A Framework For Understanding Poverty

Kelly Brelsford

Background
Ruby K. Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty, has sold over 1,000,000 copies sine 1996. Her company aha! Process Inc. conducts 800 to 1,000 workshops and seminars a year. Dr. Payne has been considered by some to be the premier expert on the effects of poverty on children in regards to education. Others view Dr. Payne and her work with a much more critical eye. I’ve found considerably more criticism than praise.

Summary
A Framework for Understanding Poverty is intended by the author to provide people living in middle and upper classes with a better understanding of the challenges that face those living in poverty. Payne’s company has built an entire model based on her framework. Aha! Process Inc. defines the model as “a comprehensive, research based approach to success in schools that meets the requirements set under the Federal no Child Left Behind Act.” According to the company’s website, aha! Process Inc. is conducting a study in 28 schools to measure the effects of the model.
The following is a chapter-by-chapter summary, taken from information provided by WikEd, a project of the CTER program, an online Master of Education degree program in the Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Chapter One – Definitions and Resource: prepares the reader to understand the messages in the rest of the book by defining several terms. This chapter also gives a scenario involving a 10 year old girl living in poverty.

Chapter Two – The Role of Language and Story: an overview of the five different registers of language, concentrating on formal and casual. This chapter offers the ability to use formal registers (and its benefits) as one of Payne’s “hidden rules of the middle class.”

Chapter Three – Hidden Rules among Classes: begins with a quiz that helps to point out to the reader things that are taken for granted by members of upper and middle classes. This chapter also provides a chart consisting of some “hidden rules among classes.”

Chapter Four – Characteristics of Generational Poverty: provides differences between generational poverty and situational property and middle class.

Chapter Five – Role Models and Emotional Resources: discusses the importance of appropriate role models and emotional support to those living in poverty. This chapter also advises that those living in poverty are often raised in dysfunctional relationships, and this inhibits children from going through developmental stages at appropriate times.

Chapter Six – Support Systems: is an overview of the support systems that a child can access in times of need. This chapter provides seven categories of support systems.

Chapter Seven – Discipline: describes Dr. Payne’s approach to a successful discipline plan for poverty-stricken students. This chapter advocates the use of structure and choice, behavior analysis, participation of the students, and teaching hidden rules (among others).

Chapter Eight – Instruction and Improving Achievement: seeks to provide teachers with instructional strategies that will lead to achievement.

Chapter Nine – Creating Relationships: seeks to provide educators with strategies to build relationships with students living in poverty, which can lead to achievement for those students.

Criticism
One of many reasons why critics have begun to question the validity of the information within A Framework for Understanding Poverty is because Dr. Payne is essentially self-published. The information within books that are self-published does not have to be verifiable, valid, reproducible, or reliable. One published critic, Anita Bohn, questions the validity of Payne’s case studies in her 2006 article “A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne.” Bohn writes that Payne’s case studies are no more “substantive than a few random anecdotes about children and families she claims to have encountered over the years.” Bohn’s dislike of Payne is made apparent by the terminology she uses; she refers to followers of Payne’s work as “minions.”
Bohn is particularly concerned with one certain element of Payne’s work. Bohn was told by a teacher who had participated in an aha! Process Inc. seminar that she learned that “poor people can’t think abstractly.” This quote makes it fairly easy to see why Bohn as well as many others find the picture of poverty-stricken children and families painted by Payne’s work to be insulting, superficial, and bigoted. A 2008 content analysis of Payne’s framework, Miseducating Teachers about the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne's Claims about Poverty by Bomer et al. concludes that Payne’s work is an example of “deficit thinking,” (a deficit thinker believes that minority children lack something).
Paul Gorski, founder of EdChange, is another published critic of Payne. Gorski has written that Payne is a participant is what has been called “the war against the poor.” He feels that Payne’s belief that people in poverty share a “mindset” or “culture” that differs from that of the upper and middle classes unfairly generalizes people in lower socio-economic classes. Gorski speculates that there is no way that poor white U.S. citizens from Appalachian West Virginia, and poor Somali refuges share the same mind set and culture. According to Gorski, Payne’s framework is built on the concept of this shared mindset.
Another area that has raised concern among critics is the notion that Payne’s work seems to attempt to place blame for the lack of academic success among low-income students outside of schools.
The book itself (as opposed to the ideas within) and Payne’s company have also been heavily criticized. Upon booking a seminar with aha! Process Inc. the booker is required to purchase one copy of A Framework for Understanding Poverty per participant. Adversaries of Payne claim she has sold most of her book’s one million copies through these seminars. It is also said that the book reads like a workbook with answers missing and is useless without the seminar.