write a summary

Fifty Years since the Coleman Report: Rethinking the Relationship between Schools and Inequality

Douglas B. Downey1 and Dennis J. Condron2

Abstract

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide bet- ter learning environments to advantaged children compared to disadvantaged children. As a result, a critical perspective that views schools as engines of inequality dominates contemporary sociology of education. However, an important body of empirical research challenges this critical view. To reconcile the field’s main ideas with this new evidence, we propose a refraction framework, a perspective on schools and inequality guided by the assumption that schools may shape inequalities along different dimensions in dif- ferent ways. From this more balanced perspective, schools might indeed reproduce or exacerbate some inequalities, but they also might compensate for others—socioeconomic disparities in cognitive skills in particular. We conclude by discussing how the mostly critical perspective on schools and inequality is costly to the field of sociology of education.

Keywords

stratification, schools, seasonal comparisons, compensation, reproduction

The authors of the 1966 Coleman Report famously

concluded that variation in academic performance

was strongly linked to children’s family environ-

ments but hardly at all to per pupil expenditures

or other measurable school characteristics (Cole-

man et al. 1966). In the decades following the

report, many social science scholars resisted this

position and articulated the ways in which schools

reinforce or even promote inequality (e.g., Bour-

dieu 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Cookson

and Persell 1985; Kozol 1992). This ‘‘critical

perspective’’ uncovered a wide range of school

practices favoring the advantaged.

More recent scholarship has called the critical

perspective into question. Compelling evidence

from studies comparing school-year growth to

summer growth suggests that socioeconomic

achievement gaps in cognitive skills are more

a product of factors outside of schools than perni-

cious school processes (Downey, von Hippel, and

Broh 2004; Entwisle and Alexander 1992; Heyns

1978). The evidence that schools temper the

growth of socioeconomic inequality in academic

skills presents a serious challenge to the critical

perspective. Black/white learning gaps, however,

may grow faster when school is in session versus

out, complicating the picture regarding how

schools matter (Condron 2009). These patterns

1Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA 2 Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Douglas B. Downey, Ohio State University, 238

Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Sociology of Education 2016, 89(3) 207–220

� American Sociological Association 2016 DOI: 10.1177/0038040716651676

http://soe.sagepub.com

Research Article

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have led to a state of theoretical vertigo in the

sociology of education; it remains unclear where

the pendulum currently rests. Do schools simply

reproduce preexisting inequalities, do they mag-

nify them, or do they help reduce them?

THE CRITICAL VIEW OF SCHOOLS

From the perspective of a body of scholarship

much too expansive to review in detail here,

schools either reproduce or exacerbate the

inequalities that students bring with them (for use-

ful overviews, see MacLeod 1995; Mehan 1992).

Bowles and Gintis’s (1976) argument that schools

provide the capitalist economy with workers who

know their place and are prepared for their roles,

along with Bourdieu’s (1977) perspective that

schools favor the ‘‘cultural capital’’ of middle-

class and elite students, form the basis of

a ‘‘reproduction’’ paradigm, in which schools are

seen as part of the process through which advan-

tage and disadvantage are passed on from one gen-

eration to the next. Numerous sociological studies

of education draw on this paradigm to investigate

how schools reproduce inequalities (e.g., Paino

and Renzulli 2013; Roscigno 1998).

Others go a step further and argue that schools

do not simply reproduce inequality but rather

exacerbate it. This position has gained stature for

good reason, as scholars have documented

a wide range of school practices and mechanisms

that favor high socioeconomic status (SES) chil-

dren. Prominent among them are ‘‘savage inequal-

ities’’ in funding (Kozol 1992), which can lead to

poorer school facilities, dated textbooks, and

larger classrooms for disadvantaged children

(Darling-Hammond 2010; Mosteller 1995). More

recently, the narrative has shifted toward the

unequal distribution of teacher quality in the

wake of evidence from experimental studies sug-

gesting that children improve 10 percentile points

in a year if assigned a top- versus bottom-quartile

teacher (Gordon, Kane, and Staiger 2006). In addi-

tion, residential segregation results in concentra-

tions of disadvantaged children in the same

schools, which has been shown to contribute to

achievement gaps (Berends, Lucas, and Peñaloza

2008; Card and Rothstein 2007). Finally, curricu-

lum differentiation practices within schools (e.g.,

ability grouping and tracking) might exacerbate

preexisting skill differences as some children are

exposed to more challenging material and more

effective learning environments than others (Con-

dron 2008; Gamoran 1992; Oakes 1985).

In our view, it is important to distinguish

between whether schools reproduce inequality

or exacerbate it. If schools reproduce inequality,

then they pass on the inequalities received at kin-

dergarten largely unchanged as children pass

through the education system. Much of the

‘‘reproduction’’ literature, however, articulates

an even more pernicious—exacerbatory—role

for schools. Both sides describe a critical per-

spective on schools and inequality, but the two

are distinct. And while reproductive and exacer-

batory positions are sometimes mixed in the liter-

ature in a confusing way, a third possibility, that

schools may reduce inequality, has been largely

overlooked.

The Challenge to the Critical Perspective

The 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity

(EEO) study influenced a separate line of scholar-

ship that placed less importance on schools them-

selves and greater emphasis on non-school sources

of disparities in children’s educational opportuni-

ties and outcomes. Often referred to as the Cole-

man Report, the study was commissioned by the

Department of Education and involved more

than 650,000 students and 4,000 schools. One

finding that had the greatest influence on future

work was summarized as follows (Coleman et al.

