Academia

The Common Core: How Bill Gates Changed America

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James Joyner points us to a Washington Post article on how Bill Gates somewhat single-handedly pulled off a dramatic restructuring of American public education, via promoting the Common Core standards. There is much that is fascinating here, including the fact that a billionaire with a plan can get things done in our fractured Republic a lot more easily than our actual governments (plural because education is still largely a local matter) ever could. Apparently, Gates got a pitch in 2008 from a pair of education reformers who wanted to see uniform standards for US schools. Gates thought about it, then jumped in with two feet (and a vast philanthropic and lobbying apparatus). Within two years, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core Standards. The idea enjoyed bipartisan support; only quite recently, when members of the Tea Party realized that all this happened under Obama’s watch, have Republicans taken up the fight against it.

Personally, I’m completely in favor of national curricula and standards. Indeed, I’d like to go much further, and nationalize the schools, so that public spending on students in rural Louisiana is just as high as that in wealthy suburbs in the Northeast. I’m also not dead set against swift action by small groups of people who are willing to get things done, rather than sit around for decades trading white papers and town hall meetings. (I even helped a bit with such non-democratic action myself, and suffered the attendant abuse with stoic calm.)

What I don’t know, since I simply am completely unfamiliar with the details, is whether the actual Common Core initiative (as opposed to the general idea of a common curriculum) is a good idea. I know that some people are very much against it — so much so that it’s difficult to find actual information about it, since emotions run very high, and you are more likely to find either rampant boosterism or strident criticism. Of course you can look up what the standards are, both in English Language Arts and in Mathematics (there don’t seem to be standards for science, history, or social studies). But what you read is so vague as to be pretty useless. For example, the winningly-named “CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.1” standard reads

Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

That sounds like a good idea! But doesn’t translate unambiguously into something teachable. The devil is in the implementation.

So — anyone have any informed ideas about how it works in practice, and whether it’s helpful and realistic? (Early results seem to be mildly promising.) I worry from skimming some of the information that there seems to be an enormous emphasis on “assessment,” which presumably translates into standardized testing. I recognize the value of such testing in the right context, but also have the feeling that it’s already way overdone (in part because of No Child Left Behind), and the Common Core just adds another layer of requirements. I’d rather have students and schools spend more time on teaching and less time on testing, all else being equal.

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Talking Back to Your Elders

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When I was young and as yet unformed as a theoretical physicist, cosmology was in a transitional period. We had certainly moved beyond the relatively barren landscape of the 60’s and 70’s, when pretty much the only things one had to hang one’s hat on were very basic features like expansion, rough homogeneity, and the (existence of) the cosmic microwave background. By the late 80’s we were beginning to see the first surveys of large-scale structure, there was good evidence for dark matter, and the inflationary paradigm was somewhat developed. In the 90’s things changed quite rapidly, unbelievably so in retrospect. We detected primordial anisotropies in the CMB and began to study them in detail, large-scale-structure surveys really took off, we discovered the acceleration of the universe, and techniques like gravitational lensing matured into usefulness.

My students and postdocs will readily testify that I am fond of complaining how much harder it is to come up with interesting new ideas that aren’t already ruled out by the data.

In an interesting and provocative post, Peter Coles bemoans a generational shift among cosmologists: “When I was a lad the students and postdocs were a lot more vocal at meetings than they are now.” In particular, Peter is worried that people in the field (young and old) are “willing to believe too much,” and correspondingly unwilling to propose dramatic new ideas that might run counter to received opinion. Or even, presumably, just to express doubt that received opinion is on the right track. After all, even with all we’ve learned, there’s certainly much we don’t yet know.

I’m not sure whether there really has been a shift or not; there’s a big observational bias from the fact that I used to be one of those young folks, and now I am a wise old head. (Old, anyway.) But it’s completely plausible. Is it a bad thing?

There’s an argument to be made that widespread agreement with a basic paradigm is actually a good thing. People agree on what the important questions are and how to go about answering them. Ideas are held to a higher standard. Furthermore, it would be very hard to blame a young scientist who wanted to play by the rules rather than rocking the boat. It’s easy to say “challenge conventional wisdom!”, but the thing about conventional wisdom in a mature field is that it’s usually right. The exceptions are important and memorable (remember when everyone thought the cosmological constant was zero?), but most controversial new ideas are just wrong. Being wrong is an important part of the progress of science, but it’s hard to tell other people that they should be wrong more often.

