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Overview
When Bowen Paulle speaks of toxicity, he speaks of educational worlds dominated by intimidation and anxiety, by ambivalence, degradation, and shame. Based on six years of teaching and research in the South Bronx and in Southeast Amsterdam, Toxic Schools is the first fully participatory ethnographic study of its kind and a searing examination of daily life in two radically different settings. What these schools have in common, however, are not the predictable ideas about race and educational achievement but the tragically similar habituated stress responses of students forced to endure the experience of constant vulnerability. From both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Paulle paints an intimate portrait of how students and teachers actually cope, in real time, with the chronic stress, peer group dynamics, and subtle power politics of urban educational spaces in the perpetual shadow of aggression.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226066387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2013 |
| Series: | Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Toxic Schools
High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam
By BOWEN PAULLE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06638-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Getting Situated
[The technique is] one of getting data ... by subjecting yourself, your own body, your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can ... penetrate their circle of response ... That "tunes your body up" and with your "tuned-up" body ... you're empathetic enough—because you've been taking the same crap they've been taking—to sense what it is that they're responding to. To me, that's the core of observation. If you don't get yourself in that situation, I don't think you have a piece of serious work.
A friend named Jake invited me to check out one of his classes up in the Bronx. That's how it all started. Reclining on the bleachers next to a basketball court after a workout at the Westside YMCA in the fall of 1996, Jake was telling me about one of his English classes and he just popped the question. While he warned me about Johnson High's "bad reputation," his comments and his relaxed delivery had a rather soothing effect. Furthermore, Jake seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about the life of the New York City public schoolteacher. He mentioned that some of his colleagues had become close friends and that he enjoyed hanging out with some of his students. "Most of the kids are sweethearts," my buddy from the gym told me. Needing to find a job, quickly, I agreed to observe one of Jake's classes.
I may have looked quite young as I entered Johnson High on that fateful first day back up in the "Boogie Down" Bronx. While standing in line with the other students headed for the metal detectors just beyond the building's massive front doors, I heard the following conversation about me. "Is that a new student?" asked one boy standing behind me. "Damn, that nigga's kinda tall," was another student's response. Upon making it through the metal detectors a male security guard (or "security officer," as they preferred to be called) made clear that I would not be checked with the handheld detector that was waved along the bodies of all the incoming students. Arriving at the desk behind the school's main line of defense I picked up my guest pass from a female security officer who explained, with a wry smile, that I could have entered through the teachers' side entrance. The message being communicated was clear cut: the incoming students, not the adults, are treated as threats. Literally from the moment I entered the building, I was exposed to institutionalized pressures not just to identify myself mentally as a teacher but to disentangle myself from the body-based experiences of students.
I went up an empty staircase and started searching for Jake's classroom. While I was walking through a long, bare corridor looking for room 214, the shockingly loud bell rang to end the period. Within just a few seconds, multiple doors opened and the emotional stampede began. Whoosh! As kids talked, yelled, screamed jokes, rapped, made beats and sang, a swarm of baseball caps, puffy winter coats, and bright colors engulfed me. I was amazed by the raw energy unleashed when so many bodies moved around through the suddenly quite smallish hallway. The adrenaline shot through my veins. I felt like I had just had five cups of coffee.
Finally I found it, room 214. Just outside Jake's classroom a dark-skinned student with what I took to be a Jamaican accent pretended to hold a gun—sideways—and shoot a victim lying on the ground in front of him. "Buuyaka, buuyaka, buuyaka—T[h]ree in da [h]elmet." His companions paid some attention, but on the whole they seemed unmoved by his somewhat playful performance of machismo. Most of them were too busy people watching, just taking it all in. One of the dark-skinned boys making up this vaguely bounded energy circle was banging out dancehall beats on the wall next to the classroom door. The rhythms, the shrieks, the laughs, the distinctive face-work, all the more or less ghettoized gaits, the relative docility of the seemingly meek, the socio-linguistic enactments of ethnonational belonging, the diverse ways of doing race, the gendered and gendering outfits, and the budding bustling vividness of it all were almost too much to register all at once.
Making my way past the small cluster of boys and entering Jake's classroom, I felt as if I had been discharged from a realm overflowing with excitement (tinged with teenage angst) and into an adult's private, low energy sphere of influence. Jake greeted me more calmly then he usually did at the gym and, without giving it much thought, I took a seat in front next to the door and near the ongoing performance of the showman with roots in the West Indies. A few more kids dragged themselves into the classroom. Rather than impolite or hostile, most seemed disengaged. The bell soon rang and the hallway started to empty. The beats, ritualized greetings, screams of delight, laughter, and taunts that had come to life in the corridor all subsided. The tyranny of the bells, I would later come to understand, was supported by mobile teams of security guards and "hallway deans" (as well as two uniformed policemen)—all connected by walkie-talkies.
