As the Bell Curves

DS: Three years after publication of The Bell Curve, I find myself endlessly reading news stories about great national controversies in which all the participants do their best to ignore the data you and Dick Herrnstein laid on the table. Three recent examples:

1) the row over school vouchers, whose advocates (e.g., Bill Bennett in the Wall Street Journal) endlessly take it for granted that poor performance by students reflects only inadequacies by the teaching profession-inadequacies among the learners being a huge unmentionable;