Bowen Paulle

Research Fellow

Bowen (Bo) Paulle is presently principal investigator of several projects researching the inner workings and measurable effects of potentially scalable interventions meant to dramatically improve the educational and life outcomes of deeply disadvantaged students (and their families). These students range from primary and secondary school pupils in the Netherlands to incarcerated “violent offenders” in California state prisons. The multidisciplinary research teams he heads are focusing especially on High Dosage Tutoring (HDT) and the Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) programs. Paulle is committed to a utilisation-focused evaluation paradigm combining ethnographic detail with the rigour of randomised controlled trials. A guiding notion here is that researchers and stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, professionals, practitioners, philanthropists) should work together to understand (through carefully coordinated experiments) how urgent social problems can be mitigated. Paulle set up The Scalable Education Programs Partnership in part to offer insights into the (preliminary) findings generated by his teams. Paulle is the author of Toxic Schools (2013, University of Chicago Press) which produced hypothesis that has recently been tested and validated using US data on the (longer term) health effects of attending high poverty schools (see Boen, C. E., Kozlowski, K., & Tyson, K. D. [2020].)