: few but academics paid attention, and only gradually
did its message sink in.

To everyone’s surprise, Coleman I found that within regions and types of
communities (urban, suburban, and rural), expenditures per pupil were
about the same in black and white schools. Even more remarkable,
students did not learn more just because more was spent on their
education. Nor did any other material resource of a school have much of
an effect on how well Johnny and Suzy read—not the number of students in
the class, nor the teacher’s credentials, nor the newness of the
textbooks, nor the number of books in the library, nor anything physical
or material that schools had for years considered important. What did
count were a host of family-background characteristics: mother’s
education, father’s education, family income, having fewer siblings, the
number of books in the home, and other factors—all of which together
explained more of the variation among students in their reading
achievement than any school-related factor.

One finding in Coleman I saved the day for the Johnson administration.
The authors found that student achievement was affected by the social
composition of the pupils at a school. If a low-income African American
child had fellow students who were white or from a higher socioeconomic
status, the child did better at reading. The converse was not true,
however: a white child did not suffer educationally from having black
classmates. In other words, the influence of peers was asymmetrical.
Desegregation helped blacks without hurting whites. Many years later,
the Nobel Prize–winning econometrician James Heckman and his colleague
Derek Neal called that asymmetrical result Coleman’s “least robust”
finding. But Coleman never doubted it. Testifying before the Senate
Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, he said black
students at segregated schools were “deprived of the most effective
educational resources contained in the schools: those brought by other
children as a result of their home environment.” Whatever regrets the
Johnson administration might have had about some parts of Coleman I, it
was pleased by the ammunition the report provided for the ongoing
desegregation campaign.

So it was truly ironic that Coleman, the very academic whose work
provided the clearest educational justification for school
desegregation, would in his next major study [Trends in School
Segregation, 1968–73, 1975], the “white flight” study (known as Coleman
II), produce findings that called into question many of the policies
being used to desegregate the schools. Using data collected by the newly
established Civil Rights Commission, Coleman II tracked trends in black
and white school enrollments in cities across the United States. He and
his colleagues found that white families were moving outward more
rapidly from those central cities where racial desegregation plans were
being implemented.

Coleman expressed concern that, as a practical matter, busing of
students within districts was self-defeating. Within school districts,
to be sure, the segregation index fell from 0.63 to 0.37 in the years
1968–1972. But that only intensified segregation between districts. Said
Coleman, “The emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is
the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs.” Schools
were at risk of being as segregated as they had ever been, exactly as
Justice [Thurgood] Marshall had predicted.

Not since Cleopatra heard about Antony’s dalliances has a messenger come
so close to being poisoned. Scholars turned on Coleman with an
unexpected vengeance that introduced a more virulent tone into the world
of education policy research. Well-known Harvard psychology professor
Thomas F. Pettigrew claimed that Coleman II “should not be taken
seriously.” The NAACP general counsel called the Chicago sociologist
“without a doubt, a first-class fraud…. He is not entitled to any
credence or any reliability or any belief with respect to the things he
says he has found.” A Washington Post columnist questioned whether
Coleman was mixing research with advocacy, quoting then deputy director
of the National Science Foundation (and future president of the
University of California) Richard Atkinson as saying, “A lot of what
goes under the name of social science is just junk…. Too often [when]
speaking on issues of education [scholars use] research evidence as a
disguise for advocating a particular policy.” Atkinson was careful not
to mention Coleman by name, but such innuendo by distinguished leaders
fed the anti-Coleman fire. It flamed into an effort, led by the
sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, then the president of the American
Sociological Association (ASA), to censure or expel Coleman from the
organization’s membership for having spread “flammable propaganda.”
Though that blaze was contained, “few sociologists ever had to endure
the high profile public controversy which swirled around him.” Years
later, Coleman recalled the ASA plenary session held to debate the
report: “The passions generated at that session are hard to reconstruct
now, but I still have the posters that were plastered at the entrance to
the ballroom and behind the podium, covered with Nazi swastikas,
epithets, and my name.”

