Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Harvard University’s endowment is $35 billion, and some people aren’t happy about it. Massachusetts legislators see money that could be theirs, and are contemplating new taxes. Social activists see money that could be going to charity, and want to divert it. Distinguished alumni who have landed at public universities wonder why, with all that cash, Harvard graduates such a tiny number of students.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I won’t be suggesting the ideal policy compromise. But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.

Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.

This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. (Note that Caltech has over 1200 faculty members and fewer than 900 undergraduate students.) And it is not a statement about universities in general; many large public universities, and smaller liberal-arts schools, take education very seriously as a primary mission. This is by no means incompatible with being a top-notch research institution — the physics departments at places like Berkeley or UC Santa Barbara would be the envy of almost any private research university. But those places also take their educational mission very seriously, which Harvard, honestly, does not.

Of course, certain individual faculty members at Harvard might be great teachers and care deeply about their students; but that’s a bonus, not a feature of the institution. (Harvey Mansfield, to a visiting colleague: “You should close your door. If you don’t, undergraduates may wander in.”)

None of this is necessarily good or bad; it’s just a recognition of the state of affairs. Harvard et al. judge themselves by the research and scholarship they produce. Students will always keep applying to those places and trying to get in, because the aura of intellectual attainment produced by precisely those scholarly accomplishments will always act as a powerful draw. Such students are by no means making a mistake; the intellectual atmosphere at such places truly is intoxicating, and if nothing else the interaction with your fellow talented students can be a life-changing experience. But to try your best to get into Harvard and then complain once you are there that the professors seem interested in their own work rather than in teaching is to utterly miss the point. And to complain that Harvard has a giant endowment that it chooses to use for purposes other than educating more students is equally misguided.

Today Steinn followed up a nice little post on the role of luck in science (is “lucky” an insult?) with a spot-on description of how being ahead of the curve can damn you in grant proposals:

selected referee comments on “A bold proposal to do something new and interesting”, years 1-3, with added bonus translation

1. very speculative, no track record in this area, would be helped by showing preliminary results proving methodology and showing that results will be forthcoming [trans: come on, first do the research then ask for funding, don’t you know anything?]

   trans: - huh, I never heard of this! Some new stuff. Speculative.
   Oy! He wants full postdoc for three years?
   Who does this guy think he is?

(Years 2 and 3 are equally good).

I think the reaction that Steinn describes can be summarized in Dalcanton’s Lemma of Proposal Writing: “It is nearly impossible to change a referee’s mind about something they think they already know“. If the reviewer comes to the problem with no preconceived notions (i.e. they’ve never read a single paper in your field), you can really make progress in educating them. Same deal if you’re moving forward on well-trodden ground (say, pushing SN Type Ia surveys to larger distances). However, if the reviewer knows something about your topic and thinks the problem is already solved, or uninteresting, or technically unfeasible, or crazy, 10 pages of perfectly formatted prose and elegant figures may still not be enough to change their minds, even if you are 100% completely and totally correct.

Shifting a referee’s frame requires that you first realize that most readers aren’t going to believe you if you’re talking about something that no one else is. Jumping into a bunch of details that seem sensible to you gets you nowhere, when the referee still can’t figure out why you’d bother even thinking about the question. You’ve got to knock down their frame before you stand a chance of getting anywhere. For example: “Although everyone assumes that stars form from gas, here’s a series of three plots demonstrating that that’s completely false when looked at in detail.” Or, “It may seem that the velocity requirements for measuring doppler shifts to detect extrasolar planets are beyond current technical capabilities, but here’s a series of plots where I show that current detection limits are indeed at a level where a monitoring campaign could detect shifts due to Jupiter-mass planets.” Or, “While the theoretical idea that the moon could indeed be made of cheese does not initially seem compelling, here are three analytical calculations suggesting that the properties of cheese could indeed be superior to rock in explaining the observed lunar properties, and thus that further work on the lunar cheese model (LCM) is warranted.” The frame breaking can’t be just a throwaway line, but must be direct acknowldegement of and attack on the paradigm that a likely reviewer would bring to the proposal.

