Why American public schools are still broken

Throughline

This episode of Throughline explores the lasting impact of the 1966 Coleman Report, a landmark study commissioned by the federal government

Key takeaways

• The Coleman Report found that family background and peer environment had a greater impact on student achievement than school funding or resources.
• Despite its data-driven approach, the report was misinterpreted to suggest that money doesn't matter in education, leading to decades of policy skepticism about school funding reforms.

Main topics

• Educational inequality in America
• The Coleman Report (1966)

Notable quotes

"The greatest problem we have is the fact that children are punished in this country because of the zip code that they're born into."

Conclusion

Sixty years after its release, the Coleman Report continues to shape debates about equity in education. While it

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If you've ever found yourself doom-scrolling and thinking, wait, who decided this was a story? You're not alone. I'm Brooke Gladstone, co-host of WNYC's On The Media. Each week, we ask those kinds of questions and more. Because once you see how the system operates, you'll never consume media the same way again. Listen to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. Thomas Coleman can still remember the trip that he took with his father to an amusement park when he was a kid. Gwinnock's Amusement Park was a little bit on the outskirts of Baltimore, I guess. It was a small amusement park. It was segregated in the 1960s. Speaker 1 (0:41) The All-White Park was a 20-minute drive from the family's house in Maryland. His father was a prominent sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. It was July 4th weekend in 1963, as Thomas tells it. The family took a trip to the amusement park, but not to go on rides, to protest segregation. It would draw national attention. So you would walk up. They would pair a white family and a black family and they would ask you, you know, are you here to go to the amusement park or are you here to be arrested? You know, we were there to be arrested. Speaker 1 (1:16) And there's a picture that was on maybe the front page of the second section of the Baltimore Sun of us, the family, being led away. The Coleman family, mom, dad, Thomas, and his brothers, were led to detention at an armory. So I was asleep on the bench, but my brother John was awake and got to go over with my parents to be fingerprinted. His father, James Coleman. was one of hundreds on the ground demanding change for equality. A few years later, again over July 4th weekend, a landmark report bearing his name would be published. It was a massive data dump that would transform the trajectory of American public education for generations to come. It was called the Equality of Educational Opportunity, or simply the Coleman Report. Speaker 1 (2:08) He said, this is the data, this is the evidence. You know, you may like it, you may not like it, but this is what it is. And that data has been debated by educational scholars and historians ever since. This was the first large-scale effort to measure the sources and the extent of educational inequality in the U.S. And it launches a thousand ships. of questions, of research agendas, of new places for scholars to investigate. I'm Randabdud Fattah. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we tell the story of that 60-year-old report that investigated inequity in American schools. Its findings raise complicated questions. Why are schools broken? How do we fix them? And what is school even for? Questions we're still trying to answer today. Speaker 1 (3:15) This is Michelle Vasquez Jacobus. And oh my goodness, do I use ThruLine. I teach law and society. Boy, I really appreciate all that you all do and so love the program. Thank you. I hope this gets through. This message comes from WISE, the smart way to manage your money around the world. With WISE, you can send, spend, and receive money in over 40 currencies at the mid-market rate. Learn more at WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This is Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I interviewed feminist icon Gloria Steinem several times over the years, and we've compiled a special episode to celebrate her life and legacy. Women become ourselves after 50. We drop a lot of baggage and really become much more our true selves. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you listen to Fresh Air. Speaker 1 (4:13) Hey, it's Ray from Car Talk. Are you tired of all the depth and thoughtful care that goes into NPR shows? Want some good old-fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on? Well, I've been taking occasional car questions again. You can hear them by signing up for NPR Plus, along with lots of other bonus content. Just go to plus.npr.org. Part 1, Section 402. Picture the American classroom. Speaker 1 (4:48) Desks, pencils, pictures of American presidents, maps of the nation. But behind all that is a political battle, one about what our children should become. It's a battle that goes back two centuries. A lot of people would argue the starting point is actually the 19th century. And the question becomes, how do you create a citizen? Victoria Kane is a history professor at Northeastern University, and she studies the history of education. How do you provide opportunity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all your citizens? It's the way we build democracy. It's a notion that Thomas Jefferson championed until his death. Education is fundamental to the prosperity of a democratic state. Schools would unite everyone with a shared national identity. striving to build this new country. Speaker 1 (5:43) As the 19th century rolled forward and waves of immigrants started coming to America, the government needed public schools to do more, starting with how to speak, read, and write in English. Americans become convinced that public school systems are the way to transform the immigrant poor into Americans. Look, we will build a school and we will transform society eventually through that school. By 1918, going to school was mandatory. But the reality was that economic hardship shaped access to schools. And for Black kids in particular, there was segregation. After the Civil War, there's an influx of money spent on creating schools for Black students in the South. Over the decades, Jim Crow laws slowly eat at that system. Across America, schools were resourced very differently depending on where they were. Speaker 1 (6:41) Affluent communities fared well. Schools in impoverished communities, not so much. The NAACP starts bringing lawsuits. They turn to the courts to try to integrate schools and try to ensure that Black students can get the resources or access to well-resourced schools. There's a major victory in 1954. The Supreme Court finds that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. But after Brown v. Board of Education, integration stalls, and the federal government knows it needs to act. So nearly a decade later, in the summer of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law. I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every American. Speaker 1 (7:40) Now, the United States would legally end state-sanctioned Jim Crow segregation. With Johnson's signature, the federal government was tackling racial inequality head-on. The Civil Rights Act was a part of his broader Great Society Project, which outlined racial injustice and poverty as two sides of the same coin. So things like unemployment, poor schools, and lack of health care were not standalone problems, but the direct result of systemic inequality and discrimination. And one of the key goals of this project was... The dream of education for all of our children. Public education. Speaker 1 (8:20) To fix the nation's schools, the Johnson administration now has two weapons to tackle that problem. One is in the courthouse, with the backing of the Civil Rights Act. And the second is money. Lots and lots of money. With the passing of something called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the administration has a huge budget line for school funding, more than a billion dollars to spend. He just needs to know how. At the time, no one really knew what was going on in American schools. That the schools were unequal was a given. The people passing the Civil Rights Act are really hoping to gather some data to make an airtight case for the necessity of integration. Johnson focuses on poverty and the disparity in resources as the root of America's problems. Racial justice, equal education. Speaker 1 (9:18) those things would flow from economic prosperity for all. Johnson's solution for the classroom was to integrate, and he wants to send resources to schools that need help. Now his administration just needed proof of how segregated schools were. The problem? There wasn't any data available. So the Office of Education spends many months coming up with a plan for how to get the information they need. They want to establish that segregation by race remains widespread throughout the country. They also want to establish that the schools attended by Black children are inferior to schools attended by white children. And having hard data is going to prove this. If you read the fine details of the Civil Rights Act, there's a tiny clause within it, buried deep inside its passages. Section 402, it's this dry little paragraph. Speaker 1 (10:14) And it requires that the commissioner of education conduct a survey and report