At the end of the day, though, I agree with the spirit of Peter’s lament. I do think that the discourse within cosmology has become tamer and less willing to try out new ideas. Dark matter is well-established empirically, but we certainly don’t know that it’s WIMPs (or even axions). Inflation has had some successes, but we are very far indeed from knowing that it happened (and the problems with eternal inflation and predictability are extremely real). I have my own prejudices about what’s settled and what are interesting open questions, but the field would be healthier if youngsters would challenge people like me and make up their own minds.

Then again, you gotta eat. People need jobs and all that. I can’t possibly blame anyone who loves science and chooses to research ideas that are established and have a high probability of yielding productive results. The real responsibility shouldn’t be on young people to be bomb-throwers; it should be on the older generation, who need to be willing to occasionally take a bomb to the face, and even thank the bomb-thrower for making the effort. Who knows when an explosion might unearth some unexpected treasure?

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On Templeton

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A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians,” and seeks to use science to acquire “new spiritual information.” They like to fund lots of things I find interesting — cosmology, physics, philosophy — but unfortunately they also like to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling. (As well as some projects that just seem silly.) They also have a huge amount of money, and they readily give it away.

I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise. Therefore, way back in the day, I declined an opportunity to speak at a Templeton-sponsored conference. Ever since then, people have given me grief whenever my anti-Templeton fervor seems insufficiently fervent, even though my position — remarkably! — has been pretty consistent over the years. Honestly I find talking about things like this pretty tiresome; politics is important, but substance is infinitely more interesting. And this topic in particular has become even more tiresome as people on various sides have become increasingly emotional and less reflective. But I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts in one place, so I can just link here the next time the subject arises.

In brief: I don’t take money directly from the Templeton Foundation. You will never see me thanking them for support in the acknowledgments of one of my papers. But there are plenty of good organizations and causes who feel differently, and take the money without qualms, from the World Science Festival to the Foundational Questions Institute. As long as I think that those organizations are worthwhile in their own right, I am willing to work with them — attending their conferences, submitting articles, whatever. But I will try my best to convince them they should get money from somewhere else.

I’ve had various opportunities to get money from Templeton, and I certainly don’t come running to blog about it every time the possibility arises. Once I even got a call from a corporate head-hunter who wanted to inquire about my interest in a job with JTF. (Someone had clearly not done their homework.) But it’s not, as many people argue, because I am worried that Templeton works in nefarious ways to influence the people it funds. That is pretty unclear; there are some dark murmurings to that effect, with this piece by John Horgan being perhaps the most explicit example, but little hard evidence. It wouldn’t be utterly shocking to find that a funding agency tried to nudge work that it supported in directions that it was favorable to; that’s the kind of thing that funding agencies do. But there are plenty of examples of people receiving money from JTF and swearing that they never felt any pressure to be religion-friendly. More importantly, I don’t see much evidence that the JTF is actively evil, in (say) the way the Discovery Institute is evil, deliberately lying in order to advance an anti-science agenda. The JTF is quite pro-science, in its own way; it’s just that I think their views on science are very wrong.

And that’s the real reason why I don’t want to be involved directly with Templeton. It’s not a matter of ethical compromise; it’s simply a matter of sending the wrong message. Any time respectable scientists take money from Templeton, they lend their respectability — even if only implicitly — to the idea that science and religion are just different paths to the same ultimate truth. That’s not something I want to do. If other people feel differently, that’s for them and their consciences, not something that is going to cause me to shun them.

But I will try to explain to them why it’s important. Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about — origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing — for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last five hundred years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Or at least, it would matter, if we made it more widely known. It’s the one piece of scientific/philosophical knowledge that could really change people’s lives. So in my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out — to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run — not just through extremists, but through the well-meaning liberal believers who very naturally think of religion as a source of wisdom and moral guidance, and who define the middle ground for sociopolitical discourse in our society. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning. If we think we know something about that fundamental nature — something that disagrees profoundly with the conventional wisdom — we need to share it as widely and unambiguously as possible. And collaborating with organizations like Templeton inevitably dilutes that message.

There’s no question that Templeton has been actively preventing the above message from getting across. By funding projects like the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, the JTF has done its best to spread the impression that science and religion get along just fine. This impression is false. And it has consequences.

So I won’t directly work with or take money from the JTF, although I will work with people who do take money from them — money that is appropriately laundered, if you will — if I think those people themselves are worth supporting or collaborating with in their own right. This means that approximately nobody agrees with me; the Templeton-friendly folks think I’m too uptight and priggish, while the anti-Templeton faction finds me sadly lacking in conviction. So be it. These are issues without easy answers, and I don’t mind taking a judicious middle ground. It’s even possible that I’ll change my mind one way or another down the road, in response to new arguments or actions on the part of the parties involved.