The class was a disaster, I thought. Jake struggled to get any verbal feedback or to get the students even slightly engaged in written assignments. The kids seemed utterly unconcerned with what the all but irrelevant guy in the front of the room was trying to get them to do. One boy, slouching almost to the point of lying down in his desk/chair unit stared blankly at Jake and the blackboard with nothing on his desk but one black leather glove, which he proceeded to take off and put on over and over again. Two kids seemed to be asleep in the back. One girl came in late, in extremely tight jeans. She talked to a girlfriend, almost perpetually—even as Jake pleaded with her to be quiet. The nonstop chatting seemed all the more bizarre because the two girls were sitting in the front row, just a few seats away from me and almost adjacent to Jake's desk. The presence of a strange adult and proximity to the teacher apparently had no effect. Finally, Jake raised his voice and asked the latecomer with the noteworthy jeans to leave. Nothing. She did stop talking, but she did not move an inch. Jake asked her to leave a second time. Again an awkward silence ensued. "Whatever," she said at last as she slowly got up to leave. Her face expressed a mix of disgust and apathy. As she sashayed over to the door a boy in the back of the room, who had been silent until that point, perked up and said, "Damn she got a fat ass." Jake pretended not to hear this, which surprised me as much as the comment itself.
In Jake's class what I experienced as extraordinary appeared to be entirely mundane. Lesson one, I would later think: While life in the halls is electric and full of meaning, at least under the conditions I was observing, the majority of the kids seem not to focus on or care about the teaching of the formal curriculum or anything else that took place inside classrooms. Lesson two: Getting along in "their" classrooms, many teachers let countless "minor" provocations slide and seemed to find this routine.
Almost as soon as the bell rang to end the period, the hallway scene sprang to life once more. The pupils, seemingly released by the bell, returned to the energizing space on the other side of the classroom door. Left alone, I was confronted by the need to say something to Jake while keeping a straight face. But a most inviting situational way out emerged when Jake appeared happy about the few minutes that he had been able to engage a couple of kids in anything, anything at all, related to Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
Looking back now I can say this was the first time that I was sucked into—or allowed myself to get sucked into—the show. Pretending that one teaches and that one's colleagues actually teach is basic to the ongoing practical adaptations of professionals on the ground in such "lousy place[s] to learn anything" (Becker 1972). The summons was at once subtle (just a friendly smile from a genuinely nice guy doing his best) and irresistible (due to my largely unconscious framing of the situation and my preverbal emotional calculus, "playing along" was basically the one possible move open to me). It was already becoming difficult to think, let alone to say anything along the lines of, "Jake, man, that was really pathetic. That was the 'English class' you wanted me to check out? Where most of the kids are 'sweethearts' because they did not actively resist your efforts to teach? Where the hell am I?" Far too embroiled to give it any real thought at the time, right then and there, I (almost) automatically mirrored Jake's goody-two-shoes demeanor. I actually found myself mimicking his posture and state of mind.
After class Jake introduced me to his supervisor—according to the kitschy nameplate on her muddled desk, the Assistant Principal of the English Department. Immediately after finding out about my educational background, she walked us over to another supervisor on another floor, the "AP" of social studies/history. Despite my lack of teaching credentials or experience, this smallish man in a cheap suit asked me to start "subbing" as soon as possible. With a Brooklyn accent as strong as any I'd heard in years, this second supervisor assured me that I could soon become a full-time teacher in his department and that I would have several years to work on becoming certified. 3 The AP asked when I could start. He also began filling in forms that I was to take down to the Board of Education office in Brooklyn. The social studies AP informed me that there were kids "wandering the halls even as we speak" because he simply had no regularly assigned teacher or long term "sub" to put in front of their classrooms.
I agreed to start as a substitute at Johnson High as soon as possible. We agreed that I would—off the record—have my own classes, due to two teachers being out with "long-term illnesses." The supervisor predicted, with another coy smile, that there would be other teachers who would become "ill," for weeks at a time, and that I would therefore have more than enough de facto regular teaching work in addition to the more traditional "sub" work (i.e., "coverages"). Above all, I was able to start teaching in Johnson High for one reason: no one else wanted the job. In the 1990s roughly half of the new teachers exited the New York City public school system by their sixth year (Brumberg 2000, p. 142), and turnover rates were highest in high-poverty, high-stress schools. Mainly because the swimming pool was leaking, I was invited to jump in.
Let us take a few steps back, now, and get a wide-angle view of this major neighborhood institution. Approaching the building, especially when the students were still out of view, Johnson High School looked like a classic early twentieth century American high school. Roughly half a city block long, it was clearly built to last. One could see why it had been viewed, for decades, as one of the best high schools in the city. Indeed long after World War II this proud public institution had been a springboard for the largely Jewish families moving up from places like the Lower East Side. The front entrance, complete with grassy knolls, trees, and an extended concrete walkway leading to a cross street, was neo-classical in style; a touch of the Ivy League just off the Bronx's most beautiful boulevard, the Grand Concourse. At first glance, especially from within and early in the morning, the thick stone building seemed to have nothing to do with the graffiti-drenched tenement buildings, run down bodegas, piles of garbage, broken up sidewalks, and filthy restaurants that had come to surround it. The long corridors on all four floors were immaculate every morning before the students started to trickle in. Johnson could look like an island of civility and order in a sea of degradation and disarray. And in some ways, for some students, it was.