1966:325):

One implication stands out above all: That

schools bring little influence to bear on

a child’s achievement that is independent

of his background and general social con-

text; and that this very lack of independent

effect means that the inequalities imposed

on children by their home, neighborhood,

and peer environment are carried along to

become the inequalities with which they

confront adult life at the end of school.

Further supporting this claim, Jencks (1972:53)

explored the same question with different data and

agreed with the broad conclusion about schools:

‘‘Educational inequality does not explain cognitive

inequality to any significant extent.’’ Some misin-

terpreted Coleman’s and Jencks’s research as

arguing that schools do not matter; but more

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accurately, Coleman and Jencks posited that

schools play only a minor role in shaping achieve-

ment gaps.

Even 10 years before Bowles and Gintis’s

(1976) book, Coleman and colleagues (1966) pro-

duced evidence suggesting non-school environ-

ments are the primary force behind achievement

gaps. In subsequent decades, however, the sociol-

ogy of education has focused more on school fac-

tors, and the Coleman Report fell out of favor,

stemming in part from methodological criticisms.

Critics pointed out, correctly, that Coleman and

Jencks may have left unmeasured the most critical

aspects of schools that generate inequality (e.g.,

teacher quality). Enthusiasm for understanding

families’ role in inequality was already diminished

due to a hostile response to the 1965 Moynihan

Report, which was critiqued as ‘‘blaming the vic-

tim’’ (Ryan 1976; see also Skrentny 2008). Ironi-

cally, while the Coleman Report initially was

seen as conservative for implicating families and

communities as the source of socioeconomic

achievement gaps and Bowles and Gintis were

seen as radically left, by the early 1980s, conserva-

tives had embraced the view that schools are the

problem (e.g., National Commission on Excel-

lence in Education 1984).

Understanding How Schools Influence Inequality

It is difficult to adjudicate between the varying

perspectives on schools and inequality without

thinking carefully about the kind of evidence

that is most useful. We identify three hurdles.

First, children are influenced in important ways

by both their families and their schools, so how

do we separate the two? The average 18-year-old

in the United States has spent just 13 percent of

their waking hours in school (Walberg 1984),

highlighting the importance of non-school envi-

ronments. Children are not randomly distributed

to schools, so it is difficult to know whether out-

come differences between schools are a function

of school processes or the widely disparate homes

and neighborhoods where children spend most of

their time. A common strategy scholars use to iso-

late school effects is to statistically equalize chil-

dren across measurable dimensions of family

background, such as socioeconomic status, family

structure, and race/ethnicity. Another approach is

to predict how much children change (e.g.,

learning gains over a year) rather than predict an

outcome at one point in time. By predicting learn-

ing gains, scholars effectively start all children at

zero and give schools no credit (or punishment)

for children’s beginning skills. These strategies

are only partly effective, however, because why

some children learn faster than others is largely

unknown. For example, in models attempting to

estimate as much variation in children’s summer

learning as possible, Burkam and colleagues

(2004) used both methods and explained less

than 15 percent of the variance, highlighting how

most of the non-school characteristics that influ-

ence children’s learning go unmeasured in large

surveys. Studies attempting to understand how

schools matter using these traditional techniques

likely overestimate school effects because their

statistical adjustments for non-school factors are

insufficient.

The second hurdle for understanding how

schools influence inequality is that we need to

consider how all school processes—both exacer-

batory and compensatory—stack up against each

other. Some studies address the first problem

(i.e., isolating school effects) by using random

assignment, but these studies typically target a sin-

gle school process (e.g., the Tennessee Project

Star experiment on classroom size), which consti-

tutes just one piece of the larger puzzle. This kind

of research has value—we learn something about

whether a particular school practice increases

inequality—but it is limited for helping us under-

stand schools’ overall effect on inequality. We are

left wondering whether the magnitude of all exac-

erbatory school processes outweighs that of com-

pensatory ones (those that reduce inequality).

The third hurdle is crucial—even if we suc-

cessfully isolate school effects and determine

whether exacerbatory school processes outweigh

compensatory ones, we still need to know whether

school inequality outweighs non-school inequal-

ity. Scholars traditionally have framed the ques-

tion narrowly, such as, ‘‘How well would a partic-

ular student perform if they attended school A

versus school B?’’ This approach identifies varia-

tion in school quality, but it tells us little about

how schools matter within the stratification sys-

tem. Instead, we recommend that scholars broaden

their scope by considering the counterfactual:

‘‘What would inequality look like if schools did

not exist?’’ (Raudenbush and Eschmann 2015).

This is important because schools may vary

greatly in quality, but non-school environments

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may vary even more (Downey et al. 2004). If this

is the case, even unequal schools could be equaliz-

ing forces by reducing the level of inequality we

would observe in their absence. The traditional

counterfactual, however, does not account for

that possibility.

Seasonal Comparisons

Seasonal comparison study designs offer one way

of meeting these methodological hurdles. The sea-

sonal nature of the U.S. school calendar—nine

months of school followed by a three-month sum-

mer break—provides a natural experiment for

understanding how schools matter (Gangl 2010).

Similar to a crossover design in medical research,

where patients are observed on and off treatment,

seasonal comparison researchers observe how

achievement gaps change when children are on

treatment (in school) versus out (summer). This

method circumvents the problem of trying to iden-

tify all the various school processes at stake. The

overall consequence of all mechanisms (both

exacerbatory and compensatory) is observable in

how inequality changes when school is in session

versus out of session. And seasonal comparisons

provide a way of estimating what inequality would

look like if children did not attend schools by

leveraging the summer as an estimate of that coun-

terfactual. Finally, unlike randomized experi-

ments, which can be weak in generalizability, sea-

sonal comparisons can be applied to nationally

representative data, producing results strong in

both internal and external validity.