Under the above Lemma, Steinn got shafted in Year 1 because the reviewer came with a frame that said “This can’t possibly work”, and, by not completing enough of the work before submitting the proposal, Steinn didn’t have enough ammo to break the frame. He’s also right in the “Who does this guy think he is?” comment, since the other way you can break a frame is to have enough of a rep that people know never to bet against you. The whole business is another example of Aspects of the Running of Science That Are True, Probably Unavoidable, But Not Necessarily Fair or Optimal.

The classic three pillars of an academic position are teaching, research, and service. While the University Administration sometimes seems to think of “service” as being synonymous with “sitting on committees”, many of us enjoy taking the broader view.

As part of my service activities, this weekend I had the pleasure to talk with a roomful of fantastic young scholars from the McNair program (officially known as the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program). The program was named after one of the astronauts who was killed in the Challenger disaster). He was also a physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT.

The McNair program identifies promising undergraduates who either are low-income, are first-generation college students, or are from an underrepresented minority group. It then provides extensive mentoring to encourage the students to continue on to graduate school. The mentoring takes the form of supporting the students in research projects in their own departments, guiding them through the steps involved in preparing a strong graduate application, providing an additional resource for academic and personal advising, and waiving application fees.

If you haven’t run across this program, keep an eye out for it. If you know a student who might be a candidate, encourage them to apply. Even more importantly, if you have a chance to work with a McNair scholar, jump at the chance. These kids are phenomenal. They’re interesting and driven, and a pleasure to know.

Via Eric Rauchway (of The Edge of the American West, but guest-blogging at Crooked Timber), here is a list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, as put together by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. (You can vote for your top five.) Here are the natural scientists they’ve chosen to include:

• Richard Dawkins, biologist, author
• Jared Diamond, biologist, historian
• Neil Gershenfeld, physicist, computer scientist
• James Lovelock, environmental scientist
• Lee Smolin, physicist
• Harold Varmus, medical scientist
• J. Craig Venter, biologist, entrepreneur
• E.O. Wilson, biologist

Bjørn Lomborg is also on the list, but I don’t count him as a natural scientist — Sunita Narain is also a close call, but seems to fall more on the activism side than pure environmental science. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker would also be there if you classified linguistics as a natural science. I also didn’t include economists, who are certainly social scientists in my classification. And V.S. Ramachandran I counted as more of a psychologist. This is a thankless task.

Note that the list is concerned with public intellectuals — people who have influenced the wide-ranging public discussion in some substantial way — so there’s no point in wondering why Lee Smolin is there but not Ed Witten. You are, however, allowed to wonder why there aren’t more physicists over all, and whether physicists should be blaming themselves or shaking impotent fists of rage at the selection committee. Either way, those biologists are kicking our butts.

Much of the April 15th angst that Sean described comes from student’s questioning “Will I be a success if I go to this particular graduate school?”. They place a tremendous weight on this decision (and rightly so, given the 5+ year duration of a typical PhD). The decision of where to go to school presents a clean well-defined juncture, where you can imagine two clear paths before you, one that leads to a happy land filled with unicorns and flowers and all night coffee shops and independent record stores, and another that leads to a sad grey land where you spend your time shuffling piles of paper for The Man. However, having been in the game from the faculty side for nearly a decade, I can say that much of what determines whether one is a “success” is largely independent from this decision. (An aside: for this discussion I’m going to assume “success” equals working as a research scientist, which is the typical goal of an entering grad student. I don’t mean this as a value judgement, since “success” is really “whatever career path you find fulfilling”, and I’m just as happy to train phenomenal future high school science teachers as future faculty at Harvard.)

I think the essence of what determines your long-term success as a scientist is your ability to influence the scientific discussion. When you’re at a point in your career when people pay attention to your work, and want to know “What does <your name > think about this?”, you are on a near certain path to a stable position as a research scientist. Instead, if no one is reading your papers (to the extent that you’ve published them at all), or wants to hear what you say at conferences, or calls you up to ask you about your area of expertise, then you’re in danger of drifting out of the field.

