Parenting & Family Quote by James S. Coleman

Coleman is smuggling a civil-rights argument into the dry machinery of school finance. The sentence reads like policy plumbing, but its target is the unwritten architecture of American inequality: district lines that double as class and racial borders. By framing access as an "entitlement", he borrows the moral force of rights language while keeping the proposal technocratic enough to sound inevitable. This is not a plea for better inner-city schools alone; it's an assault on the premise that a child is educationally fated by their zip code.

The key move is "metropolitan area outside his own district". Coleman is pointing past the city to the ring of opportunity that suburbs often hoard through zoning, property taxes, and political fragmentation. In the era after Brown v. Board, when desegregation battles were increasingly about metropolitan realities rather than formally segregated statutes, Coleman recognized that inequality had learned to hide inside "local control". His solution treats mobility as leverage: let families exit, and districts feel the consequences.

"Per pupil funds going with him" is both incentive and threat. It turns the child into a budgetary signal, rewarding schools that attract students and punishing those that rely on captive enrollment. Subtext: persuasion by market dynamics, not just court orders or moral exhortation. It's also a wager on integration by design rather than integration by coercion - a voluntary-seeming mechanism that still forces suburban systems to confront who they are willing to serve.

Coleman's broader legacy - especially the Coleman Report's insistence that peers and social context matter - hovers behind this. If environment shapes outcomes, then access to different environments becomes the policy battleground.