Like all empirical methods, seasonal compari-

sons require assumptions. For example, the

method assumes there is little treatment spillover.

We must assume that school practices in the spring

have little influence on summer learning so that

the school treatment does not contaminate esti-

mates of non-school learning. In practice, this

assumption is nearly always violated because stu-

dents are not tested precisely on the first and last

days of school. Scholars try to reduce the extent

of this problem by modeling the school segments

of learning and subtracting them from estimates

of summer learning. In addition, school practices

in the spring, like sending children home with

a summer reading list, could influence summer

learning. Although there is little evidence of this

kind of contamination among young children

(Downey et al. 2004), it remains difficult to assess.

In addition, comparing whether group A, starting

low on a scale, gains more than group B, starting

high, requires interval-level scales where gains at

the bottom are comparable to those at the top—

like equal stair steps. Some of the better scales

of cognitive skills may approach this requirement

and reduce problems associated with ceiling

effects that trouble longitudinal comparisons, but

the field would benefit from greater discussion

of this issue and perhaps greater use of nonpara-

metric methods that do not depend on interval

assumptions (Ho and Reardon 2011). Finally, are

the patterns we observe in the summer really

a good indicator of what would happen if there

were no schooling? If parents knew their children

would not return to school in the fall, would they

behave the way they do in the summers? The field

would benefit from a more energetic discussion of

these assumptions. Nevertheless, we believe they

are more plausible than the assumptions required

for more traditional methods, that is, (1) models

predicting learning gains and/or statistically con-

trolling for observable differences in family back-

ground can successfully isolate school effects, (2)

we know how all exacerbatory and compensatory

mechanisms stack up against each other, and (3)

school inequality is greater than non-school

inequality. As a result, seasonal comparison stud-

ies prompt great interest.

What do we learn from seasonal comparison

studies? Remarkably, they find that socioeco-

nomic gaps in cognitive skills grow faster when

school is out than when it is in. Evidence of this

pattern began to emerge as early as the 1970s.

Heyns’s (1978) analysis of over 3,000 sixth and

seventh graders in 42 Atlanta schools during the

1971 to 1972 school year and summer uncovered

a groundbreaking key insight—children’s learning

during the summer is a product of non-school fac-

tors, whereas learning during the school year is

a product of both school and non-school factors

(for other early seasonal comparison studies, see

Hayes and Grether 1983; Klibanoff and Haggart

1981; Murnane 1975). Observing how achieve-

ment gaps change between the seasons thus pro-

vides important leverage for understanding how

schools matter. Subsequently, Entwisle and Alex-

ander brought even greater attention to seasonal

patterns with their analyses of children’s progres-

sion through Baltimore schools in the 1980s

(Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson 2007; Entwisle

and Alexander 1992, 1994). The credibility of

the seasonal pattern was bolstered by the first

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nationally representative, seasonally collected

data, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–

Kindergarten Cohort of 1998 (ECLS-K) (Downey

et al. 2004). The magnitude of the patterns differs

from one study to another, but each has produced

the same overall finding: Socioeconomic gaps in

skills grow faster when school is out versus in.

Alexander (1997:12) explains the ramifications

of the seasonal comparison patterns: When it

comes to inequality, ‘‘schooling is more ‘part of

the solution’ than ‘part of the problem.’’’

Scholars also have begun to apply seasonal

methods to other dimensions of inequality, and

the results are provocative. von Hippel and col-

leagues (2007) analyzed the ECLS-K data and

found that children gained body mass index

(BMI) roughly twice as fast in the summer than

during the school year. Black, Hispanic, and low

SES children were especially vulnerable to BMI

gain during the summer months. Although it is

tempting to infer that schools promote childhood

obesity, given what is often available for children

to eat and drink at school, clearly schools reduce

the level of childhood obesity that we would

observe in their absence. More recent analyses of

the newer ECLS-K 2011 data replicate these pat-

terns (von Hippel and Workman n.d.). Downey,

Workman, and von Hippel (2016) analyzed the

ECLS-K 2011 data for seasonal patterns of social

and behavioral outcomes: Teachers rated children

in terms of a set of learning behaviors (e.g., keeps

belongings organized, shows eagerness to learn

new things, works independently, easily adapts

to changes in routine, persists in completing tasks,

pays attention well, and follows classroom rules);

gaps in these social and behavioral skills are large

across SES, race, and gender at kindergarten entry

but show little evidence of increasing faster when

school is in versus out of session between kinder-

garten and second grade.

To date, the seasonal comparison method

points to schools as compensatory when it comes

to socioeconomic gaps in cognitive skills and

children’s obesity and as neutral with respect to

social/behavioral skills, but the patterns for race

and cognitive skills are less clear. Heyns (1978)

found that black/white gaps grew faster in the

summer than in the school season in Atlanta, sug-

gesting that schools are also compensatory with

respect to race, but black/white patterns were

less clear in Baltimore (Entwisle and Alexander

1994). And in the nationally representative

ECLS-K data, the black/white gap grew faster

during kindergarten and first grade than during

the summer in between, consistent with the view

that schools generate inequality (Downey et al.

2004). Muddying the waters further, black/white

skill disparities are well formed at kindergarten

entry (Downey et al. 2004). Black/white gaps in

cognitive skills appear to grow before kindergar-

ten because of non-school factors, whereas the

data from kindergarten through first grade impli-

cate schools. There is also provocative evidence

from the ECLS-K and Northwest Evaluation

Association (NWEA) data that schools may under-

mine the performance of Asian Americans

(Downey et al. 2004; Yoon and Merry 2015);

the patterns for Hispanics are unclear. Overall,

early seasonal studies suggested that schools are

probably compensatory with respect to race, but

the more recent analyses of larger-scale ECLS-K

and NWEA data reveal more troubling patterns—

white children may benefit more from school than

do black or Asian children.

