ABSTRACT
The authors of the 1966 Coleman Report famously concluded that variation in academic performance was strongly linked to children's family environments but hardly at all to per pupil expenditures or other measurable school characteristics. The chapter assumes that school practices in the spring have little influence on summer learning so that the school treatment does not contaminate estimates of non-school learning. It explores more traditional methods: models predicting learning gains and/or statistically controlling for observable differences in family background can successfully isolate school effects, how all exacerbatory and compensatory mechanisms stack up against each other, and school inequality is greater than non-school inequality. The chapter describes that the best evidence indicates that schools play a meaningful compensatory role with respect to socioeconomic gaps in cognitive skills, and schools' compensatory role might extend further. Of course, even if schools are already compensatory and not the source of socioeconomic gaps, they still may be an attractive policy lever for reducing gaps further.