Now, the factors that lead to having scientific influence are many. Among the most important are:

• Writing lots of papers
• Writing interesting papers
• Writing papers using novel or superior data sets
• Writing papers on a timely topic
• Being recognized as leading the above papers, rather than being directed by others
• Communicating your ideas with clarity
• Being socially well-connected in your field
• Being really, really, really, unusually smart and/or creative
• Having influential mentors promoting you

To be scientifically successful, you don’t need to have all of these factors, or even most of these factors. You just need to have enough of them, or a long enough suit in one or two of them, that people can’t ignore what you’re doing.

Of this list, there are at least half that are almost entirely under a student’s own control, no matter where they go to graduate school. You can pick inspiring mentors, write lots of papers on interesting, timely topics, and give riveting talks about them, no matter where you are. You can fail to write any papers (on topics boring or not) and give lousy talks, under the negative guidance of ineffective advisors, even if you go to a top-ranked school. Some of the other factors do probably have some correlation with top-ranked programs, in that such programs are more likely to have the luxury to admit only students with early evidence of brains and creativity, and they tend to have more of the resources that lead to superior data access, or a larger pool of productive theorists (postdocs & faculty). [However, in astronomy at least, there is sufficiently rich access to public resources (SDSS, NASA’s Great Observatories, 2MASS, etc) that one can usually have sufficient access to create “novel or superior data sets” no matter where you are. For lab-based physics, this is likely less true.] In this list, the relative “prestige” of one’s graduate program has little direct impact on your eventual scientific impact. When I hire postdocs, or evaluate fellowship applications, I am drastically more impressed by what someone actually did, than where they went to school.

Besides the import for deciding where to attend school, the above elucidates why “climate” issues can have such a large impact on your eventual career success. If you’re at an institution that places obstacles in your path that make it difficult for you to write papers, to find good mentors, and to make scientific connections in your field, then you’ve got a problem. You’re going to be struggling uphill.

However, the same list also provides the recipe for climbing that hill, if you find that you’re on it. The number one thing you can do is to write papers (and preferably interesting and timely ones). People cannot ignore a large body of high quality work for long. Sometimes it takes a while before they notice, it’s true. But the more you publish, the more likely it is that people will begin to notice your work, and be influenced by it. As that happens, they will start noticing you as well, and will tend to deem you “someone worth having around”, whether as a postdoc, or at their conference, or as their next faculty colleague. This process is vastly easier with a good mentor behind you, but if you wound up without one (or gawd forbid with an anti-mentor), it’s going to be your only route out.

I think the clearest evidence of this is a relatively jaw-dropping preprint that was recently posted to the arXiv (h/t to Zuska). A former particle-physics postdoc (and current grad student in statistics) carried out a very detailed analysis of the productivity of postdocs on the Run II Dzero experiment, and how that translated into giving conference presentations, and being hired into faculty positions. The paper found that the postdocs’ success in eventually landing faculty jobs were highly correlated to productivity (as measured by internal papers), to conference presentations (which were awarded by the leadership of the project), and to the degree of “physics socialization”. These correlations are all what you would expect, and reinforce the above list of what leads to being scientifically influential.

The jaw-dropping aspect of the paper is that the awarding of conference presentations was grossly gender biased (as was the fraction of service work assigned to the women). The female postdocs had drastically higher levels of productivity (indeed, half the men were less productive than the least productive woman), but were allocated far fewer conference presentations than men with comparable productivity. (Note: this is a paper you actually have to read, rather than just flipping to the table at the end. It’s a very well-done piece of statistical analysis, and can’t be fully appreciated from just comparing two means in a table.)

In this exercise, we see the influence game writ large. You need to be productive and visible. If some sort of bias (against women, or shy people, or people from state schools, or whomever) is present that conspires to make you less visible, you’re going to have to be even more productive. It’s not fair, and people in positions to fight against the bias in their institution should do so. But, at least it’s something that you have a chance of controlling.

