History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The hard bigotry of low expectations and low priorities
- 07-21-2011
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Opinion By Gary Ravani/Thoughts on Public Education
Gary Ravani is currently president of the California Federation of
Teachers’ Early Childhood/K-12 Council, and is a vice president of the
CFT.
Perhaps the single best-known piece of social science research ever done in this country is the study produced by James Coleman in 1966 under the authority of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, commonly called “the Coleman Report.” Coleman’s work is the second largest social science research project in history, covering 600,000 children in 4,000 schools nationally. Coleman concluded that school-based poverty concentrations were negatively impacting school achievement for the minority poor. His proposed solutions were the impetus for the school desegregation movement and specifically busing. Coleman later admitted to the ultimate failure of busing as a consequence of “white flight.” Coleman found those two factors – poverty and minority status – more predictive than just differences in school funding. This is frequently distorted to suggest “research shows school funding doesn’t matter in achievement.” Coleman never said that. (more...)
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