Six years after James Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966) asked whether educators could effectively equalize opportunity for low-income African American and Latino students in the nation's increasingly segregated cities, sociologist Christopher Jencks questioned whether Coleman had been asking too much from American schools. If the goal was equality of opportunity broadly conceived, Jencks held, then schools were the wrong tools; efforts to equalize educational opportunity were simply a distraction from the real goal of equalizing opportunity in life.Footnote ¹ A year later, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton also questioned whether equal educational opportunity was a myth. In his 1973 autobiography, he argued that his Oakland schools had been structured to block the American dream:

When finding that at graduation he and his friends “were ill-equipped to function in society, except at the bottom,” Newton speculated that school leaders “knew what they were doing, preparing us for the trash heap of society, where we would have to work long hours for low wages.”Footnote ³ Coleman, Jencks, and Newton were all disappointed by the public schools' failure to equalize educational or socioeconomic opportunities. In expressing this disappointment, they echoed another famous critique of opportunity-based egalitarianism of the civil rights, Black Power, and Great Society eras: President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 call for “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”Footnote ⁴ However, these social thinkers approached the debates over the meanings and purposes of educational equality that rocked the educational establishment in the late 1960s and 1970s with very different explanations of the sources of inequality—and different visions of a just society—in mind.

These contests over educational equality in the decade following the Civil Rights Act represent one flashpoint in a longer history of disagreements concerning the meanings of educational equality, on the one hand, and whether schools could equalize society on the other. Imprecisely defined but widely celebrated, equality of opportunity (one strand of American egalitarian thought) has been among the most enduring and broadly embraced political ideals in twentieth-century America.Footnote ⁵ Efforts to equalize adult socioeconomic status have always been controversial, but few oppose—at least openly and in principle—giving all children a fair chance to get ahead. At the same time, since at least the 1940s, critics on the left have argued that opportunity-based egalitarianism was a myth or ideology that rationalized an unequal status quo and led Americans to ask too much of their schools.Footnote ⁶ One piece of that larger story, this paper explores Americans' contested visions of the role schools can and should play in generating a fair social order, as well as the questions those discussions raised about how much equality, and what types, are necessary in a just society.

An examination of these issues, especially in years alternately described as the Coleman Report, War on Poverty, Moynihan Report, and Black Power eras, engages three historiographies. First, it provides a history of a social and political ideal that builds on what cultural historians and scholars of “the politics of knowledge” have shown about how social categories evolve over time and are shaped by institutional pressures.Footnote ⁷ The concept of equal opportunity evolved as it moved between social science, social policy, literature, and popular social thought—discursive locations that, in part, determined the ideal's evolving contours. Second, by centering American thought about the relationship between schooling, employment, housing, and social welfare policy, this larger project integrates histories of education and American liberalism. Why Americans never committed to a more redistributive social welfare state has long occupied historians of twentieth-century liberalism.Footnote ⁸ The Coleman moment suggests that the hope that schooling could equalize society was part of the story of liberalism's blind spots, even, as Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe suggest, in cases where social science raised more questions than it answered about how education for equality actually worked.Footnote ⁹ And third, in conversation with African American intellectual and political history, this paper situates visions of schooling's egalitarian potential in the wider history of American thought on race and class injustice, debates that became especially discordant as the interracial left fractured in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰

Historians often discuss the Coleman Report as a time when views of educational equality shifted focus from educational inputs (funding, teacher quality, facilities, curricula) to educational outputs (test scores); when research on what would later be termed the achievement gap was launched; and when arguments over whether integration or compensatory education represented the best tool for equalizing educational opportunities reached a crescendo.Footnote ¹¹ When considering the politics of egalitarian thought on education in the civil rights and Black Power eras, however, the views of Coleman's critics were as important as his—though in the long term not as influential.Footnote ¹² One set of critiques, which emerged from a group of (largely white) social scientists with loose ties to the socialist-leaning New Left, suggested that what Coleman missed was schooling's limited capacity to equalize social and economic status among adults, at least in the absence of redistributive tax, employment, or welfare policies. The other line of critique, which emerged from the internally diverse African American left, argued that Coleman blamed the victim because he failed to account for systemic and institutionalized racial discrimination both within and outside of schools. Where Coleman's critics disagreed was on the relative importance of liberal capitalism and institutionalized racism as obstacles to educational equality, on the role schooling (even antiracist schooling) could play in struggles to equalize the economic order, and on the most politically strategic way to discuss the sources of the achievement gap. Certainly, the Coleman Report's federal sponsorship, combined with the rigor, scale, and innovative character of Coleman's quantitative analysis, partly account for the report's long-term impact on the educational research and policy establishment. What this paper reveals is that differences in egalitarian vision and political strategy among Coleman's critics—including the fear that questioning schooling's egalitarian capacities could be politically disastrous for low-income and minority youth—also help explain why Coleman's useful, but incomplete, explanation of educational inequality had such staying power.