The evidence for the racial patterns leans in the

direction of schools as exacerbatory, but the pat-

terns for socioeconomic achievement gaps chal-

lenge the critical view of schools. Are schools

driving some inequalities while simultaneously

reducing others? Once seasonal comparison stud-

ies expand to consider outcomes beyond cognitive

skills (e.g., health, graduation, and earnings), will

schools’ pernicious effects become more appar-

ent? We suggest that the time has come for

a new framework for theorizing and analyzing

schools and inequality that can accommodate the

provocative compensatory seasonal patterns for

socioeconomic gaps in cognitive skills and child-

ren’s obesity yet has the flexibility to consider

how schools’ effect on inequality may vary across

other dimensions of inequality.

THE REFRACTION FRAMEWORK

At the core of our framework is the idea that

schools are ‘‘refractors’’ of inequality. Much like

light is refracted when it enters a new medium

(e.g., from air to water), we argue that inequalities

are refracted when children enter schools. Light

refracts in different ways, depending on whether

it enters a slower, faster, or similar speed medium.

Similarly, how inequality changes once children

enter schools depends on how the new medium

(schools) influences inequality’s trajectory vis-à-

vis the previous medium (the non-school

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environment). Schools’ role could be (1) neutral

(no change to inequality), (2) exacerbatory (makes

inequality worse), or (3) compensatory (reduces

inequality). One advantage of this perspective is

that it elevates the compensatory possibility to

a position where it can compete with the other,

more dominant views. It also underscores how

inequality is well established and on a meaningful

trajectory prior to school entry, elevating the

importance of early childhood experiences (Caudi-

llo and Torche 2014; Heckman and Masterov

2007). We believe schools potentially can influ-

ence inequality in all three of these ways, but we

focus here on the case for schools as compensatory

because this view is the least developed.

Schools as Compensatory

In the nineteenth-century United States, education

reformers argued that mass education would pro-

vide a common experience for children and there-

fore an avenue for social mobility (Giroux 2005).

U.S. proponents of public schooling contrasted the

system they were creating with their European

counterparts, whose education system remained

closely linked to social class. Horace Mann

(1848), the well-known advocate for public

schooling, wrote,

According to the European theory, men are

divided into classes—some to toil and earn,

others to seize and enjoy. According to the

Massachusetts theory, all are to have an

equal chance for earning, and equal security

in the enjoyment of what they earn. . . .

Education then, beyond all other devices

of human origin, is a great equalizer of

the conditions of men.

This view continues to have credibility among

the general public, with some caveats. In the 1984

General Social Survey (GSS), the last year the

question was asked, over 70 percent of respond-

ents answered yes to the question: ‘‘Does everyone

in this country have an opportunity to obtain an

education corresponding to their abilities and tal-

ents?’’ The public view appears to be that schools

serve as a vehicle for social mobility—the school

system is a reasonably fair institution that rewards

hard work. At the same time, however, most peo-

ple acknowledge large disparities in school quality

and try very hard to get their own children into

‘‘good’’ schools (Johnson 2006). Although the

public views the system as rewarding people

fairly, they also put the onus of responsibility on

individuals to find the best schools and work

hard while in them.

In academia, seasonal comparison research

provides the strongest evidence that schools are

compensatory with regard to socioeconomic gaps

in cognitive skills. Of course, it may not be clear

why seasonal comparison evidence is viewed as

supporting the compensatory position, given that

high and low SES children typically learn at

roughly the same rate when school is in session.

Does that not suggest a neutral role for schools?

In some cases, high SES children even learn a little

faster than low SES children, yet scholars still

conclude that schools are compensatory (e.g.,

Downey et al. 2004). If schools are not reducing

achievement gaps in the absolute sense, and some-

times even allowing them to continue to grow

a bit, how can schools be compensatory?

An analogy may help. Suppose we assess

a year-long weight loss program by randomly

assigning subjects to either treatment or control

groups. And suppose that upon completion, the

treatment group has not lost any weight. On its

surface, this result suggests that the treatment

failed. But the proper way to assess the causal

effect of the treatment is in comparison to results

for the control group. If the control group gained

five pounds, on average, then the weight loss pro-

gram had a positive effect even if the treatment

subjects lost no weight. One can even imagine

a scenario where the control group gained, on

average, five pounds during the study while the

treatment group gained two. Even though the

treatment group experienced weight gain, we

would still define the treatment as a success

because it reduced the weight the treatment group

would have gained in its absence. Similarly, the

proper way to assess schools’ effect on achieve-

ment gaps is not to focus solely on school year pat-

terns but to compare the school year (treatment)

and summer (control) patterns. Schools are com-

pensatory whenever achievement trajectories are

more equal when school is in versus out of session.

Compensatory Mechanisms

Given that many of the patterns from seasonal

comparison research suggest that schools are com-

pensatory with respect to socioeconomic gaps in

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cognitive skills, we begin by considering possible

school mechanisms that might reduce inequality.

Our goal here is not to identify all compensatory

school mechanisms. Rather, we merely initiate

a discussion of school processes that are poten-

tially compensatory when it comes to socioeco-

nomic learning disparities.

