James S. Coleman Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

James S. Coleman was a sociologist and author of studies that fueled controversy around the mandatory busing issue in the 1960s and 1970s: one study providing the rationale for mandatory busing of students to achieve integrated schools, and the other declaring those efforts a failure.

Born on May 12, 1926, Coleman earned a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1955 and began a long teaching career at the University in Chicago the following year. From 1959 to 1973, he taught and did research at Johns Hopkins University, returning to the University of Chicago in 1973. Despite producing a broad range of research and scholarship, including the publication of thirty books, Coleman is best remembered for two studies.

His 1966 report to Congress, known as the Coleman Report, presented research that showed African American children would learn more and faster in integrated classrooms. Although his conclusions were carefully qualified, this research was used as an argument for wide-scale mandatory busing to achieve racial balance in many schools and correct the de facto segregation that had been found to exist in many American school districts. The controversy and acrimony that this effort generated placed Coleman’s work at the center of a firestorm.

Later, in 1975, after “White flight” and other issues had plagued the efforts of this movement, Coleman issued a report pronouncing the mandatory busing movement a failure. This, too, was extremely controversial to the point that the American Sociological Society considered expelling him. Coleman felt his most important work was his 1990 book, Foundations of Social Theory, in which he studied the organization and functioning of communities. Coleman died of prostate cancer on March 25, 1995.

Bibliography:

Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coleman, J. S., et al. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Coleman, J. S., Hoffer, T., & Kilgore, S. (1982). High school achievement: Public, Catholic, and private schools compared. New York: Basic Books.

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