In the early 1960s, Coleman developed six games and tested them in Baltimore schools. Teachers, he would later write, “came to share our enthusiasm for this reconstruction of the learning environment.” But he admitted that his vision was “not realized,” even though a handful of fellow researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere piloted academic games with great success.
Actually, Coleman was deep into his work on games when he got the call to pursue the wide-ranging examination of school conditions and achievement that would eventually become “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” or EEO, more popularly known as the Coleman Report. He later recalled that he saw working on the massive EEO survey as “a detour in my research direction,” though he understood its importance.
The report’s results, released in 1966, popularized the idea that a student’s home life and family background mattered more than what happened at school.
Most significantly, Coleman asserted that disadvantaged black students would do better academically if they attended schools in which the majority of their classmates were white.
The Coleman Report would change American schooling forever, providing the theoretical basis for court-ordered busing plans, which gave rise to widespread, unintended “white flight” to suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. In a follow-up study nearly a decade after the release of EEO, Coleman concluded that busing had become an empty exercise.
Even as school systems redrew their boundaries, fired black teachers and principals, and tore up foundational enrollment structures to comply with desegregation orders, they largely ignored Coleman’s earlier research on motivation and academic achievement, which found that competition “has a magic ability to create a strong group goal.”
Looking back 25 years later, Coleman himself would note that the Coleman Report’s focus on administrative issues had largely ignored what he had long considered key: the necessity of talking to students about the social systems of schools and how they actually felt, day to day, going to school. As a result, he concluded, the report “may have missed the most important differences between the school environments in which black and white children found themselves.” Had his seminal work focused on both the administrative problems and the social systems of school, Coleman later wrote, “our knowledge of how to overcome problems of racial segregation would be far more advanced than it is.” The result, he said, might have been more sturdily integrated schools without the racial backlash.
The irony of Coleman’s earlier findings is that, more than a half century later, students are, to no one’s surprise, still “person-oriented,” focusing more closely on their peers than on nearly anything adults ask them to consider. And schools still routinely use sports, games, social clubs, and band competitions, among other devices, to get students excited about coming to school.
In fact, these activities are often the only ones that keep kids there long enough to graduate. Over the past few decades, many schools have embraced national and even international academic competitions such as the National Geographic Bee, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, MATHCOUNTS, National History Day, and Odyssey of the Mind, among others. But even though several of these competitions boast thousands or even millions of participants—the spelling bee claims that upward of 10 million children participate each year—schools have rarely used academic competition to improve instruction for more than just a few top students, in essence replicating the same old academic bell curve. Coleman would not be pleased.
Shawn Young, founder of Classcraft, uses the game in his grade 11 physics class. Classcraft is a peer-driven classroom learning and management system that resembles a low-tech, sword-and-sorcery video game.
