Throughline - Why American public schools are still broken

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

In 1966, the federal government commissioned a massive survey aimed at solving educational inequality. Instead, the explosive Coleman Report unleashed a 60-year debate over race, resources, and what education in America is actually for. This is the story of how the report came together… and the policy whirlwind that followed.Guests:Victoria Cain, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, Harvard University  Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Thomas Coleman can still remember the trip that he took with his father to an amusement park when he was a kid. Gwynnach'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. 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. And there's a picture that was on maybe the front page to 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. 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 Randabed Fetah. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we tell the story of that 60-year-old report that investigating, 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.

This is Michelle Vasquez-Jocobos. And oh my goodness, do I use through line? 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. Part 1, Section 402. Picture the American classroom. 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. 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. Affluent communities fared well. Schools and impoverished communities, not so much. The NACP 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. 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 stand-alone 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. 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, 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 needs to, 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, and it requires that the Commissioner of Education conduct a survey and report to the President and Congress, quote, concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions.

Because with this document in hand, the Johnson administration would have a green light to spend all of that money. It will allow the federal government to take final and decisive action. Maybe the federal government can start cutting off funds from segregated systems. This tiny passage is hiding a gargantuan task, survey schools across the entire U.S., And through that data, figure out just how unequal the schools are. Plus, the clause stipulated a pretty urgent deadline. The results of that ambitious project needed to be delivered to the government in a report within two years. The clock started ticking in the summer in 1964.

This is Thomas Kane. He's an economist and the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. The commissioner of education and his team had to go out and find somebody who had to, would run a big study like this. And James Coleman was one of the few that had. He is a gifted, well-respected mathematical sociologist. James Coleman was studious, unassuming, and a guy who really loved numbers as a way to understand people.

He is somebody who pays attention to the quantitative, but he is keenly aware of cultural influence, cultural impact. And what catches the Commissioner of Education's attention was a big study Coleman had recently published about how nerds and jocks behaved differently in high schools. I know. It sounds like something out of a 1990s John Hughes movie.

But it gave Coleman street cred. It involved crunching a lot of data about kids in schools. So James Coleman agrees to take on the big assignment. Survey as many American public schools as he can to find out to what degree they're still segregated

and more importantly, to figure out what's contributed to educational inequity. Even today, like if you told me, go out and design a study and survey 600,000 students and have a report ready in the next 16 months, I would have told you that's huge. That's going to be really hard to pull off.

After the break, James Coleman tries to pull off one heck of an all-nighter. Hi, this is Maria Montalvo from Chicago and New York. You are listening to ThruLine at Ampera. Part 2. The report. It's 1965 when James Coleman starts working on this survey. In 16 months, he was expected to produce a report and hand it to then-president Lyndon Johnson. The administration thinks that the data James Coleman collects is going to tell them something they already know,

that they need to send more resources to schools that need support, and that they'll withhold funding from schools who are, discriminatory. Basically, they want to throw money at the inequity plaguing schools and hope that it makes a dent. And the government is confident in what they think the data will show. That marginalized communities will be sent to separate schools and those schools will be badly funded and that is why those kids will be performing poorly on tests. That is the story that they are assuming they will find. Now, the language in Section 402 is a little vague. It doesn't quite stipulate how to measure schools or how to go about designing a study of this size.

And so to some extent, James Coleman can design what he wants. Imagine the education system is this giant machine. He needed to collect data about all the mechanical things the machine needs to do its work. The idea is to measure educational inputs. Conditions and resources that help a student achieve their learning goals. Things like books in the library. The quality of educational. facilities? Does your school have a science lab? Dollars in the school budget?

How many movie projectors with sound equipment does your school have? How many cataloged volumes are in your school library? To measure these inputs and whether certain schools have better inputs than others, James Coleman writes up all these kinds of questions in his survey. But Coleman goes beyond what the law requires. He also wants to look at something no one is really paying attention to, something called educational outputs. Educational outputs are how effective the education a student has received in school is. Those are harder to measure. Harder to measure because they address how a student has changed as a result of their

schooling. Coleman really wants to understand aspects of the student's life experience that tests or inputs couldn't reveal much about. So he writes questions that try to address a student's lived experience, like how many people are in your family? How far in education did your parents go? Where does the money come from in your family to pay for things like groceries? Did anyone at home read to you before you went to school? So in many ways what Coleman is doing in asking students about their own educational expectations or their family's educational achievement. or background, but also

