The Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity

July 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Equality of Educational Opportunity (hereafter EEO), commonly known as the Coleman Report after the lead investigator of the research team, James S. Coleman (Coleman et al. 1966). The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years Later celebrates the occasion. To set the stage for the papers that follow, we take a brief look in this introduction back to the origins of EEO in the 1960s and its immediate impact on scholarship and the policy debate. But this issue, in intent and execution, is decidedly forwardlooking. Our contributors include some of the nation’s leading authorities on issues at the intersection of schooling, race, and social inequality. They appraise EEO’s lasting value, the continuing relevance of the issues it addressed, and the ways in which its research approach has stood the test of time, but their larger contribution is to forge, by way of example, a recast equality of educational opportunity research agenda appropriate to twentyfirstcentury America. As a bridge between then and now, we conclude our introduction with an overview of educational inequality as it now stands, through the lens of the EEO report. That exercise centers on conditions in Baltimore City, Coleman’s home base when leading the EEO team.