James Samuel Coleman

president (organizations)

Personal Information

Born February 17, 1949, in Newark, NJ; married, wife's name Gabriella Morris (an attorney); children: Leonard III, Christiana.
Education: Princeton University, B.S., 1971; John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, M.P.A., 1975; Harvard Graduate School of Education, M.S., 1976.

Career

Missionary in Africa for Protestant Episcopal Church, 1976-80; president, Greater Newark Urban Coalition, 1980-82; commissioner of New Jersey Department of Energy, 1982-86, and New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, 1986-88; municipal finance banker with Kidder, Peabody & Co., New York City, 1988-91; executive director of market development for Major League Baseball, 1991-94; president of National League, 1994--. Has served on numerous boards and commissions, including Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Metropolitan Opera, Waterloo Foundation, and Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (R.B.I.).

Life's Work

When he assumed the presidency of baseball's National League in 1994, Leonard S. Coleman, Jr., became the highest-ranking African American executive in professional sports. A native of New Jersey and a lifelong baseball fan, Coleman faces the task of restoring baseball's public image in the wake of a lengthy players' strike. He must also be the final arbiter in on-field disputes, whether they concern rival players, players and umpires, or managers. Coleman is deeply concerned that professional baseball has alienated its fans, who perceive both its owners and its players as greedy and concerned only with their own gains. As president of the National League, he plans to do what he can to restore the old-time feeling of baseball as a source of national pride and local identity. "We have to create a greater focus on the game for the fans so they can enjoy the game and not have to hear as much rhetoric about the business aspects of baseball," he told Ebony magazine. "We have to understand that the business of our game is the fans." One of those fans is Coleman himself. "The first thing I can ever remember loving is baseball," he noted in the New York Times. "There aren't too many people who get an opportunity to make their living at the first thing they ever loved."

Coleman was born in Newark, but he grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, a village not far from New York City. He lived in a two- family home which his parents shared with an uncle, and everyone seemed to root for a different baseball team. Coleman and his mother liked the Brooklyn Dodgers. Coleman's father preferred the New York Giants. To make life interesting, the uncle cheered for the Yankees. "Everything in our house was politics and baseball," the league president recalled in the New York Times. "That's all we talked about."

At Montclair High School Coleman played baseball and football, becoming best known for his football skills. He was named All-State and All-American at halfback during his senior year, an accomplishment that he still points to with pride. "I was part of an all-state backfield with Joe Theismann, Franco Harris and Jack Tatum," he remembered in Sports Illustrated. "I'm the only one without a Super Bowl ring."

Coleman continued playing baseball and football as an undergraduate at Princeton University, becoming the first black player ever to score a touchdown for that prestigious Ivy-League school. Still he felt that he was not being given enough opportunity to prove himself with the team--and he thought his race was the reason. As a sophomore, he joined two other black players in a protest, charging the Princeton football program with violations of the university's policy of equal opportunity for minorities. When the complaints drew national attention, Coleman and his two friends were dismissed from the team, but a panel charged with investigating the incident urged greater sensitivity toward minority students in the athletic program. Coleman told the New York Times that the experience "changed my life in many ways," especially helping him to develop a keen social consciousness.

After earning his bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1971 Coleman moved on to Harvard University, where he pursued dual master's degrees in public administration and education. With such stellar academic credentials he might have entered the work force on the fast track, but instead, in 1976, he accepted a position as a missionary to Africa for the Protestant Episcopal Church. There he put his education and expertise to work as a consultant on health care, education, and community services. All told he spent four years in Africa, serving in 17 different countries and cultivating a close friendship with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. "I matured while I was overseas, and I found out about the warmth and affection of the people," Coleman recalled in Ebony. "Everywhere I went, there was a new and exciting experience."

Returning to America in 1980, Coleman began to consider a career in politics. He first served as president of the Greater Newark Urban Coalition, an organization that sought to create liaisons between businesses, community groups, and government. In 1982 he was appointed commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Energy. There he became an important member of the administration of Republican New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. During this period he also married Gabriella Morris, an attorney.

Leonard Coleman was hardly the stereotypical public servant, however. Midway through his four-year appointment to New Jersey's Energy Department, at age 35, he worked his way into the Metropolitan Baseball League, a semi-pro affiliation catering to college players and other young pro baseball hopefuls. His late fling with baseball was the source of much joking in the governor's cabinet, but on the field Coleman was a serious competitor. Over two years of play, he compiled a .337 career batting average. He explained in Ebony that the semi-pro experience satisfied his aspirations as a baseball player. "I loved playing baseball, but I was realistic enough to know that I wasn't going to make it to the major leagues," he said.

