Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries

High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam

Bowen Paulle

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226066554
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Violent urban schools loom large in our culture: for decades they have served as the centerpieces of political campaigns and as window dressing for brutal television shows and movies. Yet unequal access to quality schools remains the single greatest failing of our society—and one of the most hotly debated issues of our time. Of all the usual words used to describe non-selective city schools—segregated, unequal, violent—none comes close to characterizing their systemic dysfunction in high-poverty neighborhoods. The most accurate word is toxic.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.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. Text printed on the back of T-shirt sported by a Johnson High student strolling through one of his school’s long hallways.

2. Antonio, a soft-spoken and mild-mannered seventeen year old, on a key expression used by (usually male) members of the Delta School’s dominant peer groups. Originally: “Ik kom hard, ja, dat is wat ze zeggen.”

3. Here and elsewhere, for reasons discussed below, I use racial categories as member’s terms rather than as analytic ones—i.e., as emic rather than etic concepts.

4. Ethnographic texts are full of rich discussions about insider and outsider status (cf. Desmond 2007, 283–307). For now I will add only this: I was an insider in the sense that I worked first and foremost as a teacher. One might however consider me only a quasi-native for at least two reasons. First, unlike the other teachers, I also operated as a researcher. I hung around and built relationships where others did not. Second, I sensed that I would eventually become an academic. I could therefore be open about my mishaps in and out of classrooms in part because I never saw myself as what some colleagues called a “lifer.”

5. I experimented with both types of annual cycles, teaching at a high-poverty high school in downtown Brooklyn during the summer of 1997.

6. As I have done here, throughout the rest of the book the Dutch version of the term in question will be italicized (and the English version will appear in brackets).

7. What are known in the United States as “high schools” do not exist in the Netherlands. The institutions examined here were secondary schools. I occasionally refer to both Johnson and Delta as “high schools” for stylistic reasons.

8. The next chapter goes into detail on these and related issues such as crime rates and percentages of single-parent families.

9. Cf. Gaston Alonso et al.’s Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failure in Urban Education Demonstrates this Point with Regard to High-Poverty Schools across the United States (2009).

10. For these reasons—and without in any way denying the need to carefully scrutinize the broad spectrum of ways in which advanced marginality has over the course of many centuries come to be organized on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean—I maintain that Johnson High and the Delta School can be described as failing “ghetto” schools. In the specific case of this concept as well as more generally, I will use double (scare) quotes throughout the book while making use of native terms.

11. On collective charisma and group disgrace, see Elias and Scotson (1964) and Elias in Goudsblom and Mennell (1998, 104–12).

12. Here it might be useful to add a few words about Dewey’s proto-sociological imagination and to anticipate where it might lead us in terms of contemporary sociological research: the “social forces and relationships that situate human behavior and consciousness are comprehensible in terms of what John Dewey call[ed] the “qualitative immediacy” or non-thematized “sense” of the social world” (Ostrow 1990, 1). It is to this immediately situated and corporeally lived-through sense or feel for the game—to use Bourdieu’s (1990) preferred terms for what he also called the at once embedded and embodied logic of practice—that I want to return as often as possible. On the striking affinities between Bourdieu and Dewey see Emirbayer and Schneiderhan (2013, 131–57) as well as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 84, 122).

13. Along with the names of the two schools, the names of all the people in them have been altered.

14. Roxanne on the meaning of a prominent social category used to distinguish highranking, high-energy individuals and groups.

15. We set up an after-school video club that operated, informally, as an ongoing discussion group. In addition to granting her access to the school, this got the kids, teachers, and security guards used to seeing me accompanied by a young women walking around with a rather large camera and bag full of audio equipment. Being interviewed on camera remained anything but a naturally occurring event. Perhaps it is fair to say, however, that this filmmaker and I made serious efforts to reduce the discomfort our interviewees/discussion group participants felt. We stressed that they could always refuse to answer specific questions and that they were free to stop the interview (or their participation) at any time.

