2010 - Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity Data

Attribution: Borman, Geoffrey, & Dowling, Maritza
Researchers: Geoffrey BormanMaritza Dowling
University Affiliation: The University of Wisconsin
Email: gborman@education.wisc.edu
Research Question:
Reanalysis and reconceptualization of the Coleman report through a 2-level hierarchical linear model.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Teacher College Record
Journal Entry: Vol. 112, No. 5, pp. 1201-1246
Year: 2010
Findings:
  • 40% of the variance in verbal achievement is attributable to differences across schools.
  • There was a statistically significant positive relationship between stronger preferences among teachers to teach middle-class students and school mean achievement.
  • Above and beyond the effects of other school-level resources, there are highly important contextual effects associated with attending more highly segregated schools with higher concentrations of poverty.
  • The compositional effect of the school-level racial/ethnic context was nearly 1 1/3 times the magnitude of the student-level effect of being African American.
  • Schools do indeed matter, in that when one examines outcomes across the national sample of schools, fully 40% of the variability in verbal achievement lies between schools.
  • A large proportion of the variation among true school means is related to differences that are explained by school characteristics.
  • Substantial school-to-school variability in terms of the within-school social distributions of achievement.
  • Both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student’s school are approximately 150% more important than a student’s individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.
Keywords: Academic AchievementClassroom CompositionCurriculumPeer EffectsRacial CompositionSES CompositionTeachersRegions: NationalMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Multilevel Models Sampling Frame:National
Sampling Types: NonrandomAnalysis Units: StudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:
  • Coleman’s EEO data files maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
  • Sample of over 570,000 students from grades 1,3,6, 9 and 12.
  • Survey responses from about 4,000 principals and 40,000 teachers.
  • Final sample 30,590 students and 226 schools
  • IV: Student Level Variables, School-level variables, Science laboratory facilities, extracurricular activities, comprehensiveness of the curriculum, volumes per student, movement between tracks, etc.
  • DV: Student’s score on a standardized verbal ability test.
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts