Barbara Chambers
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Today, teachers, principals, administrators are in a quandary. They are faced with enormous challenges on how to close educational achievement gap between poor and wealthy school districts. The pressure is even more apparent for those failing school district with large number of disadvantage, homeless and foster children. Since the advent of NCLB law in 2002, administrators and principals have been scrambling around trying to find programs that address the needs of disadvantage children, so that teachers could apply different learning methods and use tools to help their students improve test scores. One such person who received a great deal of popularity is Ruby Payne, author of the book, A Framework for understanding Poverty. She conducts over two hundred workshops a year based on the principles from her book. The main components of her book are scenarios and topics such as the use or lack of resources, “hidden rules” of different classes, language and story in speaking and writing, characteristics of poverty (generational and situational), and different approaches to discipline, role models and support systems. Her workshops focus on the habits and behaviors of people with different socioeconomic backgrounds. Some educators in school districts praise her work, while academic researchers frown upon it.
How useful is A Framework for Understanding Poverty in closing the achievement gap for poor students? According to Payne, it may serve as “practical, real-world support and guidance in working with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds” (1995).
It may help educators:
· Establish open dialogue about issues of poverty particularly “class” differences
· Recognize and apply cognitive strategies to be used to create meaningful relationships between teacher and student
· Recognize the different characteristics of poverty, generational and situational so that recommendations can be made to the appropriate support agencies.
· Reinforce “formal register” language skills over “casual register” to improve test-taking and employability skills.
· Take the initiative to be good role models in supporting student learning
· Establish open communication with parents and guardians
Some positive comments include:
“…the chapter on The Role of Language and Story…has changed the way I approach writing in the classroom.”
“…I found her explanation of the registers of language and issues surrounding them to be particularly useful in understanding some of the problems in schools today that are related to both cognition and behavior.”
“…Payne’s book has helped me look at my students behaviors through a different lens.”
Some of Payne’s work has been met with much criticism from academic scholars. The two most common criticisms have been that her work is based on assumptions rather than scientific thought, and that she perpetuates offensive stereotypes of poor families. For example the quiz from her book, “Could You Survive Poverty” make reference to these comments about people in poverty:
· I know how to get someone out of jail…
· I know how to get a gun even if I have a police record…(p.38)
Bohn (2006) says, “her work ignore social science research on poverty and language.” Gorski (2006) says that “Payne manages to exploit nearly every stereotypical deficiency” of the poor. Perhaps this might be true.
Payne’s work has raised a level of awareness in identifying different language styles and characteristics “hidden rules” of people who grow up in poverty, and that these differences in social and cultural belief influence student behaviors in the school environment. By knowing this, it may help teachers to connect and reestablish better teaching methods with poor students. However, as her critics point out it can be dangerous when she offends the same ethnic groups and does not address serious social issues that plague our schools. Perhaps, Payne needs to revamp or rework on issues relating classism and social injustices. If we want poor students to be successful in school and work, we need to modify lesson plans and instructional activities. Perhaps, if we put more emphasis on project-base learning activities, this may help improve critical thinking skills, promote creative thinking and teamwork and thus lead to better test-taking skills for all students.
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu
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