Review of Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America

Review of Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America               by Gene V Glass. Published by Information Age Publishing (2008) Reviewed by E. Scott Fletcher Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Counseling Lewis & Clark College. Like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Gene Glass’s new book, whose title consciously plays on this popular text, is a work of broad intellectual inquiry, drawing on the insights of a researcher’s long experience in the field. It is also similar in its attempt to bring a variety of complex disciplinary perspectives to bear on a pressing social question for a general audience willing to engage the text, connecting the dots to create a picture that ends up being bigger and more illuminating than anyone might have imagined at the start. Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America lives up to this description, in large measure, even when some of the underlying conceptual supports for the analysis get a little blurry. Still, Glass brings the welcome clarity of his unalloyed empiricism to questions that many others, perhaps better on the underlying social and political theories, have left opaque to thus unmoved readers. It might be best to begin with the central claim of the text, which is captured a number of times in bluntly worded passages of the following sort: The major education reform proposals debated today in the halls of legislatures, in the media, and in academic discourse arise from the circumstances of an aging, White middle class wishing to reduce the costs they bear for public education and secure some quasi-private school setting for their children and their children’s children. (p. 199) This is the touchstone of the text and the thesis that drives the analysis of demographic trends associated with urbanization (fertilizer), changes in the composition of society (pills), and patterns of consumption (magnetic strips). The explanation that Glass offers is richly textured with data that is generally accessible (as he points out, “it is scarcely heavier than that of USA Today,” p. xiv) in a text that is well paced for a general audience. There is enough argument to support the position being developed, with few of the customary academic epicycles of qualification, unnecessary methodological detail, or overzealous engagement with past critics. Glass describes the emergence of a set of circumstances in which a single powerful group (the White middle and upper classes), threatened with a lower standard of living (through overconsumption and downward swings in the economy), exert influence over public policy (voucher programs, tuition tax credits, etc.) to reduce their transfer payments to others (often people of color), while maintaining access to services that sustain their social dominance (schooling). The power of the analysis lies in the careful working through of each of these elements. The text is effectively put together for the general reader, even sporting an image of the Fordson Model F Tractor and a portrait of the chemist Fritz Haber among the many charts and graphs. The writing is occasionally personal (cameos by Glass’s in-laws, father, and surgeon), proudly well-footnoted, and always grounded in empirical measurements of birth rates, racial demographics, census data, and the like. It has both the currency of a piece of policy research and the reflective quality of a senior scholar surveying the field (or several fields, in this case). Despite the beauty of the book’s balance, there are some pieces of this complex empirical puzzle that would benefit from deeper grounding in the social and political theories on which the analysis depends. Glass doesn’t always pursue these connections and sometimes his writing suggests an ambivalence toward possible interpretations. These are the issues that I’ll address in the remainder of this review. Ideology and Educational Policy Curiously, Glass makes no use of the concept of ideology in a text that otherwise seems preoccupied with its function. Beginning in the Preface, Glass describes his coming to write this book as part of his recognition that the language of educational reform obscures the real struggle for social control and privilege. Eventually, I came to believe that debates in education are not about achievement or test scores or preparing tomorrow’s workforce at all. They are about gaining the political power to control money and secure special privileges. Behind the rhetoric lies material self-interest, a drive for comfort, and a need for security. (p. xii) Glass then goes on, in Chapters two, eight, and nine particularly, to offer an analysis of how putative reformers manipulate “choice,” “accountability,” and our ever-present educational “crisis” to promote policies that defend the power of white middle-class families and insulate them from responsibility for poorer and “browner” students who are often the children of immigrants. He demonstrates how the privilege of white middle-class families is consistently sustained, and often expanded, by voucher programs, tuition tax credit plans, and other educational policies justified by what are ostensibly efforts to improve social efficiency or expand individual freedoms. Of course, the policies described do neither, but they do produce the kinds of cost reduction and quasi-private educational benefits that Glass describes above. It’s not simply on academic grounds that I think some conception of ideology would be helpful here. I think such an explanation is necessary to move ahead with Glass’s central tasks — to explain why we seem unable to let reason guide our educational policy making and why demands for “freedom” in the marketplace almost always bring the opposite effect. Glass cites approvingly the work of Michael Apple in a footnote on p. 8, but he misses the most important connection to Apple’s analysis. Rather than explaining “how conservative education