16. Similarly, in a videotaped session in Johnson High one of the students in the video club declared that, “When I first saw you, I thought you was white.” She had changed her opinion, I would suggest, in part because of my somewhat Mediterranean looks and in part because of the bodily hexis that one “naturally” acquires as a “baller” in New York City who, for example, ends up attending a basketball factory disguised as a Catholic high school in the South Bronx. While in New York I was more than once asked if one of my parents came from Puerto Rico. Perhaps more because of phenotype than anything else, I was often asked in the Netherlands if I had Arab roots—especially by young people whose parents came from places like Turkey or Morocco.

17. Around thirty years of age, a few years older than I was at the time, this colleague with a slight Jamaican-British accent and a bachelor apartment in an impoverished section of central Harlem set up and witnessed my first encounter with Roxanne and one of her friends—a girl he also suggested for an interview. While my veteran colleague only asked a few questions, his solemn body language and tone of voice indicated that he was taking the encounter seriously.

18. We started with Roxanne’s girlfriend, also a student at Johnson, who seemed to ease quickly from obvious discomfort into a much more confident and informal way of speaking and gesturing. She appeared to enjoy telling her story. Seemingly in the flow, at a certain point, Roxanne’s girlfriend discussed how many of the boys she knew bragged about “catching bodies” (stabbing other boys). Looking on silently, Roxanne observed the first interview. Then it was her turn.

19. Of course, this non-thematization might be explained in part by the fact that she never saw white adolescents in or anywhere near her school (i.e., the segregation was so complete that it became invisible). One might additionally propose that Roxanne avoided race because she categorized two of the adults in the room as white. But, as I later confirmed, Roxanne did not seem to have race on her mind during her conversations with the nominally black teacher who set up the interview either. Whether or not unspoken sensitivities related to centuries of racial domination (subconsciously) filtered and fueled her comments remains unclear.

20. Katz (1999, 142).

21. Pollner and Emerson (2001, 130) make use of this famous quote to emphasize a key, deep-down affinity between ethnomethodology and ethnography. The punch line itself, so memorable in part because it speaks to the discomforting bodily experiences of the authentic fieldworker in action, comes from Robert Park (as recalled by Howard Becker and quoted originally in McKinney [1966, 71]).

22. That is, for many researchers in the two national contexts, including members of the gender and racial/ethno-national “groups” most at risk in high-poverty high schools. Rather than falling into this groove of non-reflexive essentialism (or what Brubaker calls “engrained groupism”), and aiming for a genuinely relational and processual approach (cf. Paulle, Van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer 2012), I treat terms like “black” and “Antillean” as native categories reflecting at once broader cultural understandings and how certain students would identify themselves if they were asked to do so along racial or ethno-national lines. Such categories, approached here as continuously shifting meaning-making constructions, say nothing about the salience of various types of (self- or other-) ascribed identifications emerging and declining in situ. Nor does treating, for example, African American or Afro-Antillean-Dutch students as category members say anything about the continual rise and fall of (peer) groups understood as “mutually interacting, mutually recognizing collectivit[ies] with a sense of solidarity . . . and capacity for concerted action” (Brubaker 2006, 8). Crucially then, to note that blacks on average differed from members of other racialized or ethno-nationalized folk categories (e.g., Puerto Ricans, Hindustanis) in terms of overrepresentation among the most aggressive and disruptive students is not to say anything about my own analytic categories, a rigorous analysis of group-forming processes, or an ethno-sociological analysis of coping processes more generally.

