ABSTRACT
In the United States, ambitious as undertakings such as the NAEP and EEOS were, it was immediately obvious that the data collected were inadequate to their intended task: measuring the adequacy and equity of American public education. In retrospect, as we noted in Chapter 3, data limitations contributed greatly to the Coleman team’s finding that schools make a relatively small contribution to student achievement (Coleman et al., 1966). The standardized tests unrelated to any defined curriculum for which schools were accountable were not ideal measures for elucidating the effects of schools on pupils. In fact, the Coleman Report’s greatest legacy may be that it
whetted policy makers’ appetites for more detailed and precise information on education, and spurred the development of two research disciplines dedicated to meeting the perceived research need: school effectiveness and school indicator research. Not surprisingly, some of the earliest challenges to the conclusions of the Coleman report used data from countries such as Ireland with curriculum-embedded examination systems, i.e. tests of what was actually taught, rather than of pupils’ generalized academic skills (e.g. Kellaghan and Madaus, 1979).
