The principal theme of this paper is that the analytical part of the Coleman Report (Coleman, et al., 1966) has such serious methodological shortcomings that it offers little policy guidance: (1) the specification of the theoretical model is inadequate and thus there is no way to interpret Coleman's statistical results; (2) when the Coleman Report does make clear the justification for the use of a variable in the regression model, the criterion used to assess the statistical performance of the variable (namely, its effect on R) is inappropriate. This paper further shows (1) how the role of a variable in affecting objectives can be interpretable in the context of a carefully specified, theoretically justified model; and (2) that when such a model is in the form of a regression equation, an appropriately scaled regression coefficient is the most useful single statistic to measure the importance of the variable for policy action.