And if anyone is tempted to award me the Templeton Prize, I will totally accept it! And use the funds to loudly evangelize for naturalism and atheism. (After I pay off the mortgage.)

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Snowmass Young Physicists Survey

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Modern experimental particle physics is a high-budget, long-time-scale operation, which requires a great deal of planning. Fortunately there is a process in place, dubbed Snowmass after the scenic location in Colorado where meetings were traditionally held. (Funding agencies subsequently decided that it was unseemly for scientists to hold meetings in places that sound like vacation resorts, so this year “Snowmass” is in Minneapolis.)

Any field depends on the engagement and interest of its younger members, so it’s great to know there is a Snowmass Young Physicist Movement. And if you’re a young high-energy physicist, they would like your input. Below is the message from organizer Marcelle Soares-Santos, but the short version is that they’re asking people to complete this brief survey. Every bit of information helps.

Dear all,

The Snowmass process which is ongoing through this summer encompasses a series of studies carried out by the high energy physics community with the goal to establish a coherent long term plan for the field in all of its Frontiers — Cosmic, Energy and Intensity.

The young scientists forum at Snowmass is organizing a survey to obtain a snapshot of views, concerns and aspirations of our scientists, specially those at the early stage of their careers. We are reaching out to students, postdocs and faculty asking that you contribute by completing the survey and forwarding this message to your colleagues.

The link to the survey is: http://tinyurl.com/snowmassyoung

The estimated time to complete the survey is 5 to 10 minutes. You will note that the survey also includes questions for those who left academia, so if you can help us reach more people from that demographic group, that will be much appreciated too.

Thank you very much for your participation!

Cheers,
Marcelle Soares-Santos
On behalf of the Snowmass Young group.

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Online Complexity Course from Santa Fe

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MOOCs are all the rage these days. That would be Massive Open Online Courses, for those of you still stuck in 2007. Apparently Bucky Fuller was pushing the idea back in the early Sixties? These days, with everyone spending most of their waking hours looking at a computer screen, the time has come to get our education on.

The Santa Fe Institute, always in the vanguard, is stepping up to the plate. Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist at Portland State and external professor at SFI, will be leading an 11-week online course titled Introduction to Complexity, starting January 28. Details are explained in a handy FAQ. Lectures given over video, but you can watch them at your leisure, and they will stay online indefinitely. If you want to get a certificate of completion and participate in the student chat room, you have to sign up and follow along as the course progresses.

Seems like a great way to spread some specialized knowledge to a wide audience using a novel format. This course is aimed broadly at the interested public, which is great for the interested public but too bad for me, as I would really love to see a version with all the glorious equations. Maybe next time?

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Guest Post: Marc Sher on the Nonprofit Textbook Movement

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The price of university textbooks (not to mention scholarly journals) is like the weather: everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. My own graduate textbook in GR hovers around $100, but I’d be happier if it were half that price or less. But the real scam is not with niche-market graduate textbooks, which move small volumes and therefore have at least some justification for their prices (and which often serve as useful references for years down the road) — it’s with the large-volume introductory textbooks that students are forced to buy.

But that might be about to change. We’re very happy to have Marc Sher, a particle theorist at William and Mary, explain an interesting new initiative that hopes to provide a much lower-cost alternative to the mainstream publishers.

(Update: I changed the title from “Open Textbook” to “Nonprofit Textbook,” since “Open” has certain technical connotations that might not apply here. The confusion is mine, not Marc’s.)

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The textbook publishers’ price-gouging monopoly may be ending.

For decades, college students have been exploited by publishers of introductory textbooks. The publishers charge about $200 for a textbook, and then every 3-4 years they make some minor cosmetic changes, reorder some of the problems, add a few new problems, and call it a “new edition”. They then take the previous edition out of print. The purpose, of course, is to destroy the used book market and to continue charging students exorbitant amounts of money.