In 1981, Coleman wrote his third major report, identified here as
Coleman III. Two years previously, Coleman and his colleagues at the
University of Chicago had been asked by the National Center for
Educational Statistics to extend the work begun in Coleman I. The study
was to be more than a single-shot survey along the lines of Coleman’s
earlier work. Instead, several rounds of data were to be collected. A
nationally representative sample of high schoolers was to be tested as
sophomores and then again as seniors, after which they would be followed
into college and the labor force. In this way, Coleman expected to find
out how much students learned between their sophomore and senior years,
as well as the impact of schooling on college attendance and labor force
participation. Coleman also convinced the U.S. Department of Education,
which was funding the study, to look at private schools as well as
public ones. He now got his chance to see if private and public schools
across the country were as different from one another as Manual High
differed from those elite schools his friends at Columbia had attended.

The survey of some 70,000 students at more than 1,000 high schools was
conducted in the spring of 1980. Working at his usual extraordinary
pace, Coleman reported his team’s findings back to the government that
same September, even as a presidential election campaign was in full
swing. After the election was over and the Reagan administration had
assumed office, the results from the first round of data collection were
released. Coleman reported that sophomores in Catholic schools performed
at higher levels than those in public schools, apparently showing in
practice what [Milton] Friedman had argued in theory. In education
circles, it was about as dramatic as the first proof of Einstein’s
theory of relativity. Coleman explained his findings by claiming that
students at Catholic schools benefited from the “social capital”
surrounding the religious school: parents knew and supported one another
as they attended Mass and participated together in other religious
activities. As another group of sociologists put it, “Catholic schools
benefit from a network of social relations, characterized by trust, that
constitute a form of ‘social capital.’… Trust accrues because school
participants, both students and faculty, choose to be there.”

The attacks on Coleman III were no more polite and detached than the
attacks on Coleman II. The day it was released, “people entering the
auditorium were handed leaflets attacking the study.” The executive
director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals
insisted that the study used “incomplete data inappropriately applied.”
The New York Times chided Coleman for publicizing his results, saying
that “sociologists invite trouble” when they seek “the stardom of
advocacy based on their fallible predictions.” Its news reports quoted
Coleman out of context in order to give the impression that he himself
thought “the study was deeply flawed and that [he] was retreating from
his conclusions,” though Coleman had said nothing of the sort. A number
of professors and education experts denounced the report. One called it
a “premature” report of “an ax-grinding nature.” Fumed one Harvard
faculty member, “While the findings are wrapped in a mantle of social
science research, the report is inconsistent with the notion of
disciplined inquiry,” curiously objecting to the fact that “the findings
are presented quite plainly.” Another set of critics opened their essay
with: “The methods and interpretations used by [Coleman and his
colleagues] fall below the minimum standards for social-scientific
research.”

A good deal of the rhetoric can safely be ignored, but two criticisms
were valid. (1) Students at fee-charging private schools cannot easily
be compared to those attending free public schools, because they come
from families who are willing to pay for their children’s education.
Although Coleman III adjusted for parental education and many other
family background characteristics, that adjustment did not necessarily
take into account the greater educational commitment of parents who were
willing to pay for their children’s education. (2) The study showed that
sophomores in private school performed at a higher level, but it did not
prove that they had learned more there. It was possible that the
children who were being sent to private school were, to begin with, more
capable students.

Coleman and his colleagues replied to these criticisms two years later
when the second round of “High School and Beyond” data became available.
This time, they were able to show that students in private schools had
learned more between their sophomore and senior years than their
counterparts in public school had. The findings calmed the skepticism of
the more reasonable of their critics.

Coleman and his colleagues made some errors. They might have decided to
withhold their results until they’d gathered information on student
gains in achievement in high school, not just the initial sophomore
scores. And they made various methodological errors, as frequently
happens when one is undertaking an innovative project. But the biggest
tactical errors were made by Coleman’s opponents. By relentlessly
attacking Coleman III, they helped to place school choice on the
national political agenda. What had been an academic debating point
during the 1970s became, in the 1980s, a part of the national conversation.

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl