Abstract
Bowen Paulle’s book, Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam, is not a figurative examination of how urban schools poison low-income and minority students’ ability to succeed. It is literal. Rather than addressing, as so many studies do, the ways in which schools facilitate their students’ underperformance on tests and their inability to acquire the necessary knowledge to prepare them for college, Toxic Schools focuses on students’ visceral, daily lived experiences navigating chaotic and stressful school environments in the South Bronx (New York) and the Bijlmer (a predominantly black neighborhood in southeast Amsterdam). This rich ethnographic account of students’ experiences deploys vignettes of individual students and teachers to elucidate school-based experiences to argue that schools drain students of the energy necessary to foster educational success and instead force them to channel their energy in coping strategies simply to survive the day.
After “setting the scene” by introducing the schools under examination and the author’s entry into them as a teacher (he spent three years in each), Paulle inserts himself into the theoretical debate, in a thoroughly readable way, by focusing on students’ race- and class-based identities as they exist in each nation and the effects of these identities on students’ daily lived experiences. Paulle situates his work within multiple literatures—the debate around Ogbu and Fordham’s “oppositional culture” and Devine’s “culture of violence” paradigms, Anderson’s “street” versus “decent” culture argument, segmented assimilation literature documenting “downward assimilation” of new immigrants in educational settings, Bourdieu’s habitus, and Katz’s idea of corporeal reactions to external educational structures. Combined, these inform Paulle’s efforts to assess students’ coping mechanisms and the everyday routines, behaviors, and rituals that occupy their emotional energy and time while in school. The brief methodological section is supplemented by a more extended version in an appendix, which should be of use to researchers entering the field.
Throughout the book, Paulle focuses on the behaviors that support “real” and “fake” identities. According to students’ own definitions, students must either acquire a “real” identity or survive in schools dominated by these norms. “Realness” entails displaying “swagger,” sexuality, and particular clothing styles, attitudes, and speech that conform to dominant stereotypes of black youths in both nations. Detailed depictions of these behaviors and their effects on peer groups and school culture might have been supplemented with critiques of this “cool pose” and its links to the structural forces that produce an aura of a perpetual threat of violence in these schools. Although only taken to the extreme on rare occasions, this aura nevertheless structures students’ daily experiences in an educational tinderbox. Situations of extreme violence, rather than cementing and validating “real” students’ power, momentarily upended the social hierarchy and found the quieter students, those who are seen as “fake” or outside the “real” peer group, as sage interpreters of the school’s environment.
While a strength of the book is the focus on the everyday lived realities of students, the most revealing findings are those addressing outliers—students who could have succeeded but did not, those who succeeded in spite of the schools, students’ behavior when removed from their immediate environments, and successful teachers. Traveling to a different, whiter, richer part of the city found the “realest” students acting and interacting in a far more reserved, almost cautious, manner, rather than displaying oppositional consciousness. This was the case both for an entire class of students in New York City taken to see Amistad (not the opportunity for consciousness-raising that teachers hoped for) and in Amsterdam, with a former and current student outside of the Bijlmer.
Equally revealing are the students and teachers who, had they not been at either Delta (the school in the Bijlmer) or Johnson (the school in the Bronx), would have likely been far more successful in their endeavors. Some students were successful in their previous schools but found themselves spiraling downward without sufficient structure, academic rigor, or support in the urban schools. Another student had been influenced by strong community role models while living briefly in the South, allowing him to succeed academically at Johnson. These outliers reveal how schools impose their values through the availability (or lack thereof) of support necessary for students to achieve, both academically and emotionally. Vignettes about female teachers, one of whom succumbed to violent behavior that students regularly performed and another who maintained control over a positive classroom environment through attention to the corporeal, emotional, and environmental factors necessary for success reveal both the challenges and the possibilities for educators working in these environments. As with students, coping strategies to manage stress are essential. Offering an innovative educational reform, Paulle suggests that schools implement stress-reduction programs for students. This suggestion is a keen insight that, if taken seriously, could drastically alter the culture of urban schools (though, given the contemporary focus on assessment, it seems highly unlikely to be taken up).
The strength of the book lies in its in-depth illustration of a school environment in which students must develop coping mechanisms to “succeed,” both emotionally and intellectually. This seems largely out of the question for most students, particularly combined with the lack of structure and teaching, but more attention to the academic success of the majority of students in the schools, those who did not seek to be “real,” could have provided a deeper answer. Nevertheless, for many students the situation appears dire. These findings align closely with recent literature examining the role of stress due to poverty and daily microaggressions on minority health, particularly on cognitive development in youth, and the potential long-term consequences of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diminished immune systems. Examining teens, Paulle argues that students’ lives are similarly shaped by school-based stress that, combined with adolescent hormones, produces a physically toxic environment.
Although representing a thoroughly new interpretation of urban students’ educational failure, in documenting these stressful environments the book moves dangerously close to voyeurism and reifying stereotypes of black youth in both nations and would have been strengthened by a discussion of these and their relationships to larger racial structures. In particular, those considering assigning Toxic Schools to undergraduates of any race must ensure a deep understanding of the ways in which social structures shape stereotypes and perceptions of urban youth. Given the largely non-white spaces in which these schools and the students within them operate, these settings seem ripe for a deeper analysis of how whiteness, beyond how it impinges on students’ daily lives as they perceive them, still matters. Students are judged based on white norms, take white tests, attend white-run schools, and exist in a society that structures their educational opportunities in a far different manner than if they lived in the richer, whiter neighborhoods that they visited. Race cannot be discounted. The students would not be in these toxic schools were it not for their race. This is true both in the United States and in the Netherlands, where many deny the existence and importance of race for daily, lived experiences.