BOO KS
639
SCHOOL AND SOCIETY
EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY.
By
James S. Coleman,
Ernest Q.
C~mpbell,
Carol J. Hobson, James McPartland, Alexander M.
Mood, Frederick D. Weinfeld, and Robert
l.
York. U.S. Government
Printing Office. $4.25.
One of the major questions now facing the nation is how
to narrow the gap between the underclass of Negro and Spanish Ameri–
cans and poor white and the affluent two-thirds. It is widely agreed that
the cleavage which divides us is much more than economic ; the under–
class is characterized by a subculture, political inefficacy, educational
deficiencies and psychological inhibitions. But education, it has seemed ,
might provide one lever for raising the le\'el of minority and poor
children, and thus helping them to break out of their rut. This was the
assumption behind projects such as Head Start and other "compensa–
tory" education projects, in which about 1,200 million dollars a year are
still being invested.
The Coleman report, one of the most technically competent and
extensive social science studics of this generation, financed and published
by the government, provides some of the data we need for reexamining
the results of new educational approaches. Nearly 600,000 American stu–
dents in grades 1, 3, 6, 9 and ] 2 in 4,000 schools in 50 states were
studied, along with their teachers, principals and superintendents. The
students answered questionnaires about themselves, their educational
aspirations and their backgrounds, and took various tests of educational
achievement and ability; school personnel answered
questionnaire~;
and
highly sophisticated statistical tools and of course computers were used
to analyze the data.
One of the incidental revelations of the Coleman report is that ten
years after the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling about 80 per cent
of all white children still attend schools that are 90 to 100 per cent white.
About hvo-thirds of Negro students attend schools where most of the
students are Negroes. Americans of Mexican, Indian, Puerto Rican and
Oriental background are also segregated, although not to the same extent
as Negroes. Teachers are segregated too, with white studE'nts attE'nd–
ing sc hools \\,}wre 97 per cent
or
thE' traclwrs arr wh ite.
