Coleman on the Griddle

Few professors have caused as much furor as did James S. Coleman when he suggested last April that court-ordered busing was a failure. He claimed that a new study of his showed school desegregation often drove white children out of city schools, thus causing more segregation. The presumption was, of course, a familiar one in parlor debates on the subject. But it was major news that the highly respected University of Chicago sociologist seemed to have verified it. After all, ten years ago, at 39, Coleman had become a sort of godfather to busing when he released a study showing that disadvantaged children do better in schools with children from more privileged backgrounds.

His new "white flight" thesis was immediately attacked and generated numerous requests for the data on which his conclusions were based. He did not release the new study for months, but he did give many interviews and also filed an affidavit in federal court bolstering an antibusing appeal in strife-torn Boston.

Eventually he did release his data, and other researchers began doing their own investigations into the 19 large cities surveyed by Coleman. There had been desegregation in each of them, they discovered, but no court-ordered busing or forced integration of any kind during the 1968-70 period for which Coleman had collected his figures. The sociologist then conceded that his publicly stated opinions attacking busing had gone beyond the data he had collected.

None of his critics disputed the fact that white flight had occurred in many large cities, but they pointed out that it had been going on for at least a decade. White flight, in fact, often preceded school desegregation, helping to bring about desegregated classrooms: when whites begin to leave an all-white neighborhood and blacks move in, the school naturally becomes desegregated.

In July Coleman presented a new analysis, studying what happened in each given year from 1968 to 1973, rather than over a period of years. His new report admitted that the average white-loss rate in the earlier study obscured "very different loss rates in different cities." Still a third paper was issued in August, in which Coleman noted that white loss "proceeds at a relatively rapid rate with or without desegregation" in cities with a high proportion of blacks and predominantly white suburbs. Indeed, each of Coleman's successive analyses minimized the effect of desegregation on "white flight." Last December Coleman presented yet another new version of his study to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, conceding that "what is not clear is whether desegregation itself induces an increased movement of whites from the desegregated districts."

Vigorous Defense. This is precisely what many of his critics had been saying. Meanwhile, a review of his findings was written for the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review by Harvard's Thomas F. Pettigrew and Michigan State's Robert L. Green, both noted psychologists. The authors charged that Coleman never interviewed a single white parent about why he may be leaving the city, and they found inadequate the research model of his original 19 inner-city districts and the two larger urban school districts in his subsequent studies. Perhaps the psychologists' strongest point is that three other studies, including two using virtually the same data base as Coleman's, reached different conclusions.

Coleman wrote a rebuttal to Pettigrew and Green that will appear in the next issue of the Harvard Educational Review. He vigorously defended his choice of cities but failed to address other criticisms of his study and forecasts, such as his failure to consider certain racial demographic changes.

Last week Coleman took his antibusing case to the public again when he addressed a joint session of the Massachusetts legislature, a predominantly antibusing body. Government policies can be decisive in integration, he said, "but only if the policies recognize that they require the support and implementation by ordinary families of all racial groups." To that end he offered a plan that may achieve partial desegregation, similar to one he suggested last fall (TIME, Nov. 10). All schools in the city--which should include some improved "magnet" schools--as well as those in the surrounding suburbs, he said, should be required to accept as much as 15% of their student body from outside their own districts. The plan would involve busing only children who wanted to be bused, yet Coleman lost some of his supporters in the legislature. Not South Boston's vociferous opponent of forced busing, Councilwoman Louise Day Hicks, however. For her own reasons, she liked the idea of transferring some of the burden outside the city limits. If this plan went into effect, she said, "I think you would hear them screaming in the suburbs" --meaning, presumably, augmenting the chorus against all forced busing.

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