First, schools may reduce achievement gaps via

curriculum consolidation. Sociologists may be

more familiar with the term curriculum differentia-

tion, referring to school practices in which some

children are exposed to different material and learn-

ing conditions than others, such as ability grouping,

tracking, and retention practices. But schools also

consolidate children’s learning experiences, group-

ing them together even when their skills are dispa-

rate. For example, schools can organize children in

many ways, but children’s chronological age is the

default basis upon which children are grouped. We

do not disagree with that practice but note that the

result is a powerful mechanism by which children

of widely varying skills are exposed to the same

curricular challenges. To understand how important

this mechanism is for promoting equality, we can

consider the distribution of cognitive skills among

children in kindergarten, first, and fifth grades in

the ECLS-K. We see substantial overlap in cogni-

tive skills across grades: 40 percent of kindergart-

ners outperform the bottom 10 percent of first

graders in reading, and a nontrivial number of kin-

dergartners read better than fifth graders (authors’

calculations). What do schools tend to do with these

high-performing kindergartners? A few are acceler-

ated through the system by skipping a grade, but

even this practice is unlikely to expose them to

challenging material. Some of these children are

so far ahead of their age-based peers that they

would need to skip multiple grades to find curricu-

lum in their sweet spot. Most remain with their age-

group peers, a practice that is likely compensatory

because it is difficult for these students to produce

academic gains while exposed to material mostly

below their level.

Second, schools may reduce achievement gaps

by targeting resources toward disadvantaged chil-

dren. It is important not to overlook the many edu-

cation policies designed to improve school condi-

tions for disadvantaged children. Title 1, Head

Start, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the

Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 all were

intended to improve the quality of school experi-

ences for low SES children (and to varying

degrees have succeeded in doing so; see Ludwig

and Miller 2007). Most school funding comes

from local and state sources, so a look at how

resources are distributed across children with spe-

cial needs versus honors students at the state level

is informative. As one example, in 2007 in Ken-

tucky, the average child with special needs

received an additional $11,970 per year, whereas

the average child deemed gifted received an addi-

tional $62 per year (Seiler et al. 2008).

Finally, it is possible that although much is

made of the cultural mismatches between teachers

and disadvantaged students, many teachers operate

in a mostly egalitarian manner. The kinds of people

attracted to teaching are distinct from the general

population—they are more interested in helping

others and more likely to endorse relatively egali-

tarian views. For example, in the GSS data, 47 per-

cent of non-teachers said that ‘‘lack of effort’’ is

a ‘‘very important’’ reason why some people are

poor, compared to just 32 percent of teachers

(authors’ calculations). And a national survey of

teachers found that when asked who was most

likely to receive one-on-one attention, 80 percent

of teachers said ‘‘academically struggling students’’

while just 5 percent said ‘‘academically advanced’’

students (Duffett, Farkas, and Loveless 2008).

Teachers may favor the advantaged under some

conditions, but overall, teacher behaviors exacer-

bating inequality may be outweighed by teachers’

greater tendency to favor the disadvantaged.

THE COSTS OF IGNORING SCHOOLS’ COMPENSATORY POTENTIAL

We believe that the best evidence currently indi-

cates that schools play a meaningful compensatory

role with respect to socioeconomic gaps in cogni-

tive skills, and schools’ compensatory role might

extend further. If schools are playing a more sig-

nificant compensatory role than is currently appre-

ciated, what are the costs of this mistake?

The Cost to Research

Underestimating schools’ compensatory role can

lead researchers to overlook the important role

that social conditions outside of school play in

shaping the magnitude and malleability of

achievement gaps. For example, it turns out that

socioeconomic-based achievement gaps are

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mostly formed prior to the onset of formal school-

ing. Perhaps the strongest evidence comes from

the 1998 ECLS-K study, which provides the best

data on a large sample of children followed from

kindergarten through several years of school.

The 90th to 10th income-based achievement

gaps in reading grew about 12 percent between

kindergarten and eighth grade, and the math gap

actually narrowed (Reardon 2011; see also Dun-

can and Magnuson 2011). If socioeconomic-based

achievement gaps form primarily prior to kinder-

garten and then increase only modestly (and some-

times even narrow) once children are in school,

then most of the action regarding achievement

gaps occurs in early childhood.

Another way to understand how broader social

conditions matter is by comparing achievement

gaps across countries. Significant cross-national

work has explored variations in test scores for chil-

dren already exposed to schools, but these studies

mix the effects of school and non-school conditions

in unknown ways. It is especially useful, therefore,

to compare gaps in skills among children who have

yet to start school. A study of U.S. and Canadian

children’s reading skills highlights this point. Merry

(2013) documents how Canadians are ahead of U.S.

children by a sizeable .30 standard deviation units

(nearly a year’s worth of learning) in the Pro-

gramme for International Student Assessment

(PISA) reading test given to 15- to 16-year-olds.

Merry also compared similar-cohort Canadian and

U.S. children on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary

Test (PPVT) reading test at ages 4 to 5, before for-

mal schooling had started, and found that a similar

gap of .31 standard deviation units was already in

place at that age.

This pattern prompts us to rethink school-based

explanations for differences in international test

scores and consider forces outside the control of

the education system (e.g., access to health care,

income inequality, racial/ethnic inequality, racial-

and income-based housing segregation, the

strength of organized labor, family structure,

immigrant status, mass incarceration, the real

value of the minimum wage, unemployment bene-

fits, and family leave options). Merry’s (2013)

study raises the possibility that international dif-

ferences in test scores among adolescents may

have little (or maybe nothing) to do with schools.

Perhaps Finland’s impressive test scores, which

have prompted great interest in their teachers

and schools, are mostly a product of its successful

social welfare programs.