A: Hey, what’s up? You’re looking a little anxious these days.

B: I know. We’re getting close to the romance deadline.

A: The romance deadline?

B: Yeah, in a couple of days I have to decide who I’ll be going out with for the next five years or so.

A: Oh, right, I forgot. Have you decided between boyfriend and girlfriend?

B: I’ve thought about it a lot, and I definitely want a girlfriend.

A: That’s cool. But don’t you worry that the standards are higher if you say you want a girlfriend? I’ve heard that boyfriends are much easier.

B: I heard that, too. But girls are what I’m really passionate about.

A: Couldn’t you just get a boyfriend first, and then switch if you don’t like it?

B: Some people try that, but it can be awkward. Better to just be honest about your intentions from the start.

A: Fair enough. So did you get any acceptances?

B: Yeah, two different women have agreed to date me. Cindy and Alyssa. But I have to choose one.

A: Hey, that’s great that you go two offers. Have you made a choice yet?

B: Well, I had coffee with Alyssa, and we really hit it off — she’s beautiful, and charming, and laughed at my jokes. I definitely think we would get along well over the next few years. I met Cindy, too; she’s a knockout, and clearly very talented, but there wasn’t as much of a spark there.

A: That can happen. So are you going to choose Alyssa?

B: I’m tempted, but the thing is — Cindy’s US News ranking is much higher.

A: Her what?

B: Every year, US News puts out rankings of boyfriends and girlfriends. Now, Alyssa is a solid top-20 girlfriend, but Cindy is top five! I’m really worried I’d be making a mistake by passing up the opportunity to go out with Cindy. Everyone has heard of her.

A: That sounds a little weird to me. How do they come up with these rankings?

B: Nobody knows, really. But everyone takes them very seriously. Still, I keep hoping that the NRC will update their boyfriend/girlfriend rankings soon. Those are supposed to be much more scientific.

A: NRC?

B: The National Romance Council.

A: But look, you seem to have really hit it off with Alyssa. Who cares that US News ranks Cindy higher? The concept of a “boyfriend/girlfriend ranking” just doesn’t make sense — what matters is how well you personally get along with them, not some pseudo-objective measure of excellence.

B: It’s easy to say that, but this is a big decision. I’m really worried that, ten years from now when I’m ready to get married, my prospective spouse is not going to be nearly as impressed that I went out with Alyssa than if I had gone out with Cindy.

A: Come on, it’s five years of your life that we’re talking about here. Your chances of eventually being happily married would seem to be a lot better if you choose someone you’re likely to be happy with right now.

B: You’re right, I know. Well, I hope Cindy won’t be disappointed. I don’t think she’s used to being turned down.

A: Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure she’ll get over it.

One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

Fortunately, being a relatively clueless 20-year old, I was only dimly aware of these things. I was interested in gravity and cosmology, and I had heard Wheeler knew a thing or two about such topics. So I waltzed in, and asked if he had any projects I could work on. I staggered out of his office four hours later, laden with books, a clearly defined project in my hands. For the ensuing two years I spent essentially every weekday with Wheeler. Each morning I would rush over to his office, always to be greeted the same way: “What’s new?” I would have been up late the night before, desperately trying to find something interesting with which to answer that question. We would then spend hours working together, going over my results, scrutinizing my calculations, poring through the literature, brainstorming new ideas. Wheeler gave me a direct and personal introduction to the joys of research. We would break for lunch, and walk up to the faculty club. I often had trouble keeping up with him. He would always take the stairs (”No time to wait for an elevator!”). He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 79 years old.

We would often work all afternoon (with the occasional interruption, the nuisance of having to leave for my class lectures). Every evening I would walk with him from Jadwin up across the full length of campus, to catch his bus. We would pass the corner of Ivy lane and Washington road, where he had scratched 137 into the concrete when they were pouring the sidewalk. We would pass Jones Hall, where he used to discuss relativity with Einstein. We would continue on through campus, crossing in front of Nassau Hall. Wheeler would insist we walk diagonally to the far gate, instead of exiting through the more convenient FitzRandolph Gate. An Undergraduate was not meant to exit FitzRandolph Gate until graduation, and Wheeler didn’t want to be responsible for what might occur were I to break tradition.

