In his famous lecture/essay, “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber called on academic teachers to supply inconvenient facts, unbequeme Tatsachen, that might challenge partisan opinion—including their own. Of course, that critical spirit is essential not just to teaching but to all scholarship. Beware of confirmation bias: consider where you might go wrong. Easy to say, hard to do—and often unpleasant.
American sociology is not known for heeding Weber’s message, comfortably ensconced as it is on the left side of the political spectrum, reliably purveying an image of America as a racist and capitalist den of injustice. When you are committed to a sacred project, inconvenient facts are more than awkward.
But occasionally, sociology does supply such facts. Yet even then, partisan opinion resists. The inconvenient fact about inconvenient facts is that they rarely budge political faith.
The Coleman legacy
Case in point is the Coleman report of 1966, Equality of Educational Opportunity. It was based on a huge survey of schools, students, and administrators, conducted at Congress’ request and led by sociologist James Coleman.
No doubt legislators and reformers hoped that it would show big quality gaps between black and white schools that would explain big academic gaps between blacks and whites. Equalize the inputs and you’d equalize the output, with racial harmony to follow: the greatest thing in the Great Society.
Congress did not ask for discomforting facts—does it ever?—but it got several.
Here are some big ones:
About gaps across schools: school resources and facilities turned out not to differ all that much by race. Implication: smallish resource gaps can’t account for big performance gaps.
About the impact of school differences: school-to-school variations in achievement were much smaller than individual variation within schools. Implication: “most of the variation in achievement could not possibly be accounted for by school differences” or in other words, “variations in school quality are not highly related to variations in achievement of pupils” (296-7).
About the relative role of school vs. background: students’ backgrounds drove outcomes much more than schools themselves. Conclusion: “schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and . . . this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school” (325).
About the sheer size of black-white gaps: minority students started with lower scores in first grade and the gap widened by 12th grade: “minority pupils’ scores are as much as one standard deviation below the majority pupils’ scores in the 1st grade” and 12th-grade tests showed that “in every case, the minority scores are farther below the majority than are the 1st-graders”—by over three grade levels (21).
Thus, the report squashed lots of empirical assumptions, causal speculations, and political hopes.
Inconvenience affirmed
Rudely inconvenienced, liberal reformers took issue with Coleman’s sampling, analysis, and interpretation. But subsequent work mostly confirmed the report’s message. With apologies for repetitiveness, which makes a point, here are some examples:
In 1969, reporter-turned-social scientist Christopher Jencks noted in The New York Times, after reanalyzing the data with a high-powered Harvard group, that Coleman had understated the case:
. . . the net effect of the report’s various errors was to under-estimate the importance of family background and over-estimate the importance of school in determining achievement” [and] [v]ariations in schools’ fiscal and human resources have very little effect on student achievement—probably even less than the Coleman Report originally implied.
In good Weberian fashion, Jencks accentuated the persistence of the black-white gap (with Meredith Phillips) in 1998: though it had narrowed a bit,
. . . the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on almost every standardized test,” [and as before,] “schools cannot be the main reason for the black-white test score gap, because it appears before children enter school and persists even when black and white children attend the same schools.
In 2017, another prominent sociologist of education, Stephen Morgan (with Sol Bee Jung), confirmed the Coleman lesson with excellent fresh data from a representative national sample, including measures at different points in time:
The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry . . . Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.
With his equally distinguished Johns Hopkins colleague Karl Alexander, Morgan also reaffirmed the racial pattern of 1966 for the Baltimore area they studied:
. . . the broad pattern across Baltimore is simple. Racial segregation remains dramatic, and historic patterns of family disadvantage, which have changed too little across the decades, convert this segregation into a clear geography of varied school performance. Elementary schools situated in affluent areas test well, but performance falls off steadily and regularly as the local prevalence of family disadvantage increases. Large portions of Baltimore City are deserts of educational performance, dotted with too few oases of distinction.
Summarizing yet more research, Harvard education prof Heather Hill concluded,
. . . even with better measurement techniques, more complete datasets, and more sophisticated modeling techniques, dozens of studies conducted through the late 1990s failed to consistently link tangible school inputs to student test scores . . . once controlled for family background and students’ previous-year test scores, allowing analysts to estimate how the resources influenced student test score gains, the relationship typically disappeared.
She quotes Stanford economist Eric Hanushek’s pithy summary of the summaries:
You can’t just write a bigger check to each school and expect to get much out of it, because there’s no evidence, on average, that schools will find good ways to use that money.