An emblem of Great Society liberalism's enthusiasm for both quantitative social science and educational responses to poverty, Coleman's enormous, government-sponsored statistical analysis of the relationship between educational inputs and outputs revealed much that commentators already knew. The sociologist found that the nation's schools were segregated by race and socioeconomic status, that segregation was generally coupled with inequality in educational resources, and that while minority children lagged behind whites in their “verbal and nonverbal skills when they enter the first grade,” schools seemed to make matters worse.Footnote ¹³ And yet the most controversial aspect of the Coleman Report was the finding—one he hadn't expected and that shocked an education policy establishment hopeful about compensatory education—that minority children's academic performance was not substantially affected by increasing educational inputs. Although most minority students attended schools where they had less access to resources (facilities like science labs and libraries, curricula, and extracurricular offerings like school newspapers or debate teams) that seemed related to academic success, these “variations in the facilities and curriculums of the schools,” Coleman concluded, “account for relatively little variation in pupil achievement insofar as this is measured by standard tests.”Footnote ¹⁴ Coleman's finding about what later scholars termed peer effects, the idea that the test scores of poor and minority students seemed to increase when they were in classes with middle-class peers, produced more hope, at least for integrationists who saw the report as a mandate for large-scale desegregation plans, including through busing.Footnote ¹⁵ Advocates of community-controlled schooling and compensatory education, however, worried that the report rationalized reduced investments in African American educational spaces.Footnote ¹⁶

Partly in response to Equality of Educational Opportunity, and alongside studies of social mobility and the life course by Peter Blau and Otis Duncan, leftist white social scientists at some of the nation's most prestigious universities launched one line of critique: they asked whether equality of educational opportunity could generate opportunity in life.Footnote ¹⁷ Making liberal capitalism without sufficient safety nets the primary obstacle to American egalitarian aspirations, sociologist Jencks and economist Samuel Bowles suggested that asking education to equalize life chances in the absence of other egalitarian social and economic programming was futile.Footnote ¹⁸ Bowles criticized the Coleman Report for underestimating the extent to which educational inputs (especially teacher quality) affected academic progress among racial minorities and for downplaying “the effectiveness of devoting more resources to the education of Negro children.”Footnote ¹⁹ Ultimately, however, Bowles was as concerned with the impact of labor market discrimination as low test scores on African American employment prospects. In a 1968 response to Coleman, he argued that “the earnings gap considerably exceeds the learning gap” and that understanding “the effects of education on jobs and the effects of education on income” was as important as understanding achievement gaps.Footnote ²⁰ “Equality of educational opportunity implies major changes in society at large,” he maintained, including changes in the “distribution of political power between races and among social classes” and “cannot be achieved by the efforts of the educational system alone.”Footnote ²¹ The volume most closely aligned with this critique was Jencks and colleagues' Inequality (1972), which concluded that increasing educational opportunity would have little effect on social status among adults, especially on inequalities in employment, income, or job satisfaction. “The character of a school's output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children,” Jencks offered in a statement that, unsurprisingly, put many educators on edge. “Everything else—the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers—is either secondary or completely irrelevant.”Footnote ²² He argued further, prefiguring an argument historian Michael Katz would make two years later, that educational reform could displace or obscure broader social reform.Footnote ²³ “As long as egalitarians assume that public policy cannot contribute to economic equality directly but must proceed by ingenious manipulations of marginal institutions like the schools,” Jencks argued, “progress will remain glacial.” In fact, exposing the radical associations that led many in the education establishment to discount his analysis, Jencks noted, “If we want to move beyond this tradition, we will have to establish political control over the economic institutions that shape our society. This is what other countries usually call socialism.”Footnote ²⁴

