COLEMAN, James Samuel

(b. 12 May 1926 in Bedford, Indiana; d. 25 March 1995 in Chicago, Illinois), sociologist best known for a report that concluded that a child's family background and a school's socioeconomic makeup are strong determinants of a student's academic success—ideas that would have a far-reaching impact on education policy.

Born the son of James Fox Coleman, a foreman, and Maurine Lappin, Coleman joined the U.S. Navy in 1944, soon after his high school graduation. He completed his navy service in 1946 and enrolled at Purdue University, where he earned a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1949. Coleman worked briefly at Eastman-Kodak in Rochester, New York, but soon realized that a purely scientific career was not sufficient to his interests. He wanted a career that would combine the sciences with issues of moral and social importance, and therefore enrolled at Columbia University in New York City. There he worked as a research associate with the Bureau of Applied Social Research and earned his Ph.D. in sociology in 1955.

Coleman was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago from 1956 to 1959 and then moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he served as associate professor from 1959 to 1961. In 1959 he founded the Department of Social Relations (now the Department of Sociology) and in 1961 was promoted to full professor. Coleman became involved in the study of education in America in 1957, when he and his associates, supported by the United States Office of Education, embarked on a detailed analysis of academic and social aspects of ten high schools in Illinois. The result was a research monograph entitled Social Climates in High Schools, published in 1961, and two academic books hailed for their in-depth research and objective analysis.

Following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. commissioner of education—under Title IV of the act—was to study "the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions at all levels." The commissioner selected Coleman and Ernest Q. Campbell of Vanderbilt University to conduct the study under a $1.5 million grant. Led by Coleman, their team surveyed sixty thousand teachers and more than 600,000 students at four thousand schools throughout the United States. Particular emphasis was placed on analyzing the type and quality of education to which underprivileged whites and members of minority groups had access. It was the second-largest social science research project in the history of the United States and considered by many to be the most important educational study of the twentieth century. Completed and published in 1966, the landmark study was entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity but became commonly known as The Coleman Report.

Barbara J. Kiviat, writing for Johns Hopkins Magazine many years later, noted that before Coleman's report, equal opportunity for students meant looking at the number and quality of a school's resources such as textbooks and other teaching tools. Indeed, Coleman began the study expecting to find a great disparity in funding between white and non-white schools that would prove to be the underpinning reason for the disparity in academic achievement between nonwhites and whites. However, noted Kiviat, "unlike his predecessors who focused on the equality of what was going into the school system, Coleman evaluated what was coming out." Coleman was the first to use students' test scores and overall performance to determine equality in education.

Surprisingly, the report found the standard of education offered by white and nonwhite schools to be relatively comparable. Teacher training and salaries, for example, as well as curriculum, were of similar quality. Also, while predominantly nonwhite classrooms were usually more crowded and teaching aids of somewhat lesser quality than those in white schools, neither factor was a major contributor to the dropout rate of black students (almost twice that of white students) or to the fact that only 4.6 percent of the nation's college students were black.

The report also pointed out that educational segregation occurred primarily by default, because most children attended school in the neighborhoods in which they lived, and those neighborhoods tended to develop according to income level and ethnicity. Another significant finding was that nonwhite students in primarily nonwhite schools lagged behind white students in primarily white schools by 1.6 years at grade six and by 3.3 years by grade twelve. On the other hand, students from lower-income families who attended schools in which the majority of students came from middle-income backgrounds improved in educational motivation. The basic deduction from these findings was that family background affected student academic achievement in the early years of education and that minority students attending minority schools suffered a continuing academic disparity, because predominantly minority schools were unable to assist students in overcoming the negative effects fostered by their family backgrounds. Richard D. Kahlenberg, writing for Education Week, stated the situation simply: "Going to school with advantaged peers was an advantage, while going to school with disadvantaged peers was a disadvantage—above and beyond an individual's family circumstances."

Kiviat pointed out that the Coleman report was "full of subtleties and caveats, but the mass media and makers of policy focused on one prediction—that black children who attended integrated schools would have higher test scores if a majority of their classmates were white." The government soon enforced a radical affirmative action policy to overcome de facto segregation: students would be bused to schools outside their neighborhood to prevent nonwhite enrollment exceeding 60 percent of a school's student ratio. The report appeared during a time of enormous social and racial unrest—race relations and issues of equality and inequality were among the foremost topics of the day. The unexpected results of Coleman's report gave rise to public policy that added a new dimension to the unrest and caused volatile emotional reactions and societal upheaval.

In 1975 Coleman released the results of another study in which he concluded that busing failed "largely because it had promoted 'white flight.'" This mass movement of white families to suburbia, and the inevitable enrollment of their children in suburban schools, dashed the possibility for racially balanced schools. Many officials, sociologists, and policy makers were outraged that Coleman would abandon his earlier commitment to desegregation. In fact, Coleman was not committed, in his work as a social scientist, to any political position, but rather to discerning the results from his data—whether those results were popular or not. As Kiviat noted, his supporters "called him a true scientist who changed his opinion when empirical evidence required him to do so."

Coleman returned to the University of Chicago in 1973 as professor of sociology and served there until his death from prostate cancer. He had married Lucille Richey on 5 February 1949, but they were divorced in August 1973, after which he married Zdzislawa Walaszek. He had four sons, three of them by his first marriage. Coleman's third and final major report, following another pivotal study, was published in 1981. He concluded that even when family background was controlled for, students in Catholic schools achieved higher academic levels than did those in public schools. Each of Coleman's reports proved both ground-breaking and controversial, and each in its own way has been the forerunner for new and continuing studies into the disparity of academic achievement and the causes behind that disparity.

More information on Coleman and his work can be found in Jon Clark, James S. Coleman (1996), and Barbara J. Kiviat, "The Social Side of Schooling," Johns Hopkins Magazine (Apr. 2000). See also Coleman's own writings, most notably Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966).

Marie L. Thompson