| Aage Sorensen
Harvard University
Schools, learning and educational opportunity
FINAL REPORT:
Study 1: Schools, Learning and Educational Opportunity: A Replication of the Main Conclusions of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (EEOR) (Co-authors S.A. Dumais, S.L. Morgan).
This paper compares the main conclusions of the EEOR (1965) authored by James S. Coleman et al. to similar analyses using the National Longitudinal Study of1988. We first review some of the main controversies around EEOR. We then conduct analyses to replicate the main conclusions of EEOR with respect to the four stated objectives of the survey. We first compare the racial segregation of Public schools and find that while there still is pronounced segregation, the very pronounced regional pattern of 1965, with the South having almost complete segregation, has disappeared.
We find in NELS even less inequality in facilities between the schools attended by Blacks and the schools attended by Whites than was found in 1965. We find, as in EEOR, that Black parents and students are as committed and interested in schooling as are White parents and students. We do find differences in the socioeconomic backgrounds of students. More Black students come from non intact families than do White students and this difference has increased.
We found a continued gap in the achievement test scores of Blacks and Whites, but the difference has decreased since 1965. We also find a continued and unchanged gap between Black and White students in their beliefs about their ability to control their environment. That this gap is unchanged is noteworthy in light of the reductions in the achievement gap and in the gap in parental education.
Measuring the effect of family and schools by their contribution to variance explained, we reach the same conclusion with NELS as did Coleman et al.: Family is much more important than schools for explaining variation in achievement test scores. However, we have doubts about whether the approach used by EEOR and in much later research on the topic is adequate for capturing the influence schools may have on opportunities for learning.
Study 2: Parental Networks, Social Closure, and Mathematics Learning: A Test of James Coleman's Social Capital Explanation of School Effects (Co-author S.L. Morgan).
Through an analysis of gains in mathematics achievement between the tenth and twelfth grades for respondents to the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we examine James Coleman's explanation for why Catholic schools apparently produce more learning than public schools. According to Coleman, Catholic schools benefit from larger endowments of social capital, generated in part through greater intergenerational social closure (i.e., dense network connections between the parents of students). Instead, we find that for public schools, social closure among parents is negatively associated with achievement gains in mathematics, net of friendship density among students. This evidence of a negative effect within the public school sector lends support to our altemative hypothesis that horizon-expanding schools foster more leaming than norm-enforcing schools. Moreover, it renders social closure incapable of explaining any portion of the Catholic school effect on learning, even though within the Catholic school sector there is some evidence that social closure is positively associated with leaming.
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