Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam By Bowen Paulle

Abstract

Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam By Bowen Paulle University of Chicago Press, 2013 Reviewed by Ariel H. Bierbaum Bowen Paulle’s Toxic Schools is an often-riveting transatlantic comparative ethnography that focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of high-poverty high schools in New York City and Amsterdam. Paulle, a native New Yorker and US-trained sociologist, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His work builds not only on sociological theory, but also on public health and epidemiological research. Paulle argues that the heightened levels of violence and stress in high- poverty schools and neighborhoods are toxic to the health, well-being, and life trajectory of both students and teachers. His novel approach to toxicity offers rich material and insights for planning scholars and practitioners who work at the intersection of public health, education, and poverty studies. Planning scholars and practitioners understand that access to high-quality education, adequate health care, well-paying jobs, and affordable housing and transportation are the key components of people’s “geographies of opportunity.” While volumes of urban scholarship and policy today aim to build more equitable geographies of opportunity, this work’s focus on the metropolitan or regional scale does not allow for careful interrogation of the everyday reality of living in high-poverty neighborhoods and attending high-poverty schools. Toxic Schools helps fill this gap, bringing to life the uneven geographies of opportunity and raising important questions for our methodological approaches as planning scholars and practitioners that shape the contexts and built environments in which these high-poverty schools persist. Paulle’s narrative is based on six years of ethnographic fieldwork as a full- time high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York City and as a part- time high school teacher in southeast Amsterdam. Both neighborhoods and schools had high concentrations of poor and minority students. According to Paulle, in both locations students and teachers described their schools similarly as “the ghetto” and invoked metaphors of “dumping grounds” and “garbage cans.” Paulle uses his introductory chapter to situate the reader theoretically as well as geographically. For those not already familiar with scholarship in