For two years I sat at the feet of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry. Over the ensuing years we kept in touch. We collaborated together on Wheeler’s last published paper.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at Wheeler’s bedside. I tried to say thank you. But it was impossible to convey how much he means to me, and how grateful I am to him. In that moment when I crossed the threshold to his office, I was embarking on a new path. I am still on that path, and every day I am grateful to him for showing me the way.

John Wheeler died this morning.

So you’re listening to a talk, and the speaker introduces a crucial step which you know — or perhaps only suspect — to be completely incorrect. What do you do? Do you raise your hand and point out the mistake? Or file it away momentarily, planning to ask them about it in private afterwards?

And does your answer change if the speaker is a senior scientist who will some day be writing you a letter of recommendation? What if it’s a fellow graduate student giving their first-ever technical seminar, and you know them to be intimidated by all these smart people in the room?

A Lady Scientist and PhysioProf have been talking about these issues. The former wonders whether there shouldn’t be some solidarity among grad students not to make each other look bad during journal club presentations, while the latter says that good perceptive critical questions are always in order.

My own attitude is pretty straightforward, and close to PP’s: it’s never impolite or out of order to ask appropriately probing questions about the material being presented at a scientific talk, regardless of the status of the speaker or the audience. It’s science, and we’re all on the same side; it doesn’t do anyone any favors to hide the truth in order to save someone’s feelings. Science is bigger than any of us, no matter how young and inexperienced or old and respected (feared) we may be. Not only should listeners feel free to ask any reasonable question of the speaker, but speakers should be honest enough to admit when they have said something that might be incorrect, rather than twisting around to find justifications for a slip-up. We’ve all made them; or at least I have.

To the extent that there is any sort of competition going on, it should not be “speaker vs. audience,” but rather “all of us vs. the natural world.” However, having staked out that absolutist position, it’s extremely important to recognize that we live in the real world. For one thing, many audience members tend to blur the distinction between “asking a good question” and “being an asshole.” There are people out there, one must admit, who tend to view seminar questions as a venue for them to demonstrate how smart they are, rather than learning about the subject matter in an open and collegial environment. There’s no excuse for that, and the guilty parties deserve to be smacked around, if only symbolically. Still, it’s no reason for the rest of us to equate hard questions with egotistical puffery, nor to soft-pedal questions that really are sincere. The biggest benefit of a talk, from the viewpoint of the speaker, would be to actually learn something from the questions and comments offered by the audience.

The other complication is that there is a competition going on, whether we like it or not. I personally don’t like it, and would vastly prefer to live in a utopia of unlimited resources where such competitions were unnecessary. But in the real world, there is a limited collection of goods — jobs especially, but other rewards of the profession — and a large number of people competing for them. And that competition never turns off. Academics are always judging each other, inevitably, and will use those judgments when it comes time to recommend or hire or give prizes to each other. So a real seminar is not simply a value-neutral examination of the facts; it’s a social milieu, in which interactions have real consequences.

Which is not to say that we should ever shy away from asking hard questions. But there are different ways to ask hard questions, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing the tone in which such questions are asked to match the occasion. Graduate students giving their first seminars need to learn that they will get asked tough questions, and that it’s okay — it’s not a devastating critique of their worthiness as scientists, it’s simply part of the process to which we are all ultimately subject.

A common technique to help students ease into the responsibility of giving talks is to have students-only seminars where the faculty are not permitted. The motivation for such things is admirable, but ultimately I don’t think they are a good idea. (As a disgruntled senior colleague once said, “Sometimes I learn something from listening to the students.”) Breaking down the barriers between “faculty” and “students,” and beginning to think of everyone as “researchers” and “colleagues,” should be an important goal of graduate school. It can all be intimidating at first, but it’s ultimately beneficial to learn to treat these artificial hierarchies as administrative annoyances, not natural categories.

