COLEMAN REPORT SET THE STANDARD FOR THE STUDY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION
Concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions.
No one had conducted studies analyzing the elements necessary for successful learning.
Coleman's questions were ones that no one had asked, let alone to such a wide degree.
Coleman wanted to understand outcomes.
How well were kids learning? What might influence a child's capacity to learn? Was it teachers? Peers? Families? "One of the interesting things about Jim and the way he approached his work is that he didn't like being told what to do.
Coleman needed to rank the results for the government and provide an answer as to the foremost challenges facing education. Was it school facilities, funding, teacher quality, social networks? Was it segregation or geography or curriculum?
The question was how to weight myriad variables, considering they were all tangled up with one another. No one knew back then how to separate one variable from another when they're all intertwined.
This whole way of figuring out and ranking the importance of variables—that are not only related to the outcome but are also related to one another—how do you do that?"
He conclude that the most important predictor of a child's performance in school wasn't the school building or resources. It was home life. It was family. All factors considered, the most important variable—in or out of school—in a child's performance remains his family's education background.
It appears that children from advantaged groups assume that the environment will respond if they are able enough to affect it; children from disadvantaged groups do not make this assumption but in many cases assume that nothing they will do can affect the environment—it will give benefits or withhold them but not as a consequence of their own action.