Problems in Making Policy Inferences from the Coleman Report. Discussion Papers.

The analytical part of the Coleman report has such serious methodological shortcomings that it offers little guidance for policy decisions. The specification of the theoretical model is inadequate, and without the theoretical framework to provide order, and a rationale for the large number of variables, there is no way to interpret the statistical results. Even in those instances where the Coleman Report makes clear the justification for the use of a variable in the regression model, the criterion used to assess the statistical performance of the variable is inappropriate. In order to suggest a more meaningful approach to the problem of measuring determinants of educational achievement for policy purposes, the role of a variable in affecting objectives must--and can--be interpretable in the context of a proper model; further, when such a model is in the form of a regression equation, an appropriately scaled regression coefficient is the most useful statistic to measure the importance of the variable for the purposes of policy action. (JM)