Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty

Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly interested in issues of social class, perhaps especially as I have seen them playing out in my Quaker meeting. Because my reaction to any random thought or question I have is to read twenty or thirty books about it, I have, well, ready twenty or thirty or more books on social class in the last few years. One of the first I read was Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which I found very useful. Payne's premise, as I recall it, is that people from different social classes have different ways of seeing the world; of relating to authority, time, and money; and of solving problems.

When I read the book, I felt like all sorts of things that had confused and vexed me about my family of origin, about certain friends and lovers, about many of my students when I was teaching at the community college, became coherent and intelligible. Behaviors that seemed dysfunctional or mistaken came into focus as adaptive ways of dealing with challenges and conflict; choices that I simply could not understand or view without judgment were revealed in a context that helped me make sense of them. I found the book tremendously helpful, and it has stayed with me for a long time, which is really saying something. I read about 300 books a year, most of them non-fiction, and since most of them are only OK, I forget a lot. So when a book keeps feeling resonant to me after over the years, when it teaches me something or changes my mind in a way that stays with me, I pay attention to that.

However, since reading Framework I have become aware that Payne is not just an author but the head of a training network that goes into schools and leads faculty and staff in workshops based on her work, and that both her writing and her work in schools are very controversial. Many people see Payne as buying into and promoting a stereotyped but untrue view of poverty, and of encouraging educators to see poor students as deficient and in need of fixing. The strength of the opposition to her is in proportion with her influence: by one measure I recently saw cited, she and her trainers have been in over 70% of school districts in the United States. She is seen as having tremendous, but detrimental, influence.

I have found this very interesting. I read Framework as proposing a model which recognizes both the strengths and deficiencies of different class-based cultural norms. But others--who are certainly more familiar, overall, with Payne's work than I am--see it as promoting middle-class ways at the expense of poor children. What did I miss?

I can see a number of possibilities for our different views of the book. It's been a few years, maybe as many as five, since I read the book. It's possible that I was relatively new to thinking about social class and did not recognize problems that would jump out at me if I were to read it now. It's possible that I have overlooked, or forgotten, the book's weaknesses while remembering its strengths. It's possible that the book itself is not horrible, but the uses it's put to in schools are.

A year or so ago, I went looking for some of the critiques of Payne, and I found a number of writers on-line who criticized her without being concrete. The accusations were repeated again and again, as if they were simply true, but without specific reference to her work. Again and again, I saw her accused of not being an academic, not being a Ph.D, [edited: my mistake. Payne actually is a Ph.D., so clearly whatever people actually have said about her, it's not this.] not giving enough attention or respect to the work of scholars who study education and social class. Now, God knows I am as big a fan of the peer-reviewed journal article as anybody, but it was very interesting to me to see people who set themselves up as experts on classism wielding their academic credentials like a sword and shield.

Yesterday, my friend Jeanne, who does a lot of reading, writing, thinking, and educating about social class (she blogs, along with others, at Class Action) linked to this very critical article about Payne. And I said pretty much what I just wrote here, a bit more briefly:

It's interesting to me how critical people are of Payne's in-school training, which I don't know much about, because that book was so helpful to me. Maybe I read it wrong, but what I took away from it felt like a better understanding of both strengths and deficits of the different ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. It made sense of some things about my family, about some of my friends and lovers, and it felt like it challenged me (a middle/upper-middle class person with a lot of education) to be more resilient and accepting when people communicate in ways that challenge me.

But what I hear over and over is that the book and training are used in schools as a way to encourage working-class and poor kids to adapt to middle-class ways of doing things, something I think ought not to be undertaken uncritically--what about training middle-class teachers, bosses, co-workers to accept more than one style of dealing with conflict, or with authority, for instance? So that the work of bridging a gap isn't always piled on the shoulders of people who are already swimming upstream.

You'll notice what I wrote isn't even remotely a defense of Payne's work. But the author of piece, Paul Gorski, responded and told me, in so many words, that--well, I'll show you. He said:

Su -- you may, indeed, have felt that Payne's book helped you better understand ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. The question is, did she help you understand accurately. A lot of people connect with what she says because we're already socialized into the deficit model. But just the way you put your own point demonstrates one of the serious liabilities of Payne's work and mainstream thinking on poverty in general. There is no "way" poor people communicate and solve problems. The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it. So if it helped you with what you say it helped you with, then it appears as though it only cemented simplifications and stereotypes.

