Letters

To the Editor:

In The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (1994), M. Stanton Evans disputes the suggestion that James Coleman’s mind was altered on busing solely because of white flight (72–73), as stated in your special section “Equality of Educational Opportunity at Fifty: Coleman’s Report and His Legacy” (Winter 2016, vol. 29, no. 4). Instead, according to Evans, the Coleman Report favored full-scale social engineering, fuller than even busing could provide, in its suggestion that “a more intensive reconstruction of the child’s social environmentthan that provided by school integration is necessary to remove the handicap of a poor family background. It is such reconstruction that is important—whether it is provided through other children, through tutorial programs, through artificial environments created by computer consoles” (emphasis added). Thus: “For those children whose family and neighborhood