Education Next – Greg Toppo
“In 1959, six years before he authored the study that would remake America’s segregated public schools, James S. Coleman found himself face to face with a very different foe: the inscrutable desires, evolving tastes, and secret motivations of the post–World War II American teenager. At the time, Coleman was head of Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Social Relations (later renamed the Department of Sociology). He had just spent two years studying the “climate of values” at several midwestern high schools, interviewing students about their academic lives, their social lives, school culture, and their rapidly evolving teen culture. Deep within the data, he found what he considered the root of the underachievement crisis in American high schools: a management structure that misunderstood teenagers and fundamentally misused student incentives.”(more)