One review of Payne's work found literally hundreds of examples of misinformation in it -- points she makes that directly contradict decades of research. So you might feel that she helped you better understand something, but that doesn't mean your understanding is accurate even if you could relate it to experiences with this or that person from your life... This is why it's not important only for us to be critical of the information we take in, but also to be critical of the lenses with which we've been socialized and the way they filter the information we're taking in. That Payne's work rings true for you says less about her work than it does about how strongly we're socialized to see things in stereotyped and deficit-laden ways... After all, what rang true for you (and for many, many others) has been shown to be completely and wholly inaccurate. It's based on a paradigm (the culture of poverty) that was rejected forty years ago in the social sciences.

Which, as insults and dismissals go, is pretty erudite. I liked Payne's work because of my failure to overcome my socialization, and my lack of awareness that "the social sciences" rejected her paradigm forty years ago. OK! This is not the first time--and probably won't be the last--that I have said to someone, sometimes indirectly as here, and sometimes directly--"tell me more about why you see that way"--and been told that my failure to already see it their way was proof of my classism or cluelessness or insularity. Oddly enough, I don't find this helpful.

I asked if he had a link to the article he mentions, and Jeanne sent me a link to one of his articles on Payne, which you can find here. I found it really helpful; after reading it I feel I have a much better understanding of the criticism of Payne and her work. Gorski does the kind of specific critique I had not found before, looking in some detail at the content of Framework.

I didn't plan to write about it, so I didn't take notes. But it has stuck with me overnight and this morning, so here I am writing about it. So far since I've started, I've had to help a kid on the potty, I've had to stop to feed someone, I've had to mediate a dispute, I've had to answer about 20 questions, and I've had to take a phone call from the hospital about my surgery on Monday. My point is that I am squeezing this writing into a morning in which I don't really have time to write, so I'm not going to do what I should do and do a second reading of the article. I'm going to work from memory. Which means I'll probably make a mistake or two. And I'll certainly end up focusing on what most stayed with me, which means I'll probably overlook some things. But there you have it.

First, Gorski makes the same complaint I've seen others make: she is not a social scientist, and she does not pay attention to the scholarly work being done on social class. I'm of two minds about this criticism; on the one hand, I am a big fan of scholarly work. I appreciate that social scientists think carefully about methodology, are aware of potential biases and work to design studies that overcome or avoid them--that the work of social scientists is a tremendously useful tool for helping us see beyond our own limited circle. On the other hand: do we require that everyone either be a social scientist or be conversant with the work of academics before they can speak publicly about social class? Because that's a pretty high bar, and even I, who have failed to overcome my socialization, can see who it excludes.

Admittedly, Payne is a special case: she's not just any old writer on social class. She and her minions are in, apparently, the majority of school districts in America, telling teachers how to understand and relate to their students who are poor and working class. To the extent that's true, she wields tremendous influence and should be held to a very high standard. But "she ignores me and my friends and our very important work" feels a little dicey.

Of course, that's not Gorski's only criticism. One of his complaints about Frameworks is that the hypothetical families Payne creates to illustrate her points are all stereotypes of poverty: single mothers of children whose fathers are in prison; families that include alcohol or drug abuse; and so on (Oops, that's actually in a different article: page 137 of this one). I don't have either a copy of the book or a clear memory of this, but Gorski provides such a long list of Payne's case study families that it wouldn't surprise me if he had named them all. And in that case, I agree with Gorski: that sucks. And Payne should have known better.

Eventually a couple of things rose up to me as central issues. One is that Payne is perceived as buying into and promoting the idea that there is a "culture of poverty," which is an idea that has been used as a way to blame the poor for their continued poverty. The other, very related criticism, is that Payne does not pay attention to the systemic forces that create poverty and trap people in it. I think this quote puts it nicely:

I believe the Ruby Payne phenomenon illustrates the temptation of the path of least resistance. Her work allows us to content ourselves by learning a set of cultural rules and helping a dominated group fit into a dominating system. She never insists that we secure social justice or eliminate educational inequities. She never challenges us to confront classism. In today’s anxiety-ridden education milieu, many of us may experience A Framework as a reprieve from the difficult reflective and transformative work called for by Kozol (1992), hooks (2000), and others. Their work challenges us to be part of institutional reform. Payne’s demands shallow awareness and no commitment to authentic reform. In other words, if I am from the upper or middle socioeconomic classes, Payne protects my privilege and gives me permission to do the same.

In other words, Payne's work does not challenge the status quo. At best--and Gorski and others question the accuracy with which she does this--she merely describes it. At worst, she helps to perpetuate it.

