A group of educators met at the Faculty Club last night to begin making sense out of the most massive--and potentially the most controversial--survey ever conducted on the schooling of Negroes and other minorities.

The 737-page report, "Equality of Educational Opportunity," was released without much fanfare by the U.S. Office of Education last July.

It reported the findings of a two-year national study that involved 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers and hundreds of principals. The findings have been practically ignored since.

So Daniel P. Moynihan, director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, and Thomas F. Pettigrew, assistant professor of social Psychology, have obtained a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to make the first intensive study of the report.

They are leading 36 other educators, most of them Harvard faculty members, in a seminar which met for the first time last night. The group will have biweekly meetings for the next year.

Results Unexpected

Moynihan said yesterday that the results of the survey were "completely unexpected," even by the people who made it--a team of researchers headed by sociologist-mathematician James S. Coleman of Johns Hopkins University.

"They went in with the conventional expectations," Moynihan said, "thinking they'd find that Negroes and whites go to schools that are unequal, and so come out with unequal educations."

Instead, they had to deal with findings like these:

* On a national basis, predominately Negro schools are about as old and about as well equipped as predominately white schools.

* The achievement level of Negro students has almost no relation to the size of their classes or to the amount of money spent on them.

* Yet Negro students in general leave school even further behind white students in reading and math skills than they were when they entered.

Coleman's conclusion is that the Negro students can not overcome their enviroment--their home life and the homogenity of segregated schools, "which perpetuate the social influences of the home."

But Coleman, who was working under a two-year deadline set by Congress, had to spend most of his time collating and intepreting the multiple choice questionnaires on which the report was based. He was not able to give all the time he wanted to conclusions, Moynihan said.

The seminar, he explained will do just the opposite. Its members will use Harvard computers to select various kinds of data from Coleman's findings, and then discuss what they suggest. Marshall S. Smith '59, research assistant in Education, will be in charge of this part of the program.

Other members from Harvard include Dean Monro; Theodore R. Sizer, Dean of the Faculty of Education; Seymour M. Lipset, Professor of Government and Social Relations; Vincent F. Conroy, director of the Center for Field Studies and professors from the Schools of Education, Law and Public Administration