Education: Boost Your Intelligence

“Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips” is one of the most interesting books I’ve read on U.S. education in a long time- and I’ve read several dozen over the past few years. Dr. Glass mentions in the book that he got inspiration from Jared Diamond’s excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which looked at the impact of technology in shaping civilizations throughout human history. Dr. Glass makes the argument that the inventions of artificial fertilizers, contraceptives and life-extending medications, industrial robots, and the personal credit card have led to huge changes in American society during the 20th century. As a result of these demographic changes, Dr. Glass argues that the older, whiter voting public has abandoned its support for government-run schools that educate “other peoples’ children”.

The book is strongest in Part II, the chapters devoted to tracing the impact of technology in changing U.S. demographics. I found this section to be fascinating and very thought-provoking. If it were possible to rate each portion of the book separately, this part deserves 5 stars.

Where I found Dr. Glass’ arguments to be flawed, however, was in his treatment of the state of government-run education. He unconvincingly repeats all the tired old liberal claims about the topic. In his view, the crisis in the schools has been “manufactured” for political reasons in order to destroy government-run schools. He devotes much space in the book to diatribes against standardized testing, charter schools, vouchers and tax credits for private schools, homeschooling, cyberschools, open enrollment and other school choice programs, alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America, and so on.

Even though the book has a copyright date of 2008, Dr. Glass often uses older studies to support his positions while ignoring more recent studies that would undermine them. For example, he uses a small 1998 study to make the claim that homeschoolers are 94% non-Hispanic whites, 1% blacks, and <1% Hispanics. Why did he ignore the much larger 2003 National Center for Educational Statistics survey that found homeschoolers to be 77% non-Hispanic whites, 9% blacks, and 5% Hispanics? The latter numbers are a lot closer to the overall school-age population, which in 2003 was 61% non-Hispanic whites, 15% blacks, and 17% Hispanics. Yes, blacks and Hispanics are somewhat underrepresented among homeschoolers but it's not even remotely as much as Dr. Glass would have his readers believe. Dr. Glass similarly cherry-picks his data on many other "hot button" educational issues.

Dr. Glass also has a highly annoying tendency to make accusations of racism/xenophobia without providing any objective evidence that it truly is at work. He admits as much in his appendix, where he states that his “personal preference is for psychoanalysis to explain many of the most important aspects of human behavior…I see something akin to the ‘defense mechanisms’ at work in the intellectualizing of motives of both experts and ordinary people around questions of racial and ethnic segregation in public education. No one likes to be accused of being prejudiced, but most of us are.” Conjectures like this do not belong in a scholarly work- just stick to the facts, please!

Overall, I recommend “Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips” despite the weaknesses in the author’s discussions of the current state of government-run schools and of alternatives to those schools.
Rating: 3 / 5

This book is a real eye-opener. It examines the forces changing public institutions of all kinds in America in the first few decades of the 21st Century. What I like about it is that the author refuses to give a bunch of glib answers for the problems public schools will increasingly face. 5 Stars!
Rating: 1 / 5

Reviewed by Jim Hattabaugh, superintendent, Mansfield School District, Mansfield, Ark.

A catchy title does not always produce a book that catches your attention from front to back. Gene V Glass accomplishes both, grabbing your immediate attention with the title, Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips, and keeping your attention throughout the entire book.

Glass, a Regents’ professor at Arizona State University, does an outstanding job of explaining the education reform movement and debunking what is behind this seemingly unending political football that occupies the daily toils and troubles of administrators, students and parents.

Especially enlightening is the way the author debunks the crisis in education based on a global comparison of student test scores. He explains in detail the fallacies and errors in these comparisons as covered by the mainstream news media. Glass also tackles the politically hot issue of accountability and ethnicity.

Readers familiar with the work of Gerald Bracey, a longtime debunker of unfair criticism of the public schools and the educators who work in them, should add Glass to their list of must reading. This especially easy-to-read book is so expertly set forth that the 311 pages of text and data were completed in two sittings. The up-to-date data he uses to illustrate the central points blend perfectly with the author’s historical perspective.
Rating: 5 / 5