23. Here I make use of Garfinkel’s (1967, 11) famous definition of ethnomethodology.

24. For well over a decade now it has been widely understood that everyday emotional environments and experiences in (high) schools are sculpting (and pruning) neurological pathways in students’ (adolescent) brains. As Brazelton and Greenspan (2000) showed, immersing children and adolescents in stable and supportive social environments will tend to restructure their brain circuitry in beneficial ways. Exposing them to chronically stressful environments during such sensitive developmental periods will tend to have negative—and potentially extremely durable—impacts on the executive functioning skills that are implicated in emotional self-control and the use of foresight. Furthermore, as the two researchers (2000, 1–4) demonstrate, “We have come to understand that emotional interactions are the foundation not only of cognition but of most of a child’s intellectual abilities, including his creativity and abstract thinking skills. . . . Emotions are actually the internal architects, conductors, organizers of our minds. They tell us how and what to think, what to say and when to say it, and what to do. We ‘know’ things through our emotional interactions and then apply that knowledge to the cognitive world.” For an accessible overview from a long-time leader in the field of stress research, see McEwen (2002). For a more recent review of research on of how social stress negatively impacts neuroplasticity as well as how well-being can be promoted, see Davidson and McEwen (2012).

25. Through the effects of particular hormones, as Epel et al. (2004) show, sustained exposure to high levels of stress accelerates the shortening of telomeres (the protective caps at the end of chromosomes). This in turn speeds up aging and the onset of health-related problems. Related findings suggest that chronic exposure to stress early in life causes inflammation in adults (Danese et al. 2007).

26. Here I borrow from the title of the “National Geographic” documentary featuring Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsky titled Stress: Portrait of a Killer (2008). For excerpts, see http://killerstress.stanford.edu/ (accessed August 28, 2012).

27. In a report entitled “The Effects of Childhood Stress on Health Across the Lifespan” (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2008, 3–4), stress is defined as “internal or external influences that disrupt an individual’s normal state of well-being. These influences are capable of affecting health by causing emotional distress and leading to a variety of physiological changes. These changes include increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and a dramatic rise in hormone levels.” The authors make a clear distinction between “positive” and “tolerable” stress (which can keep kids sharp or help them learn valuable life skills) on one hand, and, on the other, “toxic stress”—which they see as a massive threat to (networks of) especially at-risk individuals as well as to public health.

28. In arguing that the variability of distressing processes can be adequately detailed only through real fieldwork and ethnographic portrayals, I do not mean to belittle the outstanding work being done at the crossroads of urban sociology and public health (e.g., Massey 2004) that does not always try to unpack “stressors.”

29. With regard to the statistics, furthermore, we often see quite different types of trajectories homogenized into seemingly standardized outcomes (e.g., total number of “dropouts” or “high achievers”). All of those associated with this or that outcome are then subdivided into preexisting categories (or worse, into clearly bounded “groups”) such as “black” or “white.” While one might argue that such practices are necessary if we are to monitor the “black-white achievement gap,” this tells us next to nothing about how previous experiences, in-school transactions, and orientations toward the future actually produced what might be seen as very different types of outcomes (e.g., the “dropout” who had to find a job to feed a child vs. the teen who was afraid to go to school vs. the one who does not buy into the very idea of pursuing a diploma) as well as how and when (non-) racialized categories impact students’ lives.

30. The heart of the problem is, in the explanation of social behavior, privileging pre-established and stable categorical attributes of subjects (assumed to have and be guided by their own internal mental deliberations) over the ongoing bundles of social relations that penetrate (and to some degree reshape) exposed beings. Moving on, it might therefore be useful to keep in mind Emirbayer and Goodwin’s (1994, 1414) “anticategorical imperative”—the imperative which opposes explanations of actual behavior exclusively or even primarily in terms “categorical attributes of actors, whether individual or collective.”

31. I am paraphrasing a line from Goffman (1967, 3) to which we will return in the coming chapters.

32. Orwell (1946), “Politics and the English Language.”

33. Years before Bourdieu and Passeron ([1964] 1979) started developing ideas with regard to how schools stealthy function to reproduce distributio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Preface
• One. Introduction—Getting Situated
• Two. Recognizing the Real, Restructuring the Game
• Three. Episodic Violence, Perpetual Threats
• Four. Exile and Commitment
• Five. Survival of the Nurtured
• Six. The Tipping of Classrooms, Teachers Left Behind
• Seven. Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Research Methods and the Evolution of Ideas
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index