The report was so "seismic" — Daniel Patrick Moynihan's word — that Lyndon Johnson's administration released it on the Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested interests. And 50 years on, it is pertinent to today's political debates about class and social mobility. So, let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, sociologist James Coleman, author of the study "Equality of Educational Opportunity."
In 1966, postwar liberalism's confidence reached its apogee. From 1938, when the electorate rebuked Franklin Roosevelt for his plan to "pack" the Supreme Court, through 1964, congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats prevented a liberal legislating majority. But Johnson's 44-state victory that year gave Democrats 68 Senate seats and a majority of 155 in the House. Effortless and uninterrupted prosperity seemed assured as the economy grew in 1965 and 1966 by 10.7 percent and 7.99 percent, respectively. So, a gusher of tax revenues coincided with liberalism's pent-up demand for large projects. It hoped to meld two American traits — egalitarian aspirations and faith in education's transformative power.
The consensus then was that the best predictor of a school's performance was the amount of money spent on it: Increase financial inputs and cognitive outputs would increase proportionately. As the postwar baby boom moved through public schools like a pig through a python, almost everything improved — school buildings, teacher salaries, class sizes, per pupil expenditures — except outcomes measured by standardized tests.