Hunt, M. (1985). "The dilemma in the classroom: A cross-sectional survey measures the effects of segregated schooling," in Profiles of Social Research: The Scientific Study of Human Interactions. New York: Russell Sage,51-97


This case, in which the educational practice being evaluated was segregated schooling, should serve as an introduction to the politics of evaluation. While reading note the different ways political pressures shape the origin, conduct and interpretation of the evaluation, and responses to its findings. And also note the ways that educational changes in educational practices can have unintended consequences because of on-going social change and politics. - pjt pjt

Ashley N. Smith
This article proved to be very interesting for many reasons and aspects. They things that inrigued me ranged from the historical context to the methods of research done by individuals. Some key things I took away from the article are below:

Carissa Baquiran, Spring 2009
In The Dilemma in the Classroom the author chronicles the important and foundational study headed by James S. Coleman. The research project was commissioned by the federal government to provide data that would help carry out the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The purpose of the survey was to measure the availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin.

The article discusses the impact of his survey in the desegregation of many of our nation’s schools, but along the way supplies a historical context of the research methods Coleman was working at the time as well as a the kind of political and ethical struggles Coleman and his researchers encountered by doing the study. Throughout the article the author poses issues and problems faced by social researcher such as:

This article was interesting to read both as a case study of how research informed policies which has impacted many of the histories and trajectories of our nation’s urban centers. Within the article, the author provides a history of modern research, a look into the Civil Rights Era and a glimpse into an iconic figure of social research from recent history.
Alyssa J. Hinkell, Spring 2009
Interesting…
- the historical context of the article- As a history teacher I am always interested in the ways people, ideas, and events shaped history and how we have gotten to where we are today
- the distinction between social research and “pure” research- I had made a comment during one our dialogue session about the conflict that I see between the two. Hunt describes the distinctions between the two and also, again, the history that shaped them.
- freewriting- Hunt states that Coleman used a lot of freewriting during the second “look” at his research in order to see connections that were not there before, etc.
- connection to archaeology- Coleman states that research is much “like an archaeological dig” because it consists of “long hours of tedium transformed by occasional high moments of exciting discovery” (64)
Puzzling…
- bias- I am wondering what kind of thinking or rethinking Coleman had to do in order to be an unbiased, fair reporter of information based on his strong personal views of the work. I think of the importance of the epicycles in the AR process. The epicyclical process of dialogue and reflection serves as a sort of checks and balance system for ourselves.
- the roles of the branches- Coleman believed that desegregation should be carried out by the legislative and executive branches, not the judicial. However, the role of the judicial branch is to enforce the laws created in the legislative branch...
Important to find out…
- policy research- I am wondering about the validity of this type of research if it is, as the article states, motivated by a specific view or perspective. Do people even from that perspective readily accept the findings of such a study? In what ways do people challenge the results? How is this type of research justified/accepted?
- survey research- Coleman had said that the “worst part of survey research” is asking people to participate in something that does not benefit them (62). I wonder what strategies researchers use to overcome this hurtle. Also, how does the use of such strategies impact the results?
- public policy- I am very interested in the shaping of public policy specifically as it pertains to education. This is something that I hope to explore more in the future and perhaps through another degree…

Diana Truong, April 14, 2009
This reading is a little more challenging for me to comprehend. It has mixtures of subjects such as sociology, politics and racial segregation which I have not fully grasped. I had learned some part of racial segregation in the past; especially the part where Hunt mentions about testing the black children on the “nice” doll and the “bad” doll. I actually watch the video with the class during my undergrad year in women’s studies major.
Even though there are so many issues in this reading, I find some part that is helpful and relate to action research such as two goals that can help to solve problems:
1. Understanding why things are as they are.
2. And learning how to solve practical problems.
What I understand in this reading is that when it comes to problems we have to be aware of why certain matters/ problems occur the way it is. And in the end we have to accept the fact and true real life of the problems as an individual not a whole. For instance, in this article mentions about separating the Black with the White, then mixed them together, and then do all kind of tests, surveys and reports to find out the problems but in the end, it is an individual problem of each child. Overall we should understand that solving problems are very difficult and certain things may work for others but not for all.


