Fresh Look at Coleman Data Yields Different Conclusions

What would the landmark Coleman Report show if the numbers were reanalyzed today using more sophisticated statistical techniques? According to Geoffrey D. Borman, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the results would be markedly different.

Mr. Borman, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, educational policy studies, and educational psychology, got the idea to reanalyze the report’s findings in the mid-1990s, when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. James S. Coleman, the famed author of the 1966 report, was on the university’s faculty before his death in 1995, and Mr. Borman had been a student in the last class he taught there.

The idea continued to haunt the young researcher a few years later, when he began work as an associate research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, at Johns...