The school report that changed public education

In 1966, the federal government commissioned a massive survey aimed at solving educational inequality. Instead, the explosive Coleman Report unleashed a 60-year debate over race, resources, and what education in America is actually for. This is the story of how the report came together… and the policy whirlwind that followed. Guests: Victoria Cain, Associate Professor of History, Northeastern University Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, Harvard University Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In a midterm election, it's hard to keep track of all those small down ballot races. So some voters are using AI chatbots to figure out who to support.

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  Sometimes if you push back to hallucinations, the chatbot will confess that it made something up. But in other cases, you know, it will double down.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  What you should know about using AI for election research. Listen now on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Thomas Coleman can still remember the trip that he took with his father to an amusement park when he was a kid.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Gwinnett's amusement park was a little bit on the outskirts of Baltimore, I guess. It was a small amusement park. It was segregated in the 1960s.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  So you would walk up. They would pair a white family and a black family. And they would ask you, you know, 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 maybe the front page, the second section of the Baltimore Sun, of us, the family, being led away.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  The Coleman family, mom, dad, Thomas and his brothers, were led to detention at an armory.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  So I was asleep on the bench. But my brother, John, was awake and got to go over with my parents to be fingerprinted.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  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."

• 2:10Speaker 03

  He said, "This is the data. This is the evidence. You know, you may like it, you may not like it, but this is what it is."

• 2:17Speaker 02

  And that data has been debated by educational scholars and historians ever since.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  This was the first large-scale effort to measure the sources and the extent of educational inequality in the US.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  And it launches a thousand ships of questions, of research agendas, of new places for scholars to investigate.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. 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.

• 3:16Speaker 06

  Hey, Throughline. This is Michelle Vasquez Jacobus. And oh my goodness, do I use Throughline. I teach law and society. Boy, I really appreciate all that you all do and so love the program. Thank you. I hope this gets through.

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  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message. What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Part one, section 402.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Picture the American classroom.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  A lot of people would argue the starting point is actually the 19th century. And the question becomes, how do you create a citizen?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Victoria Kane is a history professor at Northeastern University, and she studies the history of education.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  How do you provide opportunity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all your citizens? It's the way we build democracy.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  It's a notion 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.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  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.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  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. After 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 in impoverished communities, not so much.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:44Speaker 10

  I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every American.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Now, the United States would legally end state-sanctioned Jim Crow segregation. With Johnson's 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 health care were not standalone problems, but the direct result of systemic inequality and discrimination. And one of the key goals of this project was...

• 8:28Speaker 10

  The dream of education for all of our children.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Public education.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  At the time, no one really knew what was going on in American schools. That the schools were unequal was a given.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  The people passing the Civil Rights Act are really hoping to gather some data to make an airtight case for the necessity of integration.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  If you read the fine details of the Civil Rights Act, there's a tiny clause within it, buried deep inside its passages.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  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."

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Because with this document in hand, the Johnson administration would have a green light to spend all of that money.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  It will allow the federal government to take final and decisive action. Maybe the federal government can start cutting off funds from segregated systems.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  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. The results of that ambitious project needed to be delivered to the government in a report within two years.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  The clock started ticking in the summer of 1964.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  This is Thomas Kane. He's an economist and the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  The Commissioner of Education and his team had to go out and find somebody who would run a big study like this. And James Coleman was one of the few that had.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  He is a gifted, well-respected mathematical sociologist.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  James Coleman was studious, unassuming, and a guy who really loved numbers as a way to understand people.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  He is somebody who pays attention to the quantitative, but he is keenly aware of cultural influence, cultural impact.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  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-

• 12:59Speaker 02

  That's huge.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  That's going to be really hard to pull off.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  After the break, James Coleman tries to pull off one heck of an all-nighter.

• 13:13Speaker 11

  Hi, this is Maria Montalvo from Chicago, Illinois. You are listening to Throughline at NPR.

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  This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Hassan Piker. He's a leading voice of what he calls the insurgent left, although he denies being a leader at all.

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  I've never said I'm a kingmaker. The media keep saying this, but I don't think there can be a real kingmaker in socialist politics. This is mass politics.

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  Hassan Piker talks with Leila Fadl this week on NPR's Newsmakers. You can watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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  American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him. And now, we finally have some answers.

• 14:01Speaker 11

  This is the prison that Austin was in.

• 14:03Speaker 15

  Oh, my God. We found Austin's file.

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  Listen to Where Is Austin Tice? From NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:15Speaker 09

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Part two, the report.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  It's 1965 when James Coleman starts working on this 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 it end. And the government is confident in what they think the data will show.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  The idea is to measure educational inputs.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Conditions and resources that help a student achieve their learning goals. Things like-

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Books in the library. The quality of educational facilities. Does your school have a science lab? Dollars in the school budget.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  How many movie projectors with sound equipment does your school have? How many catalog volumes are in your school library?

• 16:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  Educational outputs are how effective the education a student has received in school is. Those are harder to measure.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  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?