The most successful graduate students are the ones that start thinking of themselves as colleagues right away. Go to the seminars, sit in the front, ask good questions, participate in the informal discussions afterward. It’s a big universe out there, and we’re all struggling to understand it, and working together is our only hope.

The comments on Sean’s post below brought to mind a conversation I had long ago. I had been a postdoc at the Carnegie Observatories, which was a research foundation funded by donors. We were having a meet-n-greet with the folks who had given money to the institute — showing them the machine shop, the offices, etc. I was sitting down with one of the more elderly donors, who announced, “Women’s lib killed the public school system.”

When I picked my jaw off the floor, I encouraged him to expand on his thesis, and found that he wasn’t completely nuts. Back in the day, women of brains, talent, and ambition had two acceptable career options: nursing, and teaching. If I had been born 50 years earlier, I would not have a PhD in astrophysics. Instead, I would probably have grown up to be a school teacher, just like my grandmother. It didn’t have to pay that well, since really, what would have my other options have been? Not law school, not physics, not mechanical engineering, not finance. Today, the brightest women have far more options beyond teaching, and while some still teach, the vast majority of us work in other fields. The salaries in teaching remain low, as for many fields that have been dominated by women, guaranteeing that teaching is not as competitive with other career options available.

To clarify, I don’t 100% buy the premise that the public school system is a disaster. My dad was a public high school teacher, I went to urban public schools, and my daughter is in the public schools. Are there problems and failures? Sure. But I don’t accept that all public schools or schools systems are “bad”. Even if I’m not teaching in one.

One of the most bizarre aspects of the United States is how we organize public education at the elementary and secondary levels. For mysterious historical reasons, we leave all of the important decisions — from curriculum and testing to financing and bus routes — in the hands of local school boards. 130,000 of them, all told. The result, predictably enough, is screaming chaos. Not only do we have haphazard ideas about what to teach and how to judge how well it’s been taught, but the dispersal of resources makes economies of scale impossible, so we don’t put anything like the appropriate amount of effort into developing new techniques and training our teachers.

And it shows. Matt Miller has written a compelling article in The Atlantic, documenting how our screwy system — unique, apparently, in the developed world — has utterly failed to give our children the educations they deserve.

The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.

This dismal failure might at least be explicable if it served some misguided egalitarian impulse, but it doesn’t. This map, from Miller’s article, shows the spending per pupil on a county-by-county basis; the poorest counties spend less than $7,500 per student, while the rich ones are over $17,500. (Click for larger version.)

Is there any theory behind the idea that students should getter significantly better or worse educations based on the county in which they are born? This isn’t an issue of private vs. public; it’s a public service, paid for by taxes, just like Medicare or national defense. But we finance public education by combination of state and local revenues, rather than through the national government.

Faced with such a patently misguided system, the most common calls for reform involve the imposition of some sort of national standards, such as those featured in the No Child Left Behind Act that has lately been foisted on our schools. In principle, national standards are a great idea; in a sensible system, however, they be the last of a series of necessary reforms. It’s like a team that hires a new football coach, who addresses the team on the first day of practice by saying “Here’s the system: we’re going to win all of our games!” Without an actual playbook, appropriate equipment, and some strategy, exhortations to do better aren’t going to achieve any tangible results.

It’s obvious what is needed: a basic national curriculum that is shared by all schools, with a set of requirements that leave room for creativity and innovation by individual districts within the overall framework. (There is no reason why American math classes should be two grade levels behind European math classes.) Plus, crucially, an overhaul of the financing system so that resources are distributed fairly. Those are just the minimal reforms that every sensible person should be able to agree on; after those are implemented, we can return to our regularly scheduled debates about school choice and bilingual education. Apparently the problem is that conservatives hate “national” and liberals hate “standards,” and both are afraid of the teachers’ unions. So we should all be able to compromise and do the right thing! As Miller says, “We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.”