Handsome and affable, Coleman proved to be a great asset to the Republican Party in New Jersey. He helped to promote Governor Kean among black voters in such cities as Newark, Trenton, and Camden, and indeed Kean earned more votes in those cities than any Republican had in years. In 1986 Kean named Coleman commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, another cabinet- level position with an annual budget of some $250 million. Coleman had greater ambitions as well, at one time entertaining the idea of running for a Senate seat. He was popular and well-known in New Jersey, especially among Republicans, but when the 1988 Senatorial campaign got underway, Kean supported Pete Dawkins, a white Republican. Dawkins was subsequently beaten soundly by Democrat Frank Lautenberg. Coleman never made an issue of the campaign, and in fact he supported Dawkins as well, but in 1988 he left the public sector for a job as an investment banker with the prominent New York firm Kidder, Peabody & Co. He has expressed no interest in returning to national politics since that time.

Coleman eventually was named vice president of municipal finance for Kidder, Peabody, and he might have spent the rest of his career there. Instead, in 1991, he accepted his first position with Major League Baseball: director of market development. Coleman was charged with the task of reviving fan interest in baseball at a time when attendance was beginning to slip in many markets. He decided that the best way to prepare professional baseball for a bright future was to spark more interest in the game among youngsters. One program that caught his attention was Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (also known as R.B.I.), an initiative aimed at keeping city teenagers active in baseball after they leave the Little Leagues. The program began modestly but has--with Coleman's encouragement--expanded to more than 30 cities, bringing with it new playing fields, equipment, and organized baseball programs.

In March of 1994, the owners of the National League baseball teams unanimously chose Coleman to succeed outgoing Bill White as president of the National League. Coleman described his new position in Sports Illustrated as "a dream come true." At first glance the job does look ideal. League presidents are paid to fly around and attend big-league baseball games. They get the best seats at any sporting event--not just baseball, but everything from the Super Bowl to the U.S. Open tennis tournament to the Olympics. Their philosophies shape the game in ways both large and small, governing everything from the fines levied for a fight between players to the image of the game itself. The National League presidency is a high-profile position, one of the most important in organized professional sports, and the job holder is treated accordingly.

The dream can become a nightmare, however. Coleman began his duties with the National League just as one of the worst players' strikes in history was taking shape. The strike brought cancellation of a good part of the regular season in 1994 as well as all post-season play, and tarnished the image of the national pastime. To Coleman fell the task of restoring baseball's image and promoting the game as wholesome family entertainment. Asked what he would like to accomplish as National League president by the Sporting News, Coleman replied: "In terms of fans, we want an exciting product on the field that they can be proud of and relate to." He added: "I think baseball historically has had the roots within our North American society as the national pastime. Baseball has had an impact off the field and on. I look at some of the problems in our country with education, with getting children immunized. We have a role as hopefully a community citizen to help where we possibly can."

With such a philosophy in place, it is not surprising that Coleman has proven to be a tougher disciplinarian than his predecessors. "Violence, certainly, has become much more prevalent in our society. And I don't think it has a place in our sport," he commented in the New York Times. Coleman has been decisive about handing out fines and suspensions to brawling players. He has joined current and former players in a much-publicized campaign against the use of chewing tobacco during games. And he has actively encouraged players to spend more time reaching out to fans, especially children. "Baseball is going to have to provide hope and provide some type of vision in society so that kids' lives in this country can be better because of this sport," he explained in Ebony.

Not surprisingly, Coleman has also been a crusader for the rights of African American baseball players. He was instrumental in persuading Major League Baseball to open its health insurance plan to the players and the spouses of players who participated in the Negro Leagues. He also helped to design a plan that provides pension money to former Negro League players earned from the sale of Negro Leagues merchandise that is marketed by Major League Baseball.

Baseball purists have been relieved to discover that Coleman has no plans to introduce the designated hitter rule to the National League. "I like the National League style of play," he said in the Sporting News. "It's not going to be leading any movements for any change." What Coleman would like to see change is the message professional baseball is sending to its viewers. "It used to be that baseball had a strong connection with society," Coleman explained in the New York Times. "It was always able to transcend the field in a variety of very positive ways. Now, though, the only message we have been communicating is money, money, money. That is not a message we should be communicating."