The Gates and Hewlett Foundations have apparently decided to help provide an alternative to this monopoly. The course I teach is “Physics for Life-Scientists”, which typically uses algebra-based textbooks, often entitled “College Physics.” For much of the late 1990’s, I used a book by Peter Urone. It was an excellent book with many biological applications. Unfortunately, after the second edition, it went out of print. Urone obtained the rights to the textbook from the publisher and has given it to a nonprofit group called OpenStax College, which, working with collaborators across the country has significantly revised the work and has produced a third edition. They have just begun putting this edition online (ePub for mobile and PDF), completely free of charge. The entire 1200 page book will be online within a month. People can access it without charge, or the company will print it for the cost of printing (approximately $40/book). Several online homework companies, such as Sapling Learning and Webassign, will include this book in their coverage.

OpenStax College Physics’ textbook is terrific, and with this free book available online, there will be enormous pressure on faculty to use it rather than a $200 textbook. OpenStax College plans to produce many other introductory textbooks, including sociology and biology textbooks. As a nonprofit they are sustained by philanthropy, through partnerships, and print sales, though the price for the print book is also very low.

Many of the details are at a website that has been set up at http://openstaxcollege.org/, and the book can be downloaded at http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/college-physics/download?type=pdf. As of the end of last week, 11 of the first 16 chapters had been uploaded, and the rest will follow shortly. If you teach an algebra-based physics course, please look at this textbook; it isn’t too late to use it for the fall semester. An instructor can just give the students the URL in the syllabus. If you don’t teach such a course, please show this announcement to someone who does. Of course, students will find out about the book as well, and will certainly inform their instructors. The monopoly may be ending, and students could save billions of dollars. For decades, the outrageous practices of textbook publishers have not been challenged by serious competition. This is serious competition. OpenStax College as a nonprofit and foundation supported entity does not have a sales force, so word of mouth is the way to go: Tell everyone!

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Boycott Elsevier

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While I have the blog open, let me throw in a quick two cents to support the Boycott Elsevier movement. As most working scientists know, Elsevier is a publishing company that controls many important journals, and uses their position to charge amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries — and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone not at one of the universities. In physics their journals include Nuclear Physics, Physics Letters, and other biggies. It’s exactly the opposite of what should be the model, in which scientific papers are shared freely and openly.

So now an official boycott has been organized, and is gaining steam — if you’re a working scientist, feel free to add your signature. Many bloggers have chimed in, e.g. Cosma Shalizi and Scott Aaronson. Almost all scientists want their papers to be widely accessible — given all the readily available alternatives to Elsevier (including the new Physical Review X), all we need to do is self-organize a bit and we can make it happen.

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Interdisciplinarity

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Zachary Ernst, a philosopher at the University of Missouri, has written up an aggravating tale of sexism in academia. (Via New APPS. I initially mistakenly said Ernst was at the University of Wisconsin, which is where he went to grad school — fixed by commenters.) A woman philosopher in his department — who happened to be his wife — was denied tenure. It’s always hard to discern the influence of sexism in individual cases, but he was able to directly compare what his wife was forced to go through to his own experience in the same process. I have no way of judging the merits of the tenure case (and the opportunity for bias in this kind of report is clear, and clearly acknowledged), but the differences in standards seem to be pretty clear.

But I wanted to highlight this bit, because it makes a different point that I have touched on before. [Update: in the comments, Andrew Melnyk (who I gather was the department chair being quoted) offers a different recollection of this conversation.]

While I was still an assistant professor, I had published in several different areas – I had papers in ethics, action theory, game theory, logic, and philosophy of science. The chair of my department was unhappy about this, and he told me so. He said, quite explicitly, that it would be very difficult for me to get tenure with such research breadth. This may sound unbelievable to someone outside of academia, but his reasoning was quite sound. Tenure decisions were made largely based on whether the faculty member had developed a reputation in the field. And it is easier to do that if you repeatedly publish in the same narrow subset of the academic literature. Spreading myself around too much, I was told, might result in my having failed to achieve a reputation. At the time I had this conversation, I had two distinct feelings. On the one hand, I felt that this was totally absurd – how can the ability to publish in several distinct areas be considered a liability? But on the other hand, I had to admit that he was right, and that this was good advice.

The reality is that everyone likes breadth and interdisciplinarity in theory, but the resistance in practice is considerable. A university is a bureaucracy, and a bureaucracy is made of slots, into which people are fit. We know what slots we like, and are suspicious when people or ideas don’t fit into the slots. Note that Ernst wasn’t exactly straying way off the reservation, dabbling in aeronautical engineering or Medieval prosody; he was doing technical work in philosophy, just in more than one different area. To an outsider it might be hard to discern any difference at all, but within a department this is taken as a lack of seriousness.

