Toxic Schools

High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam

By BOWEN PAULLE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06638-7

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..viiONE / Introduction—Getting Situated………………………………….1TWO / Recognizing the Real, Restructuring the Game…………………….33THREE / Episodic Violence, Perpetual Threats………………………….67FOUR / Exile and Commitment…………………………………………105FIVE / Survival of the Nurtured……………………………………..131SIX / The Tipping of Classrooms, Teachers Left Behind………………….167SEVEN / Conclusion…………………………………………………199Acknowledgments……………………………………………………215Appendix: Research Methods and the Evolution of Ideas………………….217Notes…………………………………………………………….241Bibliography………………………………………………………283Index…………………………………………………………….295

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 contingenciesthat play upon a set of individuals, so that you can … penetrate their circle ofresponse … That “tunes your body up” and with your “tuned-up” body … you’reempathetic enough—because you’ve been taking the same crap they’ve been taking—tosense 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 ofserious work.

A friend named Jake invited me to check out one of his classes up in theBronx. That’s how it all started. Reclining on the bleachers next to a basketballcourt after a workout at the Westside YMCA in the fall of 1996, Jakewas 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 commentsand his relaxed delivery had a rather soothing effect. Furthermore,Jake seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about the life of the New YorkCity public schoolteacher. He mentioned that some of his colleagues hadbecome 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 fatefulfirst day back up in the “Boogie Down” Bronx. While standing in line withthe other students headed for the metal detectors just beyond the building’smassive front doors, I heard the following conversation about me. “Is thata new student?” asked one boy standing behind me. “Damn, that nigga’skinda tall,” was another student’s response. Upon making it through themetal detectors a male security guard (or “security officer,” as they preferredto be called) made clear that I would not be checked with the handhelddetector that was waved along the bodies of all the incoming students. Arrivingat the desk behind the school’s main line of defense I picked up myguest pass from a female security officer who explained, with a wry smile,that I could have entered through the teachers’ side entrance. The messagebeing communicated was clear cut: the incoming students, not the adults,are treated as threats. Literally from the moment I entered the building, Iwas exposed to institutionalized pressures not just to identify myself mentallyas a teacher but to disentangle myself from the body-based experiencesof 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! Askids talked, yelled, screamed jokes, rapped, made beats and sang, a swarmof baseball caps, puffy winter coats, and bright colors engulfed me. I wasamazed by the raw energy unleashed when so many bodies moved aroundthrough the suddenly quite smallish hallway. The adrenaline shot throughmy 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-skinnedstudent with what I took to be a Jamaican accent pretended to hold a gun—sideways—andshoot 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 playfulperformance of machismo. Most of them were too busy people watching,just taking it all in. One of the dark-skinned boys making up this vaguelybounded energy circle was banging out dancehall beats on the wall nextto the classroom door. The rhythms, the shrieks, the laughs, the distinctiveface-work, all the more or less ghettoized gaits, the relative docility of theseemingly meek, the socio-linguistic enactments of ethnonational belonging,the diverse ways of doing race, the gendered and gendering outfits, andthe budding bustling vividness of it all were almost too much to register allat 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 energysphere of influence. Jake greeted me more calmly then he usually did at thegym and, without giving it much thought, I took a seat in front next to thedoor and near the ongoing performance of the showman with roots in theWest Indies. A few more kids dragged themselves into the classroom. Ratherthan impolite or hostile, most seemed disengaged. The bell soon rang andthe 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 supportedby mobile teams of security guards and “hallway deans” (as well as twouniformed policemen)—all connected by walkie-talkies.

The class was a disaster, I thought. Jake struggled to get any verbal feedbackor to get the students even slightly engaged in written assignments. Thekids seemed utterly unconcerned with what the all but irrelevant guy in thefront of the room was trying to get them to do. One boy, slouching almostto the point of lying down in his desk/chair unit stared blankly at Jake andthe blackboard with nothing on his desk but one black leather glove, whichhe proceeded to take off and put on over and over again. Two kids seemedto be asleep in the back. One girl came in late, in extremely tight jeans. Shetalked to a girlfriend, almost perpetually—even as Jake pleaded with her tobe quiet. The nonstop chatting seemed all the more bizarre because the twogirls were sitting in the front row, just a few seats away from me and almostadjacent to Jake’s desk. The presence of a strange adult and proximity to theteacher apparently had no effect. Finally, Jake raised his voice and asked thelatecomer 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. Againan awkward silence ensued. “Whatever,” she said at last as she slowly gotup to leave. Her face expressed a mix of disgust and apathy. As she sashayedover to the door a boy in the back of the room, who had been silent untilthat point, perked up and said, “Damn she got a fat ass.” Jake pretended notto hear this, which surprised me as much as the comment itself.

In Jake’s class what I experienced as extraordinary appeared to be entirelymundane. Lesson one, I would later think: While life in the halls iselectric 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 ofthe 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 scenesprang to life once more. The pupils, seemingly released by the bell, returnedto the energizing space on the other side of the classroom door. Leftalone, I was confronted by the need to say something to Jake while keepinga straight face. But a most inviting situational way out emerged when Jakeappeared happy about the few minutes that he had been able to engage acouple of kids in anything, anything at all, related to Arthur Miller’s TheCrucible.

Looking back now I can say this was the first time that I was suckedinto—or allowed myself to get sucked into—the show. Pretending that oneteaches and that one’s colleagues actually teach is basic to the ongoing practicaladaptations of professionals on the ground in such “lousy place[s] tolearn anything” (Becker 1972). The summons was at once subtle (just afriendly smile from a genuinely nice guy doing his best) and irresistible(due to my largely unconscious framing of the situation and my preverbalemotional calculus, “playing along” was basically the one possible moveopen to me). It was already becoming difficult to think, let alone to sayanything along the lines of, “Jake, man, that was really pathetic. That wasthe ‘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? Wherethe 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-shoesdemeanor. I actually found myself mimicking his posture and stateof mind.