Instead Coleman envisions such improvements as less drug abuse among players, less fighting during games, and more promotion of baseball as entertainment for the whole family. "We need to be role models and try to encourage players to be such," he maintained in the Sporting News. "If you look at the game of baseball, it's been one of the great continuities of life.... There's a certain flow to it. You don't want to tinker with it on the field. But any ways you can enhance the fans' enjoyment, you do that."

Coleman continues to live in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife, son, and daughter. His busy schedule may take him to as many as five different American cities in as many days, and he sees as many ball games in person as he possibly can. "I am thoroughly enjoying my work at Major League Baseball," he told the New York Times. "I feel blessed that I've had several gratifying careers."

Further Reading

Sources

• Black Enterprise, July 1995.
• Ebony, June 1994, pp. 116-18; June 1995, p. 41.
• New York Times, March 6, 1994, p. NJ3; May 6, 1995, p. A27; September 17, 1995, p. NJ4.
• Sporting News, May 2, 1994, p. 9.
• Sports Illustrated, March 14, 1994, p. 51.

— Mark Kram

A major twentieth-century figure in the sociology of education, James S. Coleman was a social theorist and an empirical researcher with a prevailing interest in social problems in education - tackling issues that were sometimes unpopular. Richard Elmore describes Coleman as a "person who said what he thought and what the evidence said, regardless of whether he felt it was the right thing to say, or the socially acceptable thing to say, in other people's eyes. Even those who disagreed with him were always stimulated to think differently about the issues" (Schmidt, p. 11).

Career

Coleman was born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1926 and attended Purdue University, earning a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1949. Switching to sociology, he received his Ph.D. in 1955 from Columbia University, where his thesis, published in 1961, was a study of adolescent society. His major work was done as professor in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Sociology (1960 - 1972) and at the University of Chicago in Sociology and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) as a research director (1956 - 1959 and 1973 - 1995). He published more than thirty books and many articles. Besides being president of the American Sociological Association (1993 - 1997), he worked on the creation of the National Educational Longitudinal Study database, which he used extensively in his research.

Coleman made many important contributions to the sociology of education. First, in the mid-1960s, the so-called Coleman Report (1966) examined the effects of differentiated resources on student achievement, with the intention of showing that children attending impoverished schools (a disproportionate number of whom were African American) would perform badly. Second, in the 1970s, he analyzed the effects of forced racial integration (busing) on "white flight," becoming an advocate of school choice for impoverished families. Third, in the 1980s, he explored (with Sally Kilgore and Thomas Hoffer) the differential achievement of poor children attending private, Catholic, and public schools. Before his death in 1995, he treated schools as "output-driven systems," becoming a critic of the popular "portfolio analysis," which he believed produced inadequate measures of student performance and weakened incentives for teachers to improve their performance.

Contributions and Controversies

In 1964 Congress ordered the U.S. Commissioner of Education to investigate "the lack of availability of equal education opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin." The Coleman Report, the result of a national study of 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers, and 4,000 public schools, attempted to relate family background (including race and socioeconomic status) and school equity variables (including the integration of white and African-American children) to students' test results and their attitudes toward attending higher education.

Coleman found, surprisingly, that students' test outcomes were unrelated to the usual characteristics of schools (e.g., the quality of school facilities, programs, and teachers). Instead, the improvement in academic results among minority children was significantly linked to the quality of the student body - as measured by the proportion of students with encyclopedias in their home and the proportion with high aspirations. He wrote, "These minority children have a serious educational deficiency at the start of school, which is obviously not a result of school; and they have an even more serious deficiency at the end of school, which is obviously in part a result of [a segregated] school" (1966, p. 22). Racial integration was, according to this study, the key social factor in improving student outcomes.

As for the policy effects of Coleman's research, Hallinan noted in 2000 that the findings of the landmark study "were among the most influential factors leading to the desegregation of the American public school system" (p. 76). Nevertheless, the study's heavy emphasis on the effects of family background on children's education lies in sharp contrast to prevailing opinion. Critics (e.g., Adam Gamoran, Walter Secada, and Cora Marrett in 2000), while admitting the significance of the Coleman Report, reproached it as "the most spectacular failure to connect the collective with the individual in an educational setting. Variation in school conditions [beyond racial integration] was largely unrelated to differences in student outcomes, as school-level effects were dwarfed by the powerful influence of home environment for student learning" (p. 37).

Although the Coleman Report was used extensively by integrationists, by the mid-1970s Coleman's research showed that forced busing of students for "racial balance" was actually compromising the education of bused students by the loss of middle-class (and largely white) students in urban schools. In a study of school choice, Coleman and colleagues (1977) explained that the equalizing effects of the common school are greatest when students from diverse backgrounds - who live in the same locality - attend school together. In his view, forced busing tends to "increase the gap in educational opportunity between those with money and those without" because affluent parents can "buy their way out" of bad schools either by moving to better neighborhoods, to the suburbs, or by enrolling offspring in a private school (p. 6).

Although the location of the school that students attend is largely determined by where they live, the same cannot be said for their parents' place of work. Coleman pointed out that technological and economic changes (e.g., access to automobiles, better commuter routes, and greater affluence) tend to make residential neighborhoods more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous.

Convinced that the quality of an educational experience is associated with the composition of the student body, Coleman asked whether parents, who could choose to live far from their place of employment, might also choose where their children attend school. He describes two methods for bringing about educational equality: court-imposed efforts to achieve racial balance (e.g., busing) and policies to remove economic restraints that decrease the ability of parents to make educational choices, by providing vouchers or through competition within the public school system (e.g., magnet schools, charter schools, and open enrollment/transfer plans). Coleman traced both approaches to the "egalitarian" impulse of achieving racial integration in schools, although he favored measures that expand rather than diminish parental options.

By the 1980s, Coleman (along with Kilgore and Hoffer, 1982a) analyzed the High School and Beyond (HSB) data set - the nation's largest longitudinal study of schools effects, involving 28,000 sample students attending 1,015 public and private schools. In 1980, sophomore and senior students from public and private high schools were tested in language arts, science, social studies, and mathematics. Using the data as a synthetic cohort, Coleman and colleagues found that Catholic schools upheld the "common school ideal"; that is, the effects of family background on achievement were lower in the Catholic schools. "Average" students were more likely to take rigorous academic courses, thereby producing better results. Thus, Catholic schools avoided the "stratifying" practices, in Coleman's words, of a "'public' school system that no longer integrates the various segments of the population of students, but appears no more egalitarian than private education, and considerably less egalitarian in outcome than the major portion of the private sector in America - the Catholic schools" (1982a, p. 196).

Social capital was defined by Coleman as "the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organization and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child or young person" (1990, p. 300). He thus found an empirical referent for his social theory, based on a largescale national survey: that the Catholic parish, which supported the parish school, united to improve the education of children: the corollary of the phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child." Coleman and Hoffer discovered that since Catholic high schools possessed more "social capital," their students tended to outperform public school pupils from similar backgrounds and neighborhoods. He further explained the importance of social cohesion that has diminished with social progress.

Primordial social organization has depended on a vast supply of social capital, on a normative structure which enforced obligations, guaranteed trustworthiness, induced efforts on behalf of others, and on behalf of the primordial corporate bodies themselves, and suppressed free riding. The social capital has been eroded, leaving many lacunas. Perhaps the most important area in which erosion has occurred is in the regeneration of society through the nurturing of the next generation [e.g., education]. (1990, p. 651)

Coleman's research managed to stir up considerable controversy when he applied his theories and methods to the field of educational sociology. The work Public and Private High Schools (1987) written with Hoffer was perceived to threaten the hegemony of public schools and to elevate the effectiveness of faith-based (Roman Catholic) schools in the authors' attempt to help inner-city students. Its release brought negative reactions from the more liberal, public school establishment, as well as many of the radical equalitarians who had supported his earlier research on school integration.And a number of researchers, such as Jay Noel in 1982 and Karl Alexander and Aaron Palls in 1985, attacked Coleman's study of differing achievement in Catholic and public high schools. J. Douglas Willms, for example, reanalyzed the High School and Beyond data set and published the results in 1985, having studied 21,772 public and Catholic school students and using longitudinal data (sophomores and seniors). He determined that "no pervasive Catholic-school effect," was present although "we cannot be certain that the tests were sensitive enough to detect differences between Catholic and public school effects on students' achievement" (p. 113).

Redefining American Education

Coleman's work shows a pattern in which the process of social progress depends, to a large extent, on the extension of rights, choice, and resources to disenfranchised groups. He argues that any new "allocation of rights" results not simply from new information but from a multistage process including: "information changes beliefs; the new beliefs show a conflict of rights; [and] the conflict of rights comes to be resolved by a change in one or the other right." (1990, p. 56)

For example, Coleman interpreted the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education court decision as vindicating the right of African-American parents not to have their children assigned to distant schools when schools attended by white children were closer. The findings from the Coleman Report suggested that children from poor backgrounds perform better academically when they attend school with children from more affluent families. In this case, African-American children benefit when they are bused to distant (integrated) schools. Thus, new information "brought into conflict the right to equal educational opportunity and the right of parents not to have their children assigned to a distant school on the basis of an arbitrary ground such as race" (Coleman et al. 1966, p. 56). Coleman thought a final resolution to the busing and integration issue had yet to occur.

Toward the end of his life, Coleman asked how educational systems might be more accountable, especially when evaluating students' academic achievement. In an essay published posthumously (1997), he advocated the principle of "output-driven" systems "in which the rewards and punishments for performance in productive activity come from the recipient of the product" (p. 25). He noted that educators sought alternatives to standardized testing, especially avoiding multiple-choice tests, for both good reasons (because there are more accurate methods of assessment) and bad reasons (such as the supposed stigma connected with poor scores or grades).

For instance, Coleman examined the increasingly popular method of alternative performance assessment, the use of portfolios. He contended that portfolio analysis, based on the idea that academic achievement is analogous to artistic or athletic performance, is attractive to many educators. In Coleman's judgment, however, the use of portfolios was subjective in nature, lacking in external standards, determined by teachers' vested interests, and without a stimulus for improvement. Coleman objected to such "soft" measures, stating that "the strongest drive toward performance assessment comes from the leveling impulse: i.e., from the aim of eliminating comparative evaluation in schools" (1997, p. 37).

Contribution to Education

Thus, in his last publications, as in his earlier ones, Coleman grounded his theoretical ideas in rigorous empirical data and an insistence on being able to measure academic results. Portfolios were to Coleman just another mushy example of educational predeterminism, rather than realistic, hard-nosed, data-based outcomes. To Coleman, nothing in social life was easy. For as he explained, "the threat [portfolios] pose is not inherent in performance assessment, but lies in the ease with which performance assessment can be made compatible with reduced performance levels by those who would eliminate competition in schools" (1997, p. 37). Even in death, Coleman managed to capture attention and stir controversy.

Bibliography

Alexander, Karl L., and Pallas, Aaron M. 1985. "School Sector and Cognitive Performance: What Is a Little a Little?" Sociology of Education 58:115 - 128.

Coleman, James S. 1961. The Adolescent Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Coleman, James S. 1990. Equality and Achievement in Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Coleman, James S., and Hoffer, Thomas. 1987. Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities. New York: Basic Books.

Coleman, James S.; Hoffer, Thomas; and Kilgore, Sally. 1982a. "Achievement and Segregation in Secondary Schools: A Further Look at Public and Private School Differences." Sociology of Education 55:162 - 182.

Coleman, James S.; Hoffer, Thomas; and Kilgore, Sally. 1982b. High School Achievement: Public, Catholic and Private Schools Compared. New York: Basic Books.

Coleman, James S., et al. 1966. Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Coleman, James S., et al. 1977. Parents, Teachers, and Children: Prospects for Choice in American Education. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

Coleman, James S., et al. 1997. Redesigning American Education. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Cooper, Bruce S. 1995. "In Memoriam: Tribute to James S. Coleman: The Man and His Research." Journal of Research on Christian Education 4 (2):151 - 156.

Gamoran, Adam; Secada, Walter G.; and Marrett, Cora B. 2000. "The Organizational Context of Teaching and Learning." In Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. Maureen T. Hallinan. New York: Kluwer.

Hallinan, Maureen T. 2000. "On the Linkages between Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and Sociology of Education." In Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. Maureen T. Hallinan. New York: Kluwer.

Noell, Jay. 1982. "Public and Catholic Schools: A Reanalysis of 'Public and Private Schools."' Sociology of Education 55:123 - 132.

Schmidt, Peter. 1995. "James S. Coleman, Author of Landmark Education Studies, Dies." Education Week April 5:11 - 12.

Willms, J. Douglas. 1985. "Catholic-School Effects on Academic Achievement: New Evidence from the High School and Beyond Follow-Up Study." Sociology of Education 58 (2):98 - 114.

