ABSTRACT
In 1966, sociologist James Coleman and his co-authors issued what is today considered a seminal report on inequality in schooling. While the document, which came to be known as the “Coleman report,” drew attention to the effects of racial segregation as opposed to school resources on student outcomes, it also raised a surprising additional sociological insight: family background, not schools, was primarily responsible for differences in educational attainment.1 While for minority students some school characteristics had minor to moderate effects, these were largely school composition effects (that is, their racial make-up); expenditures only seemed to matter for African-Americans in the South.2 Such a conclusion was shocking, primarily because it implied that the indicators upon which educational policy had focused for most of the twentieth century, such as per-pupil expenditures and student-to-teacher ratios, did not matter nearly as much as policy makers had thought. Comprising information on over 600,000 students in 4,000 schools, the data indicated that the importance of family background dwarfs the role that school-based dynamics play in the educational experience.
