Parenting & Family Quote by James S. Coleman

Coleman is slipping a moral indictment into what reads like a clean, technocratic metric. “Successful” isn’t about test scores, pep rallies, or even college admissions rates; it’s a single brutal yardstick: does schooling weaken the grip of class background on what a child can become? The line’s power comes from how it redefines failure. A school can be orderly, well-funded, and proudly “high-performing,” yet still be socially unsuccessful if it mostly converts inherited advantage into institutional proof that advantage was “earned.”

The subtext is a warning about how easily education becomes a laundering system for inequality. By framing “dependence” as the problem, Coleman points to the machinery that quietly ties opportunity to zip code: tracking, differential expectations, access to advanced courses, informal networks, parental clout, and the way “merit” often mirrors resources. He’s also challenging the comforting American story that schools are the great equalizer by default. They only earn that title when they actively disrupt the pipeline from origin to outcome.

Context matters: Coleman’s name is inseparable from the Coleman Report (1966), which detonated the assumption that schools alone determine achievement and highlighted how family background and peer composition shape outcomes. Read with that history, the quote functions like a corrective to both naive school reformers and cynical determinists. Schools may not control everything, but they still have a specific civic job: to make birth matter less. Anything short of that is success in name only.