Education Reform – Gene Glass

My next expedition into the topic of education reform falls along a trajectory that is not entirely random and finds me feeling a small but satisfying personal vindication on two fronts (to be explained later). I became intensely interested in the topic after seeing Michelle Rhee on Oprah. Although Rhee is a compelling force in education reform, I felt something lacking. With that in mind, I endeavored to give her vision a closer look. Still not satisfied (and not convinced that the course of action she and her colleagues advocated was the definitive answer), I decided to turn to more specific issues that were closer to home. This led me to choose to investigate two reports from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute which dealt with the state of the Milwaukee Public Schools and with the status of Wisconsin high school education. Although these reports were insightful, I felt they were both biased and fell short of offering any lucid insight. Reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch moved me in a direction that felt consistent with a broader vision of both what I consider to be the goals of education and the shortcomings of the loudest voices in the contemporary reform movement.
When I plucked Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America by Gene Glass (2008) from the bookshelf, my first thought was the similarity in the title to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond is a geographer, but is widely known (if not always respected) in anthropological and other social science circles. Gene Glass readily acknowledges that this was intentional (my first little vindication) in his preface. Dr. Glass admits his empiricist training (he did early and influential work in statistical meta-analysis), and his shout out to Diamond is grounded in the belief that human actions and choices do not “arise ex nihilo to shape modern society” but that there is “a chain of influences” that move and shape our society. (p.xii) He goes on to say, and this is the crux of his position, that

“On a much larger scale, I have come to see the continuous debates and attempts at reform of public education in America as linked to a set of influences largely unseen and unacknowledged, but when pointed out to any intelligent and objective observer strike a note of recognition and acceptance. My analysis is akin to that of the cultural materialist in anthropology, most notably its most influential proponent Marvin Harris, in that it combines elements of both Karl Marx (in the emphasis given to the forces of production in industrialized societies) and Thomas Malthus (in the emphasis given to the implications of expanding human populations). These two forces have much to say about a wide range of phenomena that pass before our eyes in modern society, in particular, how public institutions like education emerge, grow, and recede.” (p.xiii)

In my initial post on Michelle Rhee and company I used a metaphor likening her tone and actions to Chicken Little. Glass echoes this thought (my second small vindication) when he states that

“This book is about debates that never seem to end and why they don’t. It is about people who insist the sky is falling, when in fact things are about the same way they have always been. It is about farms and fertilizers and tractors and how many people it takes to feed a nation; about why nobody lives in the country anymore and why people in the city don’t want as many children as they used to want. It’s about pills that prevent pregnancies and discoveries in medicine that mean we can expect to live about twice as long as our great grandparents did. It is about robots that can build cars better than human hands can, and never ask for time off. It is about how people carry less money with them these days, and how the plastic card in their billfold or purse no longer seems like real money. It’s about people spending themselves into debt and corporations that welcome them there, and about those that retire only to go back to work because they have outlived their savings. It is about a nation growing older and poorer and caring less about the fate of those unlike themselves who were never invited here any way. And this book is about how all of these things are interrelated and under the control of some of the strongest human drives: for material comfort and for feelings of safety, drives that undergo transformations across a lifetime into the need to consume and the wish to segregate oneself from others who are different. And this book is about how all of this plays out in the arena of the public education system, long the pride of a young nation and now in danger of being abandoned” (p.3-4)

Undoubtedly this reveals my own bias, not only as an anthropologist and social scientist, but also as an individual who struggles to see black and white, struggles to see simple fixes to complex problems, and is unwilling to chuck it all. In education reform, we should be willing to step back from politics and slogans and ask ourselves what the underlying causes for our difficulties are. If we know where we need to go, then perhaps we can draw a map. Maybe education reform needs a curriculum.
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Glass, G.V. (2008). Fertilizers, pills, and magnetic strips: the fate of public education in america by . Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.