• 17:26Speaker 05

  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?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  He even asks students about their own perception of their futures.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Whether they feel like they have control over their own success.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  So, OK, 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.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  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 LA. But they still got a lot of responses.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Eventually, he gets questionnaires from 600,000 first, third, sixth, ninth, and 12th graders, 60,000 teachers.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  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.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Now he has to crunch the data.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  And then he has to write the report.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  He locked himself up.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:46Speaker 02

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

• 20:58Speaker 05

  It's less a report than it is a data dump. 700-plus pages of data.

• 21:06Speaker 02

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

• 21:14Speaker 05

  His findings are totally explosive. And they are not what he or anybody else has anticipated.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  It seemed to undercut the promise of education itself.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  And the Johnson administration is not happy.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Instead of clarity and answers, the Johnson administration now has a quagmire to wade through.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  They are so worried about the controversy that they think that this report is going to unleash, that they effectively bury it.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  They try to quietly release the findings over 4th of July weekend, hoping no one will notice or care. That's not what happens.

• 24:37Speaker 16

  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 "Pondras: Equality of Educational Opportunity." It's a 700-page document filled with technical tables, charts, and statistics.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:29Speaker 16

  To many, the Coleman Report raises more questions than it answers.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  The Coleman Report is nothing if not a Worsach test. People find in it what they find.

• 25:39Speaker 16

  It seems to have something from everyone's point of view.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Once it was released, anyone who gets their hands on the 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.

• 25:56Speaker 05

  And they are using it to tell whatever story they really want to tell.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  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.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Some question its validity altogether.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  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.

• 27:00Speaker 17

  Don't be afraid, don't be ashamed. We want Black power. We want Black power.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 27:22Speaker 02

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

• 27:29Speaker 17

  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.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  This is the beginning of the long, hot, urban summers.

• 27:38Speaker 02

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

• 27:46Speaker 18

  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.

• 28:26Speaker 02

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

• 28:39Speaker 19

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

• 28:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:13Speaker 20

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

• 29:22Speaker 02

  That's coming up.

• 29:29Speaker 21

  This is Justin Whitlow from Lester, North Carolina, and you are listening to Three Line. Thank you so much.

• 29:37Speaker 15

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:00Speaker 22

  Support comes from NPR sponsor AARP.

• 30:04Speaker 22

  This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump's diesel deal with Russia. Would it help with shipping costs? And would it even be legal? The United States produces more diesel than it consumes. There's no real need to bring more diesel into this country. Plus, we dig into claims from Ukraine that the US cut access to crucial military satellites. Listen now to Sources and Methods from NPR.

• 30:28Speaker 09

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message. What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Part three, consequences.

• 30:50Speaker 23

  There's a battle underway these days which challenges some of the most sacred assumptions of the great American dream.

• 30:57Speaker 02

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

• 31:04Speaker 23

  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.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Everyone agrees there's a problem. Schools are unequal. There's an achievement gap. What's not clear? The solution. Lawmakers aside, busing kids to different school districts is one path forward.

• 31:27Speaker 24

  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.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  To ensure people have opportunity, we need to bus. We need to mix people up by class and race.

• 31:58Speaker 19

  Do you think it's bothering many of the parents?

• 32:00Speaker 25

  Yes. Oh, it bothers me that my kid has to change the district is all. As far as going with the colored, 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 what we're going to receive.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:41Speaker 05

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

• 32:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:26Speaker 19

  Kentucky Senator Walter Huddleston asked Coleman what alternatives are available to those who want to end busing, other than through a constitutional amendment.

• 33:35Speaker 26

  My, my hope is that the Congress might attempt to provide a kind of alternative to a full-scale racial balance through compulsory busing that would provide increased rights for blacks rather than restricted rights for both blacks and whites.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:16Speaker 23

  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.

• 34:36Speaker 27

  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.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:58Speaker 04

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

• 35:07Speaker 02

  And history showed answers weren't easy. By the 1980s and 90s, more ideas.

• 35:14Speaker 28

  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.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  And then rigorous school testing a decade later.

• 35:28Speaker 29

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

• 35:37Speaker 02

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

• 35:48Speaker 30

  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.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  You know, I think in a democracy, we want more from our schools than that.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  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?

• 37:06Speaker 28

  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.

• 37:17Speaker 31

  The Trump administration wants to make significant changes to Head Start. That's the country's early education and childcare program for low-income families. Now, this program serves more than 700,000 kids each year, from birth to age five, in both urban centers and rural areas.

• 37:35Speaker 32

  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.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  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,

• 38:25Speaker 05

  then we will achieve perfect schools that will help us achieve a perfect society. It's this long-held dream.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  The Coleman report led to some misinterpretations of the evidence from the Coleman report. Just limitations of the research design, which contributed to a skepticism and a pessimism for several decades.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  How do we create a world where all students can have access to genuine educational opportunity?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  That is the very question that sent Coleman on his initial quest.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  We haven't found the answer yet.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  And that's it for today's show. Tune into 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.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and... Amy Padula. Jasmine Romero.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Julia Redpath.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Molly Marcelo. Sarah Wyman. Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Johannes Sturgie and Cheyenne Butler. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. 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 Murnane, Paul E. Peterson, Steve Drummond, and Corey Turner. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

• 40:24Speaker 33

  Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. 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.

• 40:55Speaker 15

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 40:59Speaker 09

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• 41:27Speaker 34

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