In the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, another set of thinkers also questioned the Coleman Report, but with a different set of concerns in mind. This group, from across the internally divided African American left, turned attention to an issue Coleman largely overlooked: institutionalized racial discrimination within and outside of schools.Footnote ²⁵ Black Power leaders Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton consistently treated opportunity-based egalitarianism as an ideology rationalizing white supremacy.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast, African American integrationists closer to the liberal center, including Charles H. Thompson, recently retired editor of the Journal of Negro Education and dean of Howard University's School of Education; Whitney Young, executive director of the Urban League; and psychologist Kenneth B. Clark called emphatically for equality of educational opportunity, often as a way to promote compensatory notions of racial justice. These thinkers, in contrast to Coleman, did not shy away from causal arguments. But they treated systemic and institutionalized racism—not the family and community context that Coleman pinpointed or the inequalities capitalism inherently generated, which Bowles and Jencks highlighted—as the chief obstacle to the equalization of educational opportunities. They also situated educational inequality squarely within the wider political and economic context of deindustrializing, increasingly segregated metropolitan America.Footnote ²⁷

Clark's Dark Ghetto avoided Coleman's causal ambiguity and associated victim-blaming by clearly presenting school-based discrimination as a primary source of poor academic achievement among low-income African American youth in Harlem. The book was based largely on qualitative survey and ethnographic material compiled through Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, an educational, employment, and social service organization the psychologist established in 1962. In fact, Clark highlighted the systematic character of school-based discrimination in part because he rejected narrow versions of scholarly objectivity in favor of an approach that, “would not permit ‘the facts to interfere with the truth.’”Footnote ²⁸ In Clark's view, pernicious racist assumptions—including the notion that pushing black children academically would hurt their self-esteem and that advanced schooling would only prove disillusioning since black youth would be forced into menial work—were institutionalized in educational policy and practice in Harlem's white-run schools, providing educators with “an alibi for educational neglect.”Footnote ²⁹ In much the same way that “if an arm or a leg is bound so that it cannot be used, eventually it becomes unusable,” in a statement that both pathologized students and blamed schools for academic failure, Clark argued, “children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.”Footnote ³⁰ Clark was hardly alone in highlighting the consequences of systemic, institutionalized educational discrimination. Concern with this issue had long motivated African American resistance to biased testing, tracking, disciplinary, curricular, and guidance programs.Footnote ³¹ Experiences with overt and subtle forms of educational racism were also a ubiquitous theme in autobiographies—like Huey Newton's—published by African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ³²

Writers on the African American social scientific left also challenged Coleman's causal premises by robustly contextualizing. While Coleman acknowledged white flight, he tended to isolate educational inequality from inequality in other sectors of social, economic, and political life.Footnote ³³ Many thinkers on the African American left, in contrast, suggested that one could not understand educational inequality without situating schools in a wider context of racial inequality in the nation's increasingly segregated and deindustrializing urban cores. Young, an expert on urban social welfare policy and fair housing, put the real estate practices and federal, state, and local housing policies that built segregated residential contexts where educational inequality flourished at the center of his analysis.Footnote ³⁴ Clark situated his discussion of Harlem's schools in an expansive theory of internal colonialism.Footnote ³⁵ In a response to the Coleman Report, Thompson emphasized that “the task of obtaining equality of educational opportunity” could not be separated from efforts “to obtain equal opportunity for employment, equal access to decent housing … equal opportunity to enjoy public accommodations … equal opportunity to participate in the body politic” and all other basic civil rights.Footnote ³⁶

In fact, Young was particularly well positioned to examine educational inequality with an eye to the wider political, economic, and sociological context. His vantage point from outside the world of educational research and policy (a perspective that Coleman's broad sociological training, theoretically, also provided) left Young concerned about the dangers of institutional siloing. As the Urban League leader put it when explaining the challenges of fighting urban African American poverty: “The real estate man or the builder says the problem is economic; business, or the employer, says the problem is education; and the educators say that the problem is a matter of housing.”Footnote ³⁷ This vision of shifting blame translated into multipronged proposals for fighting urban, racialized poverty. Young proposed a comprehensive federal initiative—what he termed an “unprecedented domestic ‘Marshall Plan’”—that included housing, employment, health care, educational, and criminal justice programs to fight African American urban poverty. In doing so, he echoed the “Freedom Budget for All Americans” that A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and others tried unsuccessfully to push through Congress in 1966.Footnote ³⁸ Critiques of the egalitarian potential of schooling (if functioning in isolation) in a racist society were not limited to social policy arenas either. These ideas also emerged from African American autobiographies of the 1960s and 1970s, which featured a recurring storyline in which an author recalled the precise moment when he or she learned (usually from a disillusioned older friend or relative) that labor market discrimination would hamper employment prospects, regardless of educational credentials.Footnote ³⁹ If learning could liberate, many across the African American left acknowledged soberly, it could not do so alone.