After class Jake introduced me to his supervisor—according to the kitschynameplate 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 socialstudies/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 secondsupervisor assured me that I could soon become a full-time teacher in hisdepartment 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 Iwas to take down to the Board of Education office in Brooklyn. The socialstudies AP informed me that there were kids “wandering the halls even aswe 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 twoteachers 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 thanenough 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 JohnsonHigh for one reason: no one else wanted the job. In the 1990s roughlyhalf of the new teachers exited the New York City public school system bytheir sixth year (Brumberg 2000, p. 142), and turnover rates were highest inhigh-poverty, high-stress schools. Mainly because the swimming pool wasleaking, I was invited to jump in.

Let us take a few steps back, now, and get a wide-angle view of this majorneighborhood institution. Approaching the building, especially when thestudents were still out of view, Johnson High School looked like a classicearly twentieth century American high school. Roughly half a city blocklong, it was clearly built to last. One could see why it had been viewed, fordecades, as one of the best high schools in the city. Indeed long after WorldWar II this proud public institution had been a springboard for the largelyJewish families moving up from places like the Lower East Side. The frontentrance, complete with grassy knolls, trees, and an extended concrete walkwayleading to a cross street, was neo-classical in style; a touch of the IvyLeague just off the Bronx’s most beautiful boulevard, the Grand Concourse.At first glance, especially from within and early in the morning, the thickstone building seemed to have nothing to do with the graffiti-drenched tenementbuildings, run down bodegas, piles of garbage, broken up sidewalks,and filthy restaurants that had come to surround it. The long corridors onall four floors were immaculate every morning before the students started totrickle in. Johnson could look like an island of civility and order in a sea ofdegradation and disarray. And in some ways, for some students, it was.

At the same time, the signs of decay were unmistakable. When I arrivedthere was no playing field, only an enormous and cracked up secondaryparking lot that was almost never used. A thirty-foot-high fence surroundedthe parking lot that was used by the staff, only a tiny percentage of whomlived in the immediate vicinity. This towering fence along with a multiplicityof gates, gratings, and iron window coverings gave the impressionof a besieged fortress. And from the moment one started to witness thehip-hop flavored clothing and postures of the incoming pupils, it becamequite evident that Johnson had become a school for urban outcasts. Clichéor 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 entrancefor those pushing baby strollers. Often with scarves wrapped aroundtheir heads, enormous gold-plated earrings, gold-capped teeth, oversizedT-shirts the same color as their Nike hightops—sweatpants pulled up tothe knee on one leg—these “babies with babies” made their way through aspecial side entrance toward Johnson’s one elevator and the day-care centerat the top floor. On some days this center cared for over twenty infants andyoung children.

Perhaps nothing sent as robust and invasive a message to those approachingthe building as the bodily bearing and rhythmic movements ofthe more “thuggish” students and their associates positioned in front of thestudents’ entrance. (Every morning there were nonstudents who mixed itup with the typically more dominant pupils still at least officially attendingJohnson while, for example, letting their pitbulls and Dobermans runaround on the grassy areas in front of the school.) Initially without wordsor sounds, this forewarning was issued every morning as students and staffdrew close enough to make out the figures clustering around to the mainentrance.

To be sure, other types of signals communicated important messagesto those entering Johnson High as well. Clothing, footwear, baseball caps,headscarves, and bandanas mattered, especially when they were embodiedadroitly and purposefully deployed in order to “flash” allegiances to specificstreet 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 tothe synchronized singing, rapping, and beat-boxing almost always audiblearound the main staging areas, and to perceive the sound of the collectivebelly 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 thisconfirmed the power of signals communicated through the ritualized performancesof Bodies That Matter (Butler 1993).

The signaling certainly did not end here. Oftentimes, while approachingthe school, one saw uniformed security guards and regular police stationedjust outside the building. This further communicated the same point tothose crossing the threshold into the Johnson High: you are now entering aphysically dangerous public institution. In the afternoon it was hard to missconfirmation 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 atleast partially safe. From roughly a half a block away from the building, ofcourse, the (informal groups of ) kids were left to their own devices.

Officially, year in, year out, Johnson was depicted as being roughly thirty-fivepercent “Black” and sixty-five percent “Hispanic.” A “bilingual”—i.e.,Spanish speaking—program at Johnson effectively formed a sub-schoolwithin the overall educational environment. “Bilingual” students, who inmany cases arrived in the United States fairly recently and who were generallyunderstood to be comparatively less disruptive and aggressive, madeup roughly a third of the school population. These pupils tended to beclustered into separate classes and, in many cases, separate sections of theschool building. My research focused on the English-speaking segment ofthe school that was, officially, less than fifty percent “Hispanic.” New arrivalsfrom Haiti were formally depicted as “Black,” while students fromthe Dominican Republic—i.e., kids from the other side of the same islandwho, in many cases, had equally dark skin—showed up in the statistics as”Hispanic.” The large contingent of students (whose parents were) from theDominican Republic, the smaller yet significant percentage of kids (whoseparents or grandparents had come) from Puerto Rico, and the relativelysmall numbers of pupils with roots in Mexico, and Central and South America—allshowed up in the statistics as “Hispanic.” The statistically insignificantpercentages of students from nations such as Pakistan and Bangladeshwere 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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