Finally, it is unclear how conditions outside of

schools shape schools’ compensatory power.

Downey and colleagues (2004) suggest that as

inequality outside of school grows, schools’ com-

pensatory power also increases because the differ-

ence in school versus non-school environments

becomes more acute—schools become an even

more important haven for the disadvantaged. But

does schools’ compensatory power really increase,

ad infinitum, as social conditions outside of

schools become more disparate? One might expect

a limit to this relationship—that when social con-

ditions become highly unequal, children arrive at

kindergarten with achievement gaps so large and

entrenched that schools’ compensatory power

begins to wane. Have we reached that point?

These kinds of contextual questions—how the

gap at kindergarten entry changes over time,

how it compares across countries, and how

schools’ compensatory power changes over

time—are where sociologists shine, yet they

have received insufficient attention.

The Cost to Policy

It is one thing if academics develop the wrong

explanations for inequality; it is another if those

explanations frame public discussions that lead

to suboptimal policy advice. If we are currently

underestimating schools’ compensatory power to

the extent that the seasonal comparison evidence

suggests, then education policy is misinformed

by underestimating the quality of schools serving

low SES children. As a result, education scholars

are likely overestimating the extent to which

school reform is the most attractive mechanism

for reducing achievement gaps. If socioeconomic

gaps are mostly formed prior to formal schooling

and change little after that, then it makes more

sense to target early childhood policies that will

prevent large gaps from emerging in the first place

rather than focus on school policies aimed at reme-

diating those gaps.

Yet, a significant portion of current education

research emphasizes the importance of teacher

quality (Goldhaber 2016; Hanushek 2010). We

agree that some teachers raise children’s skills

more effectively than others, and improving

teacher quality is a laudable goal. But what are

the implications for achievement gaps? Most

scholars assume that low SES children endure

poorer teachers and that this plays an important

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role in explaining gaps. If we measure teacher

quality in terms of qualifications, experience, or

whether teachers majored in the subject area

they teach, then we find evidence consistent with

this view—low SES children are exposed to

poorer teachers than high SES children. But these

observable teacher characteristics hardly predict

students’ learning. Most scholars now agree that

when measuring teacher quality, we should focus

on what really matters: how much students learn.

If we evaluate teacher or school quality via

how much students learn, the evidence is more

mixed regarding whether low SES children endure

substantially poorer learning environments. Some

data support the notion that high SES children

enjoy more effective teachers. For example,

a report from the Tennessee Department of Educa-

tion, which uses a value-added approach for eval-

uating teachers, concludes that ‘‘Tennessee’s

teacher effectiveness data indicate that students

in high poverty/high minority schools have less

access to the ‘most effective’ teachers and more

access to the ‘least effective’ teachers than stu-

dents in low poverty/low minority schools’’ (Ten-

nessee Department of Education 2007). A similar

analysis in Louisiana found comparable patterns,

although it did not replicate in Massachusetts

(DeMonte and Hanna 2014).

The value-added models favored by many

researchers, however, may not adequately isolate

teachers’ contributions to learning. One problem

is that they usually gauge learning from one year

to the next, for example, between the spring of

third grade and the spring of fourth grade, and so

the summer in between biases the estimate

because high and low SES children’s skills

diverge for reasons unrelated to schools. Growth

models constructed with 9-month data remove

summer noise and correlate only around .50 with

traditional growth models using 12-month data,

demonstrating that summer noise is a nontrivial

problem (Atteberry 2011).

There is not yet consensus over which kind of

value-added model is most valid for isolating

teacher or school effects, but as education scholars

develop better techniques, one pattern stands

out—models that more persuasively isolate these

effects suggest that the differences in effectiveness

between schools serving high and low SES chil-

dren are modest or even nonexistent (Downey,

von Hippel, and Hughes 2008; Lauen and Gaddis

2013). For example, analyzing a nationally repre-

sentative sample of 287 schools, Downey and

colleagues found no relationship between their

measure of school quality (i.e., the difference in

schools’ summer vs. school-year learning rates)

and the percentage of children in the school

receiving free or reduced lunches (Downey et al.

2008). Along the same lines, other work notes

that private schools do not produce more learning

than public ones (Lubienski and Lubienski 2013).

These studies lead to a remarkable conclu-

sion—the distribution of teacher or school effec-

tiveness (defined as promoting cognitive skills)

may be only weakly related to socioeconomic sta-

tus. The traditional story is that low SES children

attend dramatically poorer schools and, as a result,

are far behind their high SES peers. It is probably

more accurate to say that low SES children arrive

at kindergarten far behind but then mostly stop

losing ground once in school. Current accountabil-

ity schemes therefore most likely underestimate

the performance of teachers and administrators

serving disadvantaged children, leading to unde-

served labels and sanctions. Parents and policy-

makers also receive poor information about which

schools are the best, undermining market mecha-

nisms that might promote better schools (Downey

et al. 2008).

If low SES children currently enjoy roughly

similar learning environments relative to their

high SES peers, what does this mean for reducing

the achievement gap via school reform? It means

that reducing gaps would require more than just

raising the quality of schools serving low SES

children to the level of those serving high SES

children—it would require creating substantially

better school learning environments for low SES

children. This may be what happens when small-

scale projects are able to close achievement gaps

to some degree. For example, black children

who were chosen via lottery for the Harlem Child-

ren’s Zone and experienced several years in the

program demonstrated eighth-grade skills on par

with white children in New York City while their

counterparts who were not chosen continued to lag

behind (Dobbie and Fryer 2009). The Knowledge

Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools also

have raised disadvantaged children’s skills, in

part by increasing the amount of time children

spend in school and perhaps by attracting high-

quality teachers (‘‘Student Characteristics and

Achievement’’ 2010). It is important to note that

these occasional ‘‘high-flying’’ schools probably

succeed by providing disadvantaged children

with substantially better schools than their

Downey and Condron 215

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advantaged peers attend. An obstacle for reducing

inequality via school reform therefore is that doing

so would require scaling up similar efforts and,

importantly, making them available to low SES

children while denying them to high SES children.