what is the impact of racism? What is the impact of educational inequality? He even asks students about their own perception of their futures. Whether they feel like they have control over their own success. So, okay, he has a survey filled with questions for elementary, middle, and high schools

across the country. But it's not just students he's testing. He also includes a 30 item fill in the blank for teachers to gauge their verbal skills. ETS, the Educational Testing Service, distributed the survey. When the request to participate in the study first goes out, he gets zero responses. A student on his team has to write schools a note, saying, this is an act of Congress, please call ETS this week.

Finally, responses start rolling in. Involving more than half a million students in thousands of schools. And he spends the fall of 1965 collecting data. And it's hard because no one has ever launched a national data collection effort in schools like this before. A lot of schools in the South refused to take part in the study, afraid they'd be seen as deeply segregated. But it wasn't just the South. Other places withheld data, too, like in Chicago and L.A. But they still got a lot of responses.

Eventually, he gets questionnaires from 600,000, first, third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth graders. 60,000 teachers. And roughly 4,000 schools. Coleman has thousands of pages of questionnaires coming and going from schools across the nation, hundreds of boxes of documents to compile and review. And wrangling all those boxes isn't easy. One of his postdoctoral researchers talks about, about bringing all of these boxes on the train

and then leaving them on a train seat and they end up going one direction and Coleman ends up going the other. So he has to scramble to get the boxes back. Now he has to crunch the data. He is using computers, huge mainframes in Princeton, New Jersey that are associated with ETS. But these are primitive.

He doesn't have the full. range of statistical tools that we have today, nor does he have the computing capacity that we take for granted today. You probably have more computing power in your iPhone than he has at his disposal to crunch all of these numbers. And then he has to write the report. He locked himself up. And he's surrounded by boxes and he's got bottles of bourbon to take the edge off at night. And they are just working nonstop around. to the clock to try to make sense of these hundreds of thousands of tests and questionnaires. Remarkably, in 1966, just two short years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law,

James Coleman had finished his report. It's less a report than it is a data dump. 700 plus pages of data. The evidence that the Johnson-in-Rews, administration expected and wanted to find is not what they read in Coleman's report. His findings are totally explosive, and they are not what he or anybody else has anticipated. The data tells a complicated story. Yes, the schools were still segregated. That is true across the country, in both the north and the south. And black children were performing several

grades behind their white peers. This is what we now call the achievement gap. But the rapport also tells a story of why they are behind that nobody expected. What he finds instead is that two factors really seem to influence the educational achievement of students of color or low-income students. first, a family's socioeconomic background and their educational aspirations. That is revealed to be extraordinarily powerful, really important. So how a student grew up, what life experiences they've already had, greatly influenced their learning outcomes. It's something we take for granted now, but at the time, nobody knew this. And second, a diverse socioeconomic mix.

in the classroom, a place where poor kids and kids who think they're never going to college. They are rubbing up against kids who are from affluent homes who value education, who take college or high school graduation or honors classes just as a given. And those two factors he finds in his data seem to be the most important predictors of children's school performance. The bottom line, student learning does not just improve when you increase resources. And beyond that, the report told a story about what students thought about their own futures. And his report reveals this feeling of resignation or even despair among low-income students of

color. They didn't feel like their educational futures was something they could influence. Regardless of how hard they worked or how well they did in school, they just didn't feel like they had much power over their own fate. It seemed to undercut the promise of education itself. It's just tremendously sad. It seems to betray the whole idea of the American dream, that if you work hard and you play by the rules, then you'll get ahead. But that's not the world that these kids are living in, and they don't expect for that

to happen to them. And the Johnson administration is not happy. It was naive to think it was all. just about spending, because they had been making the case that we have to equalize the funding available to high poverty schools. That's the way that we're going to deliver educational opportunity. Instead of clarity and answers, the Johnson administration now has a quagmire to wade through. They are so worried about the controversy that they think that this report is going to unleash that they effectively bury it.

