“Sense of Fate Control” and Community Control of the Schools

Abstract

This study suggests that the sense of fate-control findings of the Coleman Report are irrelevant to the debate over community control of the schools. The sense of fate-control findings appear to be based on an erroneous conceptualization of beliefs about fate-control and on a partly invalid measure. The attitude positively related to school achievement among black students appears to be academic self-concept, not beliefs about fate-control.

Let me make an important limitation of this study clear. The students in this study were eleventh and twelfth graders, while the Coleman Report found the strongest relationship between a sense of fate-control and school achievement among black ninth graders. It may be that black ninth graders hold the type of internal-external attitude that the Coleman Report suggests, that the Sense of Fate-Control Scale validly measures it, and that it indeed depresses school effort and achievement. Such students may tend to drop out of school before the later grades, so these processes would not be evident in this study.

It is customary to call for more research to explore such a possibility, but I cannot recommend what I believe would be wasted effort. My studies of sense of fate-control and school achievement among white ninth and tenth graders have led to similar conclusions (Kleinfeld, 1970), and the Coleman Report suggested that a low sense of fate-control might depress achievement efforts among disadvantaged white students through similar processes.

The sense of fate-control and school achievement issue appears to be a blind alley. This study suggests that research effort could be more profitably directed toward exploring Katz' (1969) provocative finding that black students hold unrealistically low estimates of their ability and also toward experiments designed to increase academic self-concept in black students and determine effects on achievement. One of the unfortunate results of the Coleman Report's highly publicized sense of fate-control findings is that they have diverted research attention from such problems.

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