Or, at the least, low SES children would need to

enjoy greater benefits than high SES children

from the school treatments provided.

Relatedly, one of the best investments U.S.

policymakers could make would be to move

away from the current, agriculturally based school

calendar and extend the school year. Yet policy-

makers, influenced by popular school-based rheto-

ric, reasonably ask, ‘‘Why spend money increasing

the quantity of schooling when the quality of

schools serving disadvantaged children is so

poor?’’ Scholars have promoted the view that

schools serving low SES children are of very

poor quality, thereby undermining support for

increasing school exposure. This is unfortunate

because a longer school year, with school quality

distributed as it currently is, would improve the

cognitive skills of U.S. children in general and

benefit the disadvantaged the most (i.e., by length-

ening the period of time in which they lose less

ground to high SES children).

Of course, even if schools are already compen-

satory and not the source of socioeconomic gaps,

they still may be an attractive policy lever for

reducing gaps further. Through school reform,

we can readily influence a broad range of children.

But recall that these gaps emerge during early

childhood and are nearly completely formed by

kindergarten entry. When we consider school-

based reforms for reducing achievement gaps,

we need to know more about the cost-benefit anal-

ysis of broader societal policies that could prevent

gaps from emerging in the first place versus school

reforms aimed at remediating gaps. The question

is not whether it is possible via school reform to

reduce achievement gaps; the question is whether

school reform is the best strategy for reducing

them.

CONCLUSIONS

Fifty years after the Coleman Report, a critical

view of schools has come to dominate the sociol-

ogy of education, with scholars identifying a wide

range of school mechanisms thought to reproduce

or exacerbate inequality. The field is now at

a crossroads. The dominant ideas continue to

support the notion that schools reproduce or exac-

erbate inequality, but compelling empirical evi-

dence suggests that schools are compensatory

when it comes to a key dimension of educational

inequality—socioeconomic achievement gaps.

It may turn out that socioeconomic gaps in cog-

nitive skills (and children’s body mass index) are

the exceptions, the only dimensions of inequality

for which schools are compensatory. Maybe

schools are an engine of socioeconomic inequality

for most other outcomes. But if future work finds

that schools promote inequality for most other out-

comes, we would need to explain why the school

mechanisms that reduce SES-based cognitive skill

gaps do not extend to these other outcomes, high-

lighting the need to understand schools’ compen-

satory mechanisms better. This gap in the sociol-

ogy of education literature remains a significant

obstacle.

Another possibility, and one we find more per-

suasive, is that schools are considerably more

compensatory than previously thought. Coleman’s

conclusion—that schools play a largely neutral

role in influencing achievement gaps—was

wrong, but for a different reason than most cri-

tiques of his work suggest. Coleman may not

have measured what matters about schools well,

but he also did not measure the non-school envi-

ronment well, and that error was even greater.

The primary need for change, in our view, lies

in how education scholars frame their questions.

Scholars tend to ask, are there school processes

that favor advantaged children? If they find

them, then they conclude that schools are culprits.

We do not dispute that some school practices

likely make inequality worse, and indeed we

both have researched some of these practices our-

selves (Condron 2008; Downey and Pribesh

2004). But we contend that the literature typically

fails to compare the magnitude of exacerbatory

school mechanisms against that of compensatory

ones, resulting in a one-sided view of schools

and inequality. In addition, even if exacerbatory

school mechanisms do outweigh compensatory

ones, we still need to know if the inequality pro-

duced by schools is worse than that produced by

non-school environments.

We call for a more contextual understanding of

how schools matter, a view that was initially

undermined by the No Child Left Behind legisla-

tion. When No Child Left Behind was first imple-

mented, it was clear that schools were to be eval-

uated on the basis of children’s test scores at one

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point in time, and there would not be any adjust-

ments based on varying non-school environments.

This made no sense, of course, given that between-

school achievement gaps are significantly estab-

lished at the onset of kindergarten. But to their

credit, many states abandoned evaluations of

schools based on test scores at one point in time

and have moved toward value-added assessments,

in which statistical models more persuasively iso-

late schools’ contribution to children’s learning.

This change represents a noteworthy acknowledg-

ment by policymakers that context matters.

Can this victory for the ‘‘context’’ side be

expanded? Two more shifts are necessary. First,

the public needs to understand that socioeconomic

achievement gaps form primarily before formal

schooling and schools probably do more to reduce

than increase them. If the public and policymakers

knew this, they likely would acknowledge that

achievement gaps are generated and maintained

primarily by forces outside a school’s purview,

and they might be more inclined to address the

broader social conditions generating those gaps.

Second, the public needs to understand that,

once compared fairly, schools serving low SES

children provide learning environments roughly

on par with schools serving high SES children.

When we say this, we do not mean to suggest

that schools serving disadvantaged children are

perfect and would not benefit from improvement

or that certain practices within schools are not

advantageous for high SES children. What we

mean is that when school effects are carefully iso-

lated, there is surprisingly little evidence that

schools serving high SES children do a better

job promoting math and reading learning than do

schools serving low SES children. Sociologists

should be at the forefront of making this more con-

textual understanding of schools better known.