She also affirms that, as noted by Coleman and Jencks, pre-schooling differences are large:
Federal data collected in 2010 . . . showed the average black child roughly one-half of a standard deviation behind the average white child in mathematics at kindergarten entry, and one-third of a standard deviation behind in reading.
In a 2025 Substack post, leftist education scholar Freddie DeBoer sums up one lesson to be drawn from the consistently inconvenient facts under the title “Education Doesn’t Work”:
despite the widespread assumption that any student can be educated to any level of performance, in reality students demonstrate a certain level of overall academic ability and gravitate to that level of ability throughout their academic lives, with remarkable fidelity at the population level. Decades of [all sorts of evidence] . . . ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement.
The distribution of cognitive skill is what it is, says DeBoer. He then wades into territory the sociologists vaguely describe as “family background” or “conditions of life”: the consistency of the distribution, in the face of “immense efforts” to change it, strongly suggests “some individual attribute that constitutes an inherent or innate academic potential.” Thus, there will always be a “predictable and unfixable portion of students who struggle,” causing gaps that are “the product of forces that teachers can’t possibly change.” If so, education “doesn’t work” because it can’t.
Facts about facts
Coleman and many after him showed schools and resources don’t close racial gaps. Here, at least, sociology did its Weberian job.
What to do? Not much, as it turns out. Inconveniently for partisans of Weberian rationality, mere facts rarely sway partisans (or the public). That is metafact #1.
Various strategies served to neutralize Colemanian inconvenience. There are at least three types:
Ignorance, more or less deliberate. When inconvenient facts lurk, close your eyes and ears. In practice, the body politic did not let them derail the flow of politically convenient waste. Example: in several states, courts ordered major school spending to remedy presumed “inequities” and achieve “adequate” education for all—without taking the key facts into account, but with predictable results. For example, under a court mandate New Jersey spent some $40 billion after 1997 to equalize resources across districts. A 2012 state assessment dryly notes, in the spirit of Coleman, that the “logical argument: close the spending gap and the achievement gap will follow . . . won in the courts but not in the classroom.” The data show a distressing but not surprising picture:
. . . despite “adequate” (some might argue, more than adequate) funding, the achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students [and between racial groups] persists and, in some instances, has widened. (emphasis added)
Undeterred, the report sugggests that the problem may not be how much but how well New Jersey spent its money. If only the state were smarter, that would do the trick. Believers don’t let mere facts dispel faith.
Denial. As Danish blogger Emil Kirkegaard notes, “decades were spent” trying to refute Coleman. Though he acknowledges that school variables tend to account for about 10% of variation in achievement scores, he is unimpressed with recent studies purporting to show anti-Coleman effects after all. One study of finance reforms’ impact on scores produced “essentially a bunch of 0 findings”; perhaps the most positive study finds a very modest .03 standard deviation shift in outcomes for every $1,000/student spent; and an analysis of large-scale class-size reforms in Tennessee finds some modest short-term effects but only a 1.8% increase in college attendance and no (or negative) adult income benefits. Reviewing still more anti-Coleman studies, his fellow blogger Alden Whitfeld reaches a similar conclusion:
Cross-sectional analyses of school funding and test scores show very low correlations. A meta-analysis of randomized control trials found that the weighted average effect size was just 0.04, meaning that being treated with the intervention predicted only a 0.04 SD increase in your score on an academic achievement test. And, finally, a meta-analysis of policy-induced funding increases found an effect size equivalent to a correlation of just 0.11. All of these findings converge on one fact: school funding has very little influence on achievement. This is assuming, of course, that gains on test scores reflect anything real—my guess is that they do not, and that the true effect is zero.
Circumvention. For people uncomfortable with ignorance and denial, this is a plausible alternative. In 1969, Jencks already suggested one suitable leftist way around the troublesome fact of pointless spending: go bigger. “If improved student achievement is our goal,” he wrote, “the Coleman Report’s implication is obvious: we must alter the whole social system rather than just tinker with the schools.” Just alter the system, and poof go the gaps. Right?
From a conservative point of view, inconvenient facts in the Coleman tradition are pretty convenient: they tend to deflate progressive assumptions and confirm conservative biases. The world is complicated. It does not abide by fervent progressive hopes. The best-laid governmental plans run aground. Metafact #2: nothing works!
Or might there be an unbequeme Tatsache to challenge that?