Coleman Report

The Equality of Educational Opportunity (EEO) report, known as “the Coleman report” after principal investigator James S. Coleman, is widely seen as one of the most significant contributions of the 20th century to education policy and research as well as the field of sociology. The national study, commissioned by Congress under a provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, documented school inequality on an unprecedented scale. Attempting to survey every principal, student, and teacher in a nationally representative sample of 4,000 schools, the EEO represented a historic data collection effort in American education. The project collected cross-sectional survey and test score data from approximately 600,000 students and 50,000 teachers. This entry further discusses how the researchers conducted the study and their findings. It then ...