The Coleman Report, fifty years later

Abstract

In 2016 the Coleman Report will be 50 years old. It was the first external evaluation of a whole educational system by means of standardized tests. Its main conclusions still hold, and have been confirmed by many subsequent research. But its interpretation has been loaded with variuos biases. Conclusions about the role of family background have been misinterpreted by taking as causality what is no more than correlation. Those concerning the lack of differences among schools have been tenaciously ignored, while the findings concerning peer effects have been widely accepted and rather exagerated. Finally, a probably fatal error in the Coleman Report, to pretend that an aptitude test is a valid indicator of scholastic achievement, has been hardly noted and easily forgotten.