They try to quietly release the findings over Fourth of July weekend, hoping no one will notice or care. That's not what happens. The federal government has published a massive study challenging widely held beliefs on educating the poor. It's called The Coleman Report. The Coleman Report doesn't make light reading. Its official title is Pondris,

equality of educational opportunity. It's a 700-page document filled with 10,000, technical tables, charts, and statistics. The media gloms on. On that Independence Day weekend in 1966, the New York Times, in a tiny article, characterizes Coleman's findings incorrectly. Running under the headline,

Negro education is found inferior. It says that predominantly black schools are inferior to those attended by white students and that this widens the achievement gap between the races. TV news also digs into. the report. To many, the Coleman report raises more questions than it answers. The Coleman

report is nothing if not a Worsatch test. People find in it what they find. It seems to have something from everyone's point of view. Once it was released, anyone who gets their hands on data from the federal government, social scientists, local politicians, they

also start to cherry pick the results of what he found, plucking out what they think the report means. And they are using it to tell whatever story they really want to tell. Depending on who is holding the report in their hands, any number of arguments can be made about how to approach segregation and the endemic inequality in schools.

Conservatives interpret the report to mean that money doesn't matter. Oh, schools don't make any difference. And that's not at all what he was saying. But that interpretation gets enlisted by a lot of people who want to lower their taxes. want to stop the federal government from shoveling money towards schools. Some question its validity altogether. Others argue that actually the report is damaging,

that it doesn't take into account the importance of the feeling of confidence or security that a black child might have in a largely black classroom with a black teacher. This is the moment of community control of nationalist liberation movements in the black community of black power. Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed. We want black power. And they argue that the Coleman report is really disparaging.

Black children don't need white children to learn. This report really fragments along racial lines. As debates about what the report says and what to do with it heat up, racial tensions in the country are also heating up. This is going to happen all our Americans. going to be a hot world, not a hot summer. It's a hot world. This is the beginning of the long, hot urban summers. Protesters are demanding that President Johnson deliver on his promises.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turns up the volume. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America. It is estimated that we spend 32,000, $1,000 for each enemy we kill in Vietnam. While we spend in the so-called war and poverty in America, only about $53 for each person classified as poor. And it all comes to a fever pitch on April 4, 1968,

when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Anchorman Walter Cronkite broke the news to millions of CBS viewers. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. In the aftermath of King's assassination, the nation's schools erupt. There are walkouts. There's enormous pressure on school boards to make changes. And through it all, Coleman is watching.

Debates on what his findings mean are spiraling beyond his control. Then Coleman decides to weigh in with his opinion on what he thinks all of this data is pointing to. If this country means to have equal opportunity for schoolchildren integration, said Professor Coleman is the only way to get it. That's coming up. This is Justin Whitlow from Leicester, North Carolina, and you are listening to Three Line. Thank you so much. Part three. Consequences. There's a battle. underway these days, which challenges some of the most sacred assumptions of the great American

dream. In the wake of Coleman's findings, in the 1970s, there's debate about how to fix American public education. The battleground is a little red or white or blue schoolhouse. The issue is whether or not what's taught inside that schoolhouse makes a difference to the students and to the society in which they live. Everyone agrees there's a problem. Schools are unequal. There's an achievement gap. What's not clear, the solution. Lawmakers decide busing kids to different school districts is one path forward. What do you think about this busing thing? Well, I think we'll make it the

first few days, but the rest of them will be kind of tough. That's because in 1971, the Supreme Court had weighed in, deciding that busing is a constitutional remedy to achieve racial desegregation in public schools. Kids must start getting on buses to attend new schools. Some of the sometimes far from where they lived. To ensure people have opportunity, we need to bus. We need to mix people up by class and race. Do you think it's bothering many of the parents? Yes.

Oh, it bothers me that my kid has to change the district is all. As far as going with the color, no. I'm concerned about my schoolmates and everything, and I'm concerned about how we'll be treated and everything like that. and very much concerned about the education where we're going to receive. Coleman's data starts getting cited in court-ordered busing mandates. While Coleman was very much for integration, he starts voicing concern almost immediately after the Supreme Court's decision on busing. It was not the answer, he said, taking issue with how judges used his data. He actually opposes it. He writes op-eds, and he publishes editorials opposing busing.

not because he is opposed to integration. But because Coleman worries that instead of creating more opportunity, busing would lead to even more segregation. To him, busing is going to lead to white flight. And it did. Coleman, still a believer that schools should be integrated, is alarmed. So he goes back to what he does best. He collects more data.

