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

  • 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.