Jeff Craig - April 15, 2008
This article provides interesting insight into the political nature of applied social research and how politics can influence the motivations, methodologies, evaluations, interpretations, and usage of data. Social scientists seek practical solutions to society’s problems, and they are keenly aware that their work can have a profound impact on social policy and on the lives of millions of people. Social scientists need to – as best as they can – remain neutral and “value-free”, even while studying emotionally-charged problems that afflict society. Hunt mentions that in 1944, a Swedish scientist named Gunnar Mydral questioned why this should be so. He thought it was quite appropriate for social researchers to combine objective inquiry with a “morally-inspired search for remedies to social problems.”

Hunt tells the story of James Coleman, a sociologist from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, who played a central role in the enforcement of desegregation laws, ordered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act required that a study be completed to show the “extent of inequality of educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin ….” Coleman was charged with leading the project, which involved conducting a nationwide survey of school districts to gauge how well they were conforming to desegregation laws. From the start, Coleman was concerned with how the data would be used. Did the Justice Department simply want objective data or was it going to be used to punish districts that were disobeying the law. (The latter proved true; federal funds were withheld from districts that did not obey the laws.)

The survey produced a heavy backlash. Several cities and the entire state of Florida refused to participate in the study because they felt the questions were intrusive, insensitive, and that the results would be used to make comparisons between school districts. The lack of cooperation led to a mere 30% participation rate, which had potential to skew the data. To further complicate things, the results contradicted Coleman’s expectations: He found that the racial composition of a school was not the most influential factor in a child’s success. A child's performance, he found, was more closely tied with the socioeconomic status and educational background of his or her classmates. Further, Coleman found a positive correlation between the number of white students in a school and the academic performance of black children. This was the case regardless of a school’s "input" or resources. This angered anti-segregation activists because they were pushing soley for racial intergration and increased resources.

A sad and ironic by-product of court-ordered desegregation was that white families were fleeing cities and moving to the suburbs, leading to re-segregation on a broader scale than before. This would be known as “white flight.”

This case showed that social research findings are very political and are often “ignored, disputed, or tenuously interpreted. The obvious reason is that such knowledge threatens the position of dominant groups and lends strength to those they dominate.” It seems to me that Action Research doesn’t only require a great deal of research skills, but also the ability to anticipate and prepare for political influence and fallout. Should fallout occur because the data doesn’t reflect certain wishes or expectations, action researchers need to be prepared to build constituencies that will support the next steps.

Jacquelina Monteiro's Summary

There was an extreme about of information that was present in this article. Before this article I have a little background information on segration in certain areas and trying to get children in one neighborhood into another therefore you would not have all blacks and one white person in a specific school and vice versa. It was really nice knowing about this information and where the thought orginated from. I am also glad that they knew that this was a important issue in many cities and states and they actually took the time and the money to do something about it. It may or may not be an important issues in some states yet they may the funds available to take care of this specific issue.
In the beginning stages of deciding about what the cities and states were going to do about this specific isssue were very hetic. It was not fun and their were many conflicts about the final decision. It became so bad that certain families actually moved aware so they would not be a part of the delimma that they did not feel as if it was an issue. Little did those individuals know that moving was not going to make the issue go away. Now the minorities were and are actually given the chance to make their life better than the expectations of what the community had set out for them.

Andy Reyes--April 18
Food for thought gained from reading Hunt:
-The researcher's findings may not always be what the general public wants to hear. Certain people in power (politicians, think tanks, etc.) might find joy in derailing a researcher's sincere and genuine effort.
-It might help to "check in" with a "jury of one's peers" before taking a full plunge and sharing one's findings wholesale. (Coleman got flak from going "wholesale" and not consulting with peers first. Going slowly but surely might be a good approach to take.)
-It is difficult to make social research value-free. When we're talking about human beings and social causes, we inevitably expose values, biases, prejudices, and even ignorance.