reformers are contributing to ethnicity, race, and class division,” the genius of both Apple and Glass is their capacity to explain why well-meaning people go along with such proposals — or even more startling, why people who are actually harmed by these policies often serve as their advocates (recall Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas?). Both Glass and Apple seek to expose the underlying ideology of market rationales for educational policies that ostensibly appeal to values such as equality of opportunity and parental choice as actually rooted in the race and class solidarity of privileged groups. This is the reason that Glass would do well to call upon ideology, or something similar, as a tool in his analysis. But this isn’t the only reason. It would also help Glass better explain the relationship between class membership (the demographic data) and the motives of individual social actors (their support for particular educational policies). Class Interests and Individual Actions One reason that ideology doesn’t play an explicit role in Glass’s analysis may be related to the ambivalence I see in his characterization of social groups in the text and how best to understand their “motives.” Early in the book, Glass identifies himself as a cultural materialist (like Marvin Harris), especially insofar as the approach gives appropriate weight to the forces of production (Marx) and to the implications of population dynamics (Malthus). At times, this appears to lead Glass to see the problem he’s describing as having a certain kind of historical and demographic inevitability — the fate of public education. For most of the rest of the book, however, it seems clear that Glass considers the choices white middle class people make to support particular educational policies as evidence of their conscious efforts to defend (or extend) their economic interests and privilege of position. He appeals directly to individual motives to explain such actions. Policies widely advocated in democratic institutions ranging from local school boards to the U. S. Congress have been put forward as solutions to a crisis in educational attainment that threatens national prosperity and security (indeed, national preeminence itself), when in fact these policies have likely arisen from different, less honorable motives, namely, the desire of White voters to preserve wealth, consume material goods, and provide a “quasi-private” education for their children at public expense. (p. 16) What drives the advocates? What is the source of their partisan energies? It is clearly not a case of having discovered, say, a miraculous cure for a virulent disease and wanting the world to benefit from it. One must look for the motives that drive the reformers. They are not hard to find: Reduce costs; make schooling private at public expense for my children. (p. 147, emphasis in text) The ambiguity here lies in the uneasy relationship between individual motives and class interests. Glass is no doubt right to argue that “people’s actions are scarcely comprehensible without thinking about what drives them and what personal interest is served by their acting thus” (p. 12). But an account of the belief system that integrates perceptions of self-interest with class membership (and thus what actions count as serving class interests in the first place) is exactly what’s needed here. Demographics, as powerful as they are, are insufficient to explain this relationship. Indeed, Glass demonstrates all too clearly that the effort to promote educational policies that benefit white middle-class families requires the deployment of sophisticated rhetorical structures (accountability, choice, educational crisis) to garner the political support necessary for their adoption. The irony here, as well as the conceptual difficulty, is that these rhetorical structures depend on individuals and their actions at the same time that they shape individuals’ motives and understanding. I think Glass would do well to say something more on this issue, as it also has important implications for where the analysis would take a sympathetic reader interested in raising the flag. How Full is Your Glass? In the end, it’s hard to answer Glass’s own question about whether he’s a pessimist (I agree with his self-assessment as a cynic — of the best kind). On the one hand, he seems to have a hard time resisting the determination of demographic data: It would be better to speak of possibilities or likely scenarios for public education rather than its fate in these pages were it not that the forces being discussed have a sense of inevitability about them. Thus we speak of demographic imperatives (p. 235). But it would take a true cynic indeed to put so much erudition into a book of this kind, only to conclude that nothing can be done. I’m grateful that Glass cannot resist the careful reader’s conclusion that the insights conveyed here can help us change our current. course, to seek justice in the provision of public education, and unmask false attempts at reform that benefit few at the expense of many. Will understanding—like that hopefully conveyed here—lead to some degree of introspection, some reflection by the very generations on whom the future of public education depends? If indeed the motives driving school reform are as selfish as is here claimed, can good consciences be awakened? There are no likely solutions to problems possible without knowledge of causes, even if it is partial knowledge. (p. 249) Maybe that’s as optimistic as a hard-boiled empiricist who looks at the figures and finds what Glass does in this book can be. I think it’s more than enough motivation to tempt fate and pursue these arguments in the court of public opinion. This book holds out the possibility of reaching a larger audience far beyond the walls of the academy. I hope that it does; I’ll certainly be recommending it. Reference Fletcher, S. (2008). Review of Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips. Encounter, 21(4), 45-48.