We recognize that the U.S. public is excep-

tional in the way they view public investment in

schools as a legitimate action of the welfare state

yet are skeptical of state involvement via other

means. People in the United States are more reluc-

tant than Canadians or Europeans to help families

via non-school policies (e.g., increasing the mini-

mum wage, greater public transportation, more

generous family leave policies, broader access to

health care, pro-worker legislation, and reducing

mass incarceration) (Katz 2013; McCall 2013).

This cultural position has consequences and too

often directs policy efforts toward schools when

the source of the problem is elsewhere.

Education scholars have been complicit in pro-

moting school reform as the answer. Based on evi-

dence that almost certainly fails to separate school

from non-school effects, they have encouraged the

notion that schools serving advantaged children

promote more learning than schools serving disad-

vantaged children, and they have downplayed the

fact that skill gaps are mostly formed prior to

schooling and schools, as currently constituted,

do more to reduce than increase these gaps.

They have highlighted how better teachers pro-

mote much more learning than weaker teachers

and then implied that improving the teachers black

students are exposed to could readily close the

black/white achievement gap (Gordon et al.

2006) even though they lacked evidence that

teachers serving black children are poorer than

those serving white children. Economist Eric

Hanushek (1992:106) explains the focus on

schools: ‘‘While family inputs to education are

indeed extremely important, the differential

impacts of schools and teachers receive more

attention when viewed from a policy viewpoint.

This reflects simply that the characteristics of

schools are generally more easily manipulated

than what goes on in the family.’’

But should current political conditions regard-

ing what is considered the easiest policy reform

shape scholars’ willingness to identify the real

causes of achievement gaps? The assumption

that policy affecting families and neighborhoods

is out of bounds and school policy is the only lever

available has been a significant obstacle to under-

standing how schools really matter. This focus

promotes the narrative that social conditions out-

side of schools are somehow natural and indepen-

dent from policy decisions. They are not (Fischer

et al. 1996). Earlier we mentioned that Canadian

4- to 5-year-olds outperform U.S. children on

reading tests before schools have a chance to mat-

ter. It is noteworthy that Canadians are ahead by

the largest margin at the bottom of the perfor-

mance distribution—the United States has a longer

tail of poor performers (Merry 2013). The Cana-

dian people have made a wide range of different

policy decisions that have made it easier to be

poor in Canada than in the United States.

A cynical—and entirely plausible—interpreta-

tion of the greater emphasis on reforming schools

relative to reforming other institutions is that it

serves a purpose: It distracts people from the

real sources of inequality, thereby serving the

interests of those who benefit from current social

Downey and Condron 217

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arrangements. Spring (2013:14), for instance, pos-

its that school-based reform is inherently conser-

vative because it avoids the more central conflict

between the interests of labor and capitalists:

‘‘One reason schools have gotten involved with

so many social problems is that the school is the

most available institution and the one least likely

to affect other parts of the social system.’’ If this

is so, then school policy provides an arena where

reformers’ energies can be ‘‘cooled out’’ with little

chance of undermining existing power structures.

The current weakness in the sociology of edu-

cation literature—underestimating the compensa-

tory role of schools—stems from unwarranted cer-

tainty among scholars that schools promote

inequality. It would be equally problematic to

replace that position with one that contends that

schools are uniformly compensatory, especially

because currently we only have evidence that

schools are compensatory with regard to socioeco-

nomic gaps in cognitive skills and BMI and that

they play a neutral role with respect to social

and behavioral skills. Instead, we call for a more

balanced understanding of the relationship

between schools and inequality, one where neu-

tral, exacerbatory, and compensatory possibilities

are all given serious consideration and scholars

acknowledge that inequality between groups is

already on a strong trajectory when children arrive

at kindergarten. We need to know more about how

schools refract that trajectory. In the past half cen-

tury, we have made less progress on this question

than we should have. In the next 50 years, we can

do better by rigorously isolating school effects,

carefully weighing the magnitude of exacerbatory

and compensatory mechanisms, and placing

school effects in context.

FUNDING

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial

support for the research, authorship, and/or publication

of this article: ‘‘How Big Are Summer Learning Gaps?

Using Seasonal Comparisons to Understand Whether

Schools or Other Settings Are the Primary Source of

Test-Score Inequality’’ with Paul von Hippel, William

T. Grant Foundation, ($426,923), June 1, 2013–May

30, 2015. ‘‘Do Gaps in Test Scores, Behavioral Skills,

and Health Grow Faster in School or out? New Analyses

Using the ECLS-K 2011’’ Russell Sage Foundation,

($100,297), May 1, 2016–August 31, 2017. ‘‘The Distri-

bution of School Quality’’ Spencer Foundation,

($43,452), June 1, 2014–May 30, 2015.

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Author Biographies

Douglas B. Downey is a professor of sociology at Ohio

State University. He is interested in how inequality is

reproduced. He is currently analyzing the way SES,

race, and gender gaps in social/behavioral skills change

when school is in versus out (with Joseph Workman

and Paul von Hippel), exploring how schools’ compen-

satory power changed between 1998 and 2010 (with

Joseph Merry and Joseph Workman), and assessing

whether wealthy suburban schools produce better learn-

ing outcomes than poor urban ones (with Elizabeth

Martin).

Dennis J. Condron is an associate professor of sociol-

ogy at Oakland University. His research focuses primar-

ily on unequal educational opportunities and outcomes

along the lines of social class and race/ethnicity in the

U.S. He is currently studying inequality in school fund-

ing and changes in class and racial/ethnic achievement

gaps as children enter and progress through school.

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