While they discussed the issue in different language, then, what Coleman's diverse critics recognized was that even if equal educational opportunity could be defined and promoted, schooling might not be able to equalize access to stable, middle-class jobs and the standard of living that accompanied them. In contrast to Jencks and Bowles, however, many on the African American left simultaneously embraced the “learning for liberation” tradition by envisioning schooling as a central (though never the only) tool for African American political and psychological empowerment.Footnote ⁴⁰ In fact, highlighting the ways attention to systemic racial discrimination emerged hand in hand with commitment to liberation-oriented schooling, Newton was one of many Black Power leaders to establish separatist, Pan-African, or liberation schools premised on the notion that the right type of education could be individually and collectively empowering.Footnote ⁴¹

So how did the debates over education's relationship to racial equality that divided an increasingly fractious interracial left in the 1960s and 1970s relate to the Coleman Report's long-term impact. The precise combination of political, methodological, and theoretical pressures that explain why the Coleman Report had wider influence in educational research and policy than the report's critics demands further investigation. Certainly, as I've argued elsewhere, and as others in this issue make clear, that the federal government chose Coleman to use cutting-edge statistical techniques on one of the largest datasets thus far available enhanced his scholarly authority.Footnote ⁴² This is especially the case when one views his work alongside Clark's qualitative, impressionistic approach or Young's application-oriented social policy research.

What is also clear, however, is that the racial blind spots of some of Coleman's white leftists critics were also part of the story. The Coleman Report, and the controversies it generated, emerged amid not only Moynihan Report-style deficiency paradigms (and Daniel Moynihan, it should be recalled, strongly supported Coleman's research) but also as Arthur Jensen revived hereditarian explanations of racial inequality.Footnote ⁴³ Both paradigms angered civil rights and Black Power communities because they made it easy to blame the victims of racial injustice for their plight. In this context, many publishing in the African American social scientific and popular press worried that the view that schools were insufficient egalitarian tools, which they associated with both the Coleman Report and Jencks's Inequality, was itself “antiegalitarian.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, that Jencks's volume combined skepticism about schooling's economic potential with an argument about “inequality in cognitive skills” led some to draw a straight line between Jencks and Jenkins.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Ebony, an anonymous author responded to Inequality with outrage, writing:

The African American social scientific press, while more cautious in tone, also addressed the issue. Jencks's research, Journal of Negro Education author Charles Martin feared, would be “incorporated into public policy by an antiegalitarian government” that would reject his socialist leanings and simply use the analysis to ensure that “the amount of money for schooling and the amount of schooling for black people will be significantly reduced.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Even those who saw Jencks's treatment of cognitive skills as more nuanced than the author of the piece in Ebony (who was attacked by another editorialist for not reading Inequality carefully enough), criticized Jencks for “letting schools off the hook.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, one of Inequality's lead researchers, Marshall Smith, was forced to resign from a position as acting commissioner of education in the Carter administration in 1979 after the Congressional Black Caucus protested due to his work on Inequality, a book they described as having “racist overtones.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Certainly, points of overlap exist in the two counternarratives about schooling's egalitarian potential this paper has examined. Both sets of thinkers challenged the Coleman Report's emphasis on the cultural and academic failures of minority parents, teachers, and communities; questioned Coleman's tendency to separate educational inequality from the political, economic, and spatial contexts in which it was situated; and rejected Coleman's focus on educational opportunity (and outcomes) without considering opportunity in life. Still, differences in emphasis remain striking. Concern with systemic or institutionalized racism both inside and outside schools emerged most robustly from African American intellectual circles, while educational discrimination took on a secondary role in Jencks's and Bowles's critiques of schooling. Scholars across a diverse African American left also remained distinctly hopeful about schooling's egalitarian promise in a liberal society, if only institutionalized racism in schools and beyond were effectively challenged. Perhaps most importantly, as controversies over desegregation, community control, and compensatory education raged in the mid-1960s, and then as Nixon-era “law and order” politics and attacks on “forced busing” accelerated by the early 1970s, African American leftists frequently rejected arguments—including the suggestion that schools might be insufficient egalitarian tools—that could rationalize reduced commitments to desegregation or educational funding for minority students. Even Coleman's critics, then, feared that acknowledging the real complexity of the relationship between education and equality might undermine the larger goal of improving educational quality for students in need.