Coleman's questions were ones that no one had asked, let alone to such a wide degree.

An excellent account of James Coleman and the research behind the Coleman report.  From Coleman Report Set the Standard for the Study of Public Education by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson.

I had not realized quite how groundbreaking it was in terms of examining social policy through the lens of a scientific approach and hard data.  

In the spring of 1966, James Coleman, a Johns Hopkins sociologist, checked into a motel in Washington, D.C., and shut himself off from the outside world. He did so because of a single paragraph in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Section 402 required that the commissioner of education conduct a survey and report to the president and Congress "concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions." The report had to be filed within two years of the law's enactment, so once President Lyndon Johnson made it official, in July of 1964, the clock had started ticking.

The Office of Education, then inside the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, spent the next several months debating how to move forward. By the time the bureaucratic bickering had ended, the commissioner had reached out to Coleman and handed him an unprecedented task: to gather a team and survey the entire United States to determine whether public education was fair. Coleman had a little over a year to meet the congressional deadline.

In the fall of 1965, Coleman's team set about administering one of the largest social science surveys ever conducted, using questionnaires of his design. Very little was known at the time about America's schools. Funding and resource distribution were a mystery. Test scores of whites and blacks had never been compared because standardized tests, ubiquitous today, did not yet exist nationwide. And no one had conducted studies analyzing the elements necessary for successful learning. Coleman's questions were ones that no one had asked, let alone to such a wide degree. And from the beginning, he had taken this mammoth task and made it even harder by asking more questions. Rather than simply look at the resources and funds going into schools as directed by the government, Coleman wanted to understand outcomes. How well were kids learning? What might influence a child's capacity to learn? Was it teachers? Peers? Families? "One of the interesting things about Jim and the way he approached his work is that he didn't like being told what to do," says Karl Alexander, a professor emeritus of sociology at Johns Hopkins and a colleague of Coleman's. "He'd have a mandate, and he'd do it, but then he'd do what he wanted beyond that. The congressional intent [with the report] was to understand where we stood in terms of school desegregation. You didn't have to be a genius to realize we hadn't gotten far down that path. And the report did survey segregation. That was the first cut. But my goodness, it went so far beyond that."

Several months later, it was time for Coleman to sequester himself in the D.C. motel and analyze the results with the help of a mainframe computer housed at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Coleman, then 41, had one change of clothes. He slept little. Scattered about the room were printouts analyzing surveys that had been filled out by 600,000 students and 60,000 teachers from 4,000 of the nation's public schools. Every day, new computer printouts arrived. James McPartland was a young graduate student who studied under Coleman and worked on the report. "He was holed up in that motel—not quite a flophouse, but definitely not elegant—waiting for the pages of analysis that he'd requested to be crunched by the computers in Princeton," McPartland says.

The federal government had already formed a hunch about what Coleman would find: A decade after Brown v. Board of Education, segregation was still the norm in most schools, and some districts were likely underfunding schools with predominantly minority students. The Equality of Educational Opportunity report, the formal name of Coleman's study, would determine whether this was true. McPartland, who went on to become a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, was hired by the Office of Education to help administer and co-author the EEO with Coleman. "What the government really expected was that the South was discriminating by having lousy schools for poor and minority kids," he says. The government, armed with this new data, planned to strong-arm discriminatory school districts by threatening to withhold federal funding.

Read the whole thing.