— BRUCE S. COOPER, TIMOTHY S. VALENTINE

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (December 2008)

James Samuel Coleman
Born	May 12, 1926 Bedford, Indiana
Died	March 25, 1995 Chicago
Nationality	American
Fields	sociological theorist
Alma mater	Columbia University
Doctoral advisor	Paul Lazarsfeld

James Samuel Coleman (b. May 12, 1926, Bedford, Indiana - d. March 25, 1995, Chicago) was an American sociological theorist who studied the sociology of education, public policy, and was one of the earliest users of the term "social capital". His Foundations of Social Theory stands as one of the most important sociological contributions of the late-20th century.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Coleman Report 4 Legacy 5 Selected works 6 Notes 7 See also 8 External links

Early life

The son of James and Maurine Coleman, he spent his early childhood in Bedford, Indiana and then moved to Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating in 1944, he enrolled to a small school in Virginia but left to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After he was discharged, he transferred to Purdue University. Coleman received his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 1949, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955, where he came under the influence of Paul Lazarsfeld.

Career

Coleman achieved renown with two studies on problem solving: An Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and Mathematics of Collective Action (1973). He taught at Stanford University and then at the University of Chicago. In 1959 he moved to Johns Hopkins University where he taught until 1973 before returning to Chicago,^[1] where he then directed the National Opinion Research Center. In 1991 Coleman was elected President of the American Sociological Association.

Coleman Report

Coleman is widely cited in the field of sociology of education. In the 1960s, he and several other scholars were commissioned to write a report on educational equality in the U.S. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than 150,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over 700 pages. That 1966 report — titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity" (or often simply called the "Coleman Report") — fueled debate about "school effects" that has continued since.^[1][2] The report was commonly presented as evidence, or an argument, that school funding has little effect on student achievement. A more precise reading of the Coleman Report is that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending).^[2] Another controversial finding of the Coleman Report was that, on average, black schools were funded on a nearly equal basis by the 1960s. This was probably because many Southern states vastly raised their spending on black schools in the 1950s, in the hopes of avoiding compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education decision.^{[citation needed]}

This research also suggested that socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially-mixed classrooms. This was a catalyst for the implementation of desegregation busing systems, ferrying black students to integrated schools. Following up on this, in 1975 Coleman published the results of further research, this time into the effects of school bussing systems intended to bring lower-class black students into higher-class mixed race schools. His conclusion was that white parents moved their children out of such schools in large numbers; this is known as "white flight". His 1966 article had explained that black students would only benefit from integrated schooling if there was a majority of white students in the classroom; the mass bussing system had failed.

Coleman's findings regarding "white flight" were not well received in some quarters, particularly among some members of the American Sociological Association. In response, efforts sprang up during the mid 70s to revoke his ASA membership. ^[3] Coleman remained a member and ironically twenty years later became the ASA's president.

Legacy

Coleman was a pioneer in the construction of mathematical models in sociology with his book, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964). His later treatise, Foundations of Social Theory (1990), made major contributions toward a more rigorous form of theorizing in sociology based on rational choice.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout his career, Coleman wrote more than thirty books and published numerous articles. He also created an educational corporation that developed and marketed "mental games" aimed at improving the abilities of disadvantaged students. A devoutly honest scholar, Coleman made it a practice to send his most controversial research findings "to his worst critics" prior to their publication, calling this "the best way to ensure validity."^[4]

At the time of his death, he was engaged in a long-term study titled "The High School and Beyond," which examined the lives and careers of 75,000 people who had been high school juniors and seniors in 1980.

Selected works

• Union Democracy (1956, with Seymour Martin Lipset)
• The Adolescent Society (1961)
• Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964)
• Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966)
• Youth: Transition to Adulthood (1973)
• High School Achievement (1982)
• Individual Interests and Collective Action (1986)
• Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action, article in American Journal of Sociology 91: 1309-1335 (1986).
• Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, article in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, Supplement: Organizations and Institutions: Sociological and Economic Approaches to the Analysis of Social Structure, pp. S95-S120 (1988).
• Foundations of Social Theory (1990)
• Redesigning American Education (1997, with Barbara Schneider, Stephen Plank, Kathryn S. Schiller, Roger Shouse, & Huayin Wang)

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Kiviat, Barbara J. (2000) "The Social Side of Schooling" Johns Hopkins Magazine April 2000, accessed 30 December 2008
2. ^ ^{a b} Hanushek, Eric A. (1998) "Conclusions and Controversies about the Effectiveness of School Resources" Economic Policy Review Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 4(1): pp. 11-27, accessed 30 December 2008
3. ^ http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/the-shunning-of-james-coleman/
4. ^ Editor's personal conversation with James S. Coleman

See also

• Mathematical sociology
• Rational Choice Theory

External links

• Obituary in the University of Chicago Chronicle
• American National Biography Online
• Photo of James Coleman

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