One could certainly imagine an unapologetic defense of narrow interdisciplinary categories for their own sake; research proceeds fastest when attention is focused on depth rather than breadth, something like that. But this defense is very rarely explicitly articulated; the department chair in the above quote was just more candid than usual. (And he wasn’t trying to defend the state of affairs, just making sure it was understood.)

For those of us who do think interdisciplinary work is useful, it’s hard to know exactly how to change things. The problem is structural; universities are divided into departments, each with their own carefully-guarded boundaries, and strict sub-categorizations within the department itself. (Everyone loves biophysics, but people who actually try to do biophysics within either biology departments or physics departments inevitably encounter stumbling blocks.) Some specific institutions can be populated by individuals who respect boundary-crossing and even encourage it, and of course there will always be ornery researchers who do it despite any obstacles that are thrown their way. But it would be nice to have more reliable and institutional ways of encouraging good work for its own sake, rather than only because it fulfills a narrow ideal of what work counts as valuable. From the comments at New APPS, here’s news of an interesting attempt along these lines at USC. It would be good to see other universities consider similar strategies.

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All-Male Conferences

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We all know that certain areas of academia exhibit a profound gender imbalance — philosophy, it turns out, is nearly as bad as physics. Interestingly, one often sees major conferences organized in which the ratio of men to women on the invited speakers list is substantially higher than one would expect even on the basis of gender-blind selection. I have nothing profound to say about this interesting phenomenon, except to quote in full this lovely comment by “Modalist” concerning the 2011 Oxford Graduate Conference (in philosophy).

I think it worth emphasizing that the most important thing for everyone involved in the GCC is to ensure, by all means possible, that they bend over backwards so as to make sure that there is never any possibility that some Anonymous Internet Person might conceivably be offended at the suggestion that conference organizers anywhere—let alone conference organizers at an institution such as Oxford, whose commitment to gender equity and rejection of male privilege in education runs as far back as the High Middle Ages I’m sorry, I mean 1974—should risk feeling any twinge of private or, Heaven forfend, public embarrassment in the face of some no doubt imagined tendency to repeatedly organize conferences that feature only men on the program. We are, it is worth remembering, only in the second decade of the twenty first century. Mary Wollstonecraft is not yet cold in her grave. Surely Philosophy as an enterprise—nay, an endeavor; a vocation; the love of wisdom itself; a noble calling that grabs one by the testicles early in life and refuses to let go; perhaps indeed the last best hope of rationality and clarity of argument on this benighted Earth—can only suffer terribly if small, unfunded websites populated by aggressive viragos and their emasculated enablers insist on making a habit of pointing out the unfortunate yet, I am sure, entirely accidental Male Pattern Allness occasionally visible at conferences within the field. I should also like to remind the organizers of this “campaign” that a policy such as I have recommended—characterized as it is by polite deference, an unwillingness to make any person feel in any way even slightly out-of-sorts or unpleasantly compelled to recognize their so-called “privilege” on an otherwise perfectly pleasant sort of afternoon in the Junior Common Room, combined with a constant willingness to apologetically back down at the slightest suggestion that umbrage has been taken, or the first appearance of a convoluted description of an imaginary yet technically possible state of affairs wherein the observed outcome might not have been sexist in any way, shape, or form—has been shown by repeated historical experience to be without question the most effective means of effectuating change, especially the kind of modest, incremental and above all comfortably distant, blame-free social change that I am sure we all agree would be the best outcome in this case. Now if you’ll excuse me, my cocoa is getting cold and I do not want to have to ask my wife to heat it up again.

Via the always interesting New APPS.

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NSF Tries to Make Family/Career Balance Easier

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Among the various difficulties that women experience when they embark on a scientific career, a big one is how to balance the challenges of work with raising a family. (In principle men could face the same challenges; in practice the burden usually falls on women. Individual cases will vary.) Science is extremely competitive, and it’s generally not a 9-to-5 job. The years when you might be at your scientifically most productive can be precisely those years when you want to have kids. I’m not familiar myself, but I understand that raising kids actually takes up some of your time.

So it’s great to see the National Science Foundation trying to do something to help. The White House just announced a major new initiative aimed at giving parents new flexibility in their careers. As explained in this press release, the general focus is flexibility, which is a great idea anyway: letting grant recipients defer for a year, and cutting down on the demands for investigators to travel to NSF headquarters when applying or renewing. (Via New APPS.)

These are tiny steps, and there are many other hurdles women face in academia other than the timing of their grants. But every little bit helps, and it’s certainly good to know that someone upstairs is paying attention.

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