At the same time, the signs of decay were unmistakable. When I arrived there was no playing field, only an enormous and cracked up secondary parking lot that was almost never used. A thirty-foot-high fence surrounded the parking lot that was used by the staff, only a tiny percentage of whom lived in the immediate vicinity. This towering fence along with a multiplicity of gates, gratings, and iron window coverings gave the impression of a besieged fortress. And from the moment one started to witness the hip-hop flavored clothing and postures of the incoming pupils, it became quite evident that Johnson had become a school for urban outcasts. Cliché or not, you know you are in a truly broken down monstrosity of a "school" when you see girls as young as fourteen coming in through a special entrance for those pushing baby strollers. Often with scarves wrapped around their heads, enormous gold-plated earrings, gold-capped teeth, oversized T-shirts the same color as their Nike hightops—sweatpants pulled up to the knee on one leg—these "babies with babies" made their way through a special side entrance toward Johnson's one elevator and the day-care center at the top floor. On some days this center cared for over twenty infants and young children.
Perhaps nothing sent as robust and invasive a message to those approaching the building as the bodily bearing and rhythmic movements of the more "thuggish" students and their associates positioned in front of the students' entrance. (Every morning there were nonstudents who mixed it up with the typically more dominant pupils still at least officially attending Johnson while, for example, letting their pitbulls and Dobermans run around on the grassy areas in front of the school.) Initially without words or sounds, this forewarning was issued every morning as students and staff drew close enough to make out the figures clustering around to the main entrance.
To be sure, other types of signals communicated important messages to those entering Johnson High as well. Clothing, footwear, baseball caps, headscarves, and bandanas mattered, especially when they were embodied adroitly and purposefully deployed in order to "flash" allegiances to specific street gangs (cf. Garot 2010). And of course, to hear the boisterous, ever-repeated calls of the more ostentatious students ("What up, family?" "You aaaiight [all right] dawgs?" "You know how WE do?"), to listen to the synchronized singing, rapping, and beat-boxing almost always audible around the main staging areas, and to perceive the sound of the collective belly laughs of those who felt relaxed enough to enjoy a good "dis" (i.e., the disrespecting of, or the "screaming on" a person or group)—all of this confirmed the power of signals communicated through the ritualized performances of Bodies That Matter (Butler 1993).
The signaling certainly did not end here. Oftentimes, while approaching the school, one saw uniformed security guards and regular police stationed just outside the building. This further communicated the same point to those crossing the threshold into the Johnson High: you are now entering a physically dangerous public institution. In the afternoon it was hard to miss confirmation that students and staff were leaving a perilous social arena. Diverse police vehicles (always at least one cruiser, often a paddy wagon) and uniformed officers were deployed in an effort to make the exit areas at least partially safe. From roughly a half a block away from the building, of course, the (informal groups of ) kids were left to their own devices.
Officially, year in, year out, Johnson was depicted as being roughly thirty-five percent "Black" and sixty-five percent "Hispanic." A "bilingual"—i.e., Spanish speaking—program at Johnson effectively formed a sub-school within the overall educational environment. "Bilingual" students, who in many cases arrived in the United States fairly recently and who were generally understood to be comparatively less disruptive and aggressive, made up roughly a third of the school population. These pupils tended to be clustered into separate classes and, in many cases, separate sections of the school building. My research focused on the English-speaking segment of the school that was, officially, less than fifty percent "Hispanic." New arrivals from Haiti were formally depicted as "Black," while students from the Dominican Republic—i.e., kids from the other side of the same island who, in many cases, had equally dark skin—showed up in the statistics as "Hispanic." The large contingent of students (whose parents were) from the Dominican Republic, the smaller yet significant percentage of kids (whose parents or grandparents had come) from Puerto Rico, and the relatively small numbers of pupils with roots in Mexico, and Central and South America—all showed up in the statistics as "Hispanic." The statistically insignificant percentages of students from nations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh were thrust together under the label "Asian."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Toxic Schools by BOWEN PAULLE. Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceChapter 1: Introduction—Getting Situated
Chapter 2: Recognizing the Real, Restructuring the Game
Chapter 3: Episodic Violence, Perpetual Threats
Chapter 4: Exile and Commitment
Chapter 5: Survival of the Nurtured
Chapter 6: The Tipping of Classrooms, Teachers Left Behind
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Appendix: Research Methods and the Evolution of Ideas
Notes
Bibliography
Index