Another solution, he argues, is needed. In 1975, he publishes a follow-up. up study, this time making the case against busing. And he's soon called to testify before Congress to explain his point of view. Kentucky Senator Walter Huddleston asked Coleman what alternatives are available to those who want to end busing other than through a constitutional amendment. My hope is that the Congress might attempt to provide a kind of alternative to full-scale racial balance through compulsory busing that would provide increased rights for blacks. rather than restricted rights for both blacks and whites.

It's not a popular opinion, and his reputation suffers. There's even an effort to expel him from the American Sociological Association. The genie is out of the bottle. Coleman couldn't control the narrative swirling around his data or around him. And yet he doggedly continues to publish more studies and crunch more data in the hopes of finding a solution the government can use. sociologist James Coleman, principal author of public and private schools.

His critics say he's doing superficial and misleading research. Bumper sticker sociology, one critic calls it. Robert Crane of the Rand Corporation is harsher. He says Coleman set out to advance the cause of private schools. If you go to Congress and you say, I'm a scientist, and here's what I have to say, then you have to be a scientist. But Coleman wasn't conducting a scientific experiment that could prove cause and effect.

Really, his approach was just a snapshot of the system. It didn't come with a roadmap that tells you where to go. You know, for decades, people thinking they knew the answer to questions that actually correlational studies can't answer. And history showed answers weren't easy. By the 1980s and 90s, more ideas. One of the newer ideas for how to build a better public school comes in the form of charter schools. These alternative, semi-autonomous public schools reject the idea that one size fits all.

And then, rigorous school testing a decade later. President Bush has signed into law one of the most far-reaching education bills in 35 years. The No Child Left Behind Act. That legislation updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed by President Johnson. It aimed to close the achievement gap through rigorous mandatory testing. The fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn. We expect every child to learn. And you must show us whether or not every child is learning.

I think that one of the more damaging legacies of the Coleman report is this emphasis on quantitative testing as a measure of school quality. The idea of using a standardized test to gauge school quality, to examine how individual students are achieving, it's a pretty reductive measure, and it helps to flatten out the idea of what schools should do. It reduces them to places that can produce students who can achieve on a standardized test.

You know, I think in a democracy, we want more from our schools than that. The long-tail impact of the Coleman report is one we are arguably still living through today. And just as President Johnson did and nine other presidents did after him, Donald Trump has brought the conversation front and center, driving the news cycle.

What to do about American public schools? The Trump administration is stepping up its push to break up the Department of Education, transferring much of the agency's workload, including six offices, to other federal agencies. The Trump administration wants to make significant changes to head start. That's the country's early education and child care program for low-income families. Now, this program serves more than 700,000 kids each year, from birth to age five in both urban centers and rural areas.

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. I think one of our big challenges in this country is that we cannot agree on what schools are for or what they should strive to be. That is a very American phenomenon. We love to think that schools will solve all of our problems, but we frequently ask schools for more than they are capable of providing. There's always this impulse to tinker towards utopia, to think that if we change this kind of curriculum or we alter this kind of budget, then we will achieve perfect schools that will help us achieve a perfect society. It's this long-held dream.

The Coleman report led to some misinterpretations of the evidence from the Coleman report. It was just limitations of the research design, which contributed to a skepticism and a pessimism for several decades. How do we create a world where all students can have access to genuine educational opportunity? That is the very question that sent Coleman on his initial quest. We haven't found the answer yet. And that's it for today's show. Tune in to our next episode this coming Tuesday when we answer a listener's question. In a time when AI is revolutionizing how we live and work,

they asked, where did the first Luddites come from? We have answers. I'm Randaudh Fattah. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Ada Blui. This episode was produced by me and Amy Padula Jasmine Romero Julia Redpath

Molly Marcello Sarah Wyman Leanna Simstrom Irene Noguchi Thank you to Johanna Sturgy and Cheyenne Butler Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Robert

Rodriguez. Special thanks to Stephanie DeLucah, James Heckman, Allison Boulos, Derek Neil, as well as Sheila Griffin, Anthony Brick, Richard Mernain, Paul E. Peterson, Steve Drummond, and Corey Turner. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.