Questions I still have:
-Are there any similar studies currently being conducted to evaluate the effects of desegregation?
-What has been the impact of the METCO program? (I currently have a former METCO student who claims she finished high school in a suburb, without having learned anything. Although she graduated from a good school in a Boston suburb, she doesn't feel that she got anything out of her H.S. experience.)
-Do racially diverse classrooms really produce "better students" than monoracial classrooms?
-I wonder (in 2008): What percentage of our HS students would prefer to be in racially mixed classrooms?

Andy Reyes--April 26
Additional info connected to the Hunt Reading

In Cultural Literacy (What Every American Needs to Know) by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (1987, Houghton MIfflin Company), Diane Ravitch traces the aftermath of the Coleman report, making the following observation:

One commentator wrote in the Harvard Educational Review,
"It is highly uncertain at this point what school policies, if any, can compensate for the inequalities in cognitive skills between rich and poor children that are apparent at the time they enter school." The same sentiment was expressed countless times by authors and policy makers as a demonstrated fact in the years after 1966...Whether students did well or poorly in schools seemed determined for the most part by their social background, and little, if at all, by anything that teachers and schools did. Consider the consequences of this conclusion: If schools were so ineffectual in affecting the educational outcomes of their students, it becomes difficult to argue on behalf of any given curriculum, requirement, or policy.

Hirsch states that "[t]he flaw in the current view is not that sociological observations are wrong (they have been reconfirmed many times), but that the inferences drawn from them are unwarranted. It is true that, under our present curricular arrangements, academic achievement is heavily determined by family background. But we cannot conclude from the present state of affairs that deprived children would be predestined to low achievement to low achievement under a different school curriculum. This consideration suggests that there has been an oversight in the conclusions from recent sociological observations. It has been silently assumed that our recently fragmented school curriculum is a permanent and necessary feature of our educational system."

Final note
Social research is not a foolproof process, it seems, even with the best of intentions. It seems easy enough to weave a tangled web, without even knowing it!

Marnie Jain
MY SUMMARY QUESTIONS (BEYOND THE SPECIFICS OF THE ARTICLE)
“Once the results of the researcher are made known, he researcher loses control of them; they become weapons in political debate, used or misused by various factions to serve their own purposes, often in ways the social scientist neither expected nor wanted.” (p. 44 Hunt)
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. Epictetus:
“It is only when scientists know clearly what they don’t know that they can intelligently explore the unknown.” (From the Hunt article, an interpretation by Hunt of Karl Popper’s comment that our ignorance grows with our knowledge).
It seems impossible to completely avoid unintended use of research; however, it raises two questions for me:
1. Is it possible to plan the research and the presentation of the research in such a way as to minimize that potential?
2. Why is it so bad that anyone have access to the research and results and the right to interpret and use it?

In my mind, this is not far removed from artists’ situations.
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.” Susan Sontag

It also reminds me of Robert Oppenheimer and his later involvement in preventing the misuse of atomic energy.

TIMELINE TO HELP ME SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE
1920’s 1930’s
Social research on relations between whites and blacks was done for better understanding rather than social change
1944
An American Dilemma - Gunnar Mydral
Cited a conflict of values in Americans between own prejudices and selfish interests and democratic moral precepts and ideals
1950
Study by black psychologist Kenneth Clark – in which black children chose white dolls over black dolls.
1954
Brown vs. Board of Education - landmark case in which the existing “separate but equal” practice of classroom segregation deprived black children of their rights.
1963
Coleman and family participate on CORE protest.
1963
March 1963 – march on Washington to highlight failure of Brown vs. Board of Education
1964
Civil Rights Act – which created mechanisms for enforcing desegregation such as withholding of federal funding from schools still practicing segregation.
*SECTION 402 of the Act sought to establish the extent of segregation by conducting a survey
1965
James Coleman asked to head 1.5 million dollar study* to show “the lack of availability of educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin.” As required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act
1965 (1966?)
“The Coleman Report” was published under the title Equality of Educational Opportunity.
1968
1969
Supreme Court decisions ordering immediate end to official Southern segregation.
1970
Nixon cites the Coleman Report to justify a conservative policy on spending for schools and a more liberal one on desegregation.
1970
Emergency School Act - Aid of $1.5 billon dollars to aid schools undergoing court-appointed desegregation (in the South) and to assist voluntary plans for integration in the North.
1971
SC decision finding that assigning children to schools by race to achieve integration and busing them to those assigned schools is constitutionally permissible.
1974
Coleman was asked to write a chapter for a book on urban education. He reanalyzed data and looked at additional data. He discovered that while busing and desegregation was working to some extent, there was a phenomenon occurring where school districts outside big cities were remaining
highly white-segregated”, which he attributed to “white flight”.
1975
Press conferences and a much media coverage, which attacked Coleman’s research methodology and pronounced him as a defector from the civil rights movement.
1975
The Urban Institute document called “Trends in School Segregation, 1968-1973” was published. It was referred to as the Second Coleman Report.
1975
The ASA Committee on Professional Ethics and the ASA Council considered taking action against Coleman, but soon other studies began to substantiate his findings.

ROADBLOCKS to the research:
Defining the term “inequality of educational opportunity”. Were they looking at input or output?
 They settled on looking at both.
In light of no apparent consequences (penalties) many southern and some non-southern school districts (ex. Las Angeles and Chicago) refused to participate. They cited that the survey was intrusive, might be later subpoenaed, etc.) In the end 30% of the selected schools did not participate.
 They added schools with comparable student compositions, but recognized the possible bias in the sample and the lack of full national representation.
Some of the results did contradicted expectations. They expected to see a difference in the quality of that the average black child and average white child are exposed to. But while there were some percent differences in equipment, there was largely not much difference.
 Coleman formed a new question, “What could account for the differences in outcome?” (Since the inputs showed no significance difference.)
There were too many possible variable, “each child’s experience was the result of a unique mixture of multiple influences over which the researchers exercised no control.
 He used “Regression analysis” – a way to mathematically isolate the effect of each factor when a mass of factors together produce a result. Unlike the scientific method where one can actually control factors and change only one variable at a time, he looked for commonalities among the group (such as number of siblings), then looked for further similarities, such as the same family income, and so on until only a single variable remains.
Interested parties were not pleased with the summary result, and the summary report was re-written three times, none but the original reporting the unbiased results.
 Coleman, though still unhappy with the final summary, accepted the third version, but mostly because the summary diverted the attention from the body of the research, which still showed what he had originally summarized, and so his study was to some degree intact.
Later Coleman’s re-analysis of data (he used regression analysis again) showed busing to have a negative impact on the large cities.
 He chose to public share his findings prior to sharing them with the academic community.

NOTES/QUESTIONS:
∑ Twice it mentioned Coleman working in isolation. The first was when he did his initial brainstorming for the survey. “Coleman’s first order of business was planning. In art, this consisted of solo brainstorming…”The second was when he was sequestered in a motel and phoned in data runs, studied the results (himself) and then formed his next question. “It was a kind of dialogue with myself…it was a very solitary process.”
∑ Is it possible that sociological research can be value free?
∑ “I like it when my ideas have power, but not when I do.” Coleman
∑ BASIC vs. APPLIED research
∑ AIM of social sciences was to find out “Is this really so? Why is it so?” AIM became “Is it right that it is so? What should we do about it?”
∑ Social research deals with subjective reality while research of the natural science is more objective.

∑ Social science (as opposed to purely scientific research) is likely to meet with contradiction and argument. Maybe this goes back to the discomfort when social research threatens the status quo.
∑ The role of social scientists: Should they be both advocate and researcher?
∑ “Coleman, however, had violated the unwritten professional code by announcing his findings at a public forum before offering them to his colleagues for their study and criticism.”
∑ Max Weber & William Graham Sumner
∑ Argued for value –free sociological research, claiming that values “would distort and invalidate their findings.”
∑ Alfred Schutz
∑ Claimed “Social science could not and should not be value-free because the essence of social behavior is what it means to people.”
∑ Augustan Comte
∑ (founder of sociology) maintained that social science could be exact and objective and social scientists, “unchallenged leaders of society”.