As I read, one of my reactions was that Gorski and others were criticizing Payne for not writing a different book--they wanted theory. He quotes Payne, responding to one of his critiques, as saying, “Gorski states that his lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoretical frames are almost polar opposites.” So, for a bit, one of my reactions to Gorski was that he and Payne were talking past each other.

As I read more, though, I began to feel like there was a question Gorski wasn't addressing that feels important to me: just what exactly are classroom teachers supposed to be doing? I wanted him to acknowledge how challenging it is for a teacher in the classroom to navigate the mess of resource distribution, home and neighborhood influences, academic expectations, administrator pressure. Teachers and their students are at the center of a big complicated mess, and it is not at all clear how best to behave within that mess.

I was a teacher for 13 years; I taught freshmen at community colleges, a course that every incoming student was required to take, so I dealt with students with every level of preparation for college work (though "well-prepared" was vanishingly rare) and a spectrum of class backgrounds.

I believe in theory, and I believe in understanding the systemic reasons why poverty persists and the institutional barriers that prevent individuals (except in rare cases) from getting out of poverty. But I'm not sure how helpful that theory is in the classroom. As a teacher, I might be inclined to say, "You want me to help dismantle structures of inequality? Great, I can do that with you on the weekend. But Monday through Friday, I am in the classroom with students who are already victims of those structures. All the critical social theory in the world is not going to help these kids right now. What do I do?"

Payne has an answer to that. Maybe it's the wrong answer--her critics say that the answer she's peddling is that poor and working-class kids should become more like middle-class kids, should buy into the existing structure to the extent they're able, in the hope of moving themselves to a more comfortable and secure place within it (I don't know how accurate this is, as I am not at all familiar with her teacher trainings or her writings other than Framework). Gorski et al are right that this solution does nothing to dismantle the structure. But what else is a teacher to do?

I have faced this myself, teaching students whose home language was a dialect of Black English. Yes, it's a language. Yes, it has a coherent (and complex) grammatical structure. But in my students' lifetime, writing that uses the vocabulary and grammar of that dialect will not be accepted in an academic setting. What am I to tell my students? Am I not supposed to teach them to code-switch, to write in the voice that will let them stay in school? If I do help them develop an "academic" writing voice, am I helping to support the system? Am I doubly burdening those who already bear the brunt of inequality, making it their job, their responsibility, to learn to fit into a system that denigrates them? But if I don't teach them to write that way, am I helping to trap them in marginal economic circumstances?

Gorski creates a list of what authentic anti-povery education would include. He mentions eliminating tracking, creating integrated school districts, using vouchers. Most of these kinds of changes are things that classroom teachers have little or no control over. He also mentions things like, "transcend[ing] identity politics and examin[ing] the ways in which these sorts of policies and practices help to concentrate power in the hands of the corporate elite" and "[a]cknowledg[ing] the interconnectedness of poverty, classism, racism, sexism, linguicism, ableism, and other forms of oppression" (pp 145-146 here). OK!

(To be fair, he ends with a list of practical things that can be done immediately, that includes things like "Assign work requiring computer and Internet access or other costly resources only when we can provide in-school time and materials for such work to be completed," and that I mostly applaud.)

It seems like the core of the problem is that Payne embraces a model in which there are class-based cultural differences, and Gorski rejects that notion. He is, I think, very conscious of a history in which the idea of a "culture of poverty" has been used to blame the victims of poverty and to absolve the rest of us of responsibility, and he fears that Payne's work perpetuates this. I fear that denying class-based cultural differences can deprive of us of tools we can use both to reach that high-falutin' glittering dream of a world in which we have "transcended" and "overcome" and "acknowledged," and also to improve things in the little slice of the world we live in.

For instance, my friend Jeanne sees class-based differences in how people deal with conflict. She writes about it here, for instance. If, as Gorski says, "There is no 'way' poor people communicate.... The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it," then Jeanne is wrong. And if Jeanne is wrong, then when I am dealing with that person who makes me uncomfortable by being very direct and using language that sometimes strikes me as rude or crass, we don't have a social-class problem. We don't have a problem in which I was raised to a (dominant) middle-class model of suppressing emotion and avoiding conflict, while that other person was raised to a working-class model of direct confrontation. And I don't have a responsibility to think about my class position, or to challenge myself to accept a different way of communicating. No, if it's just human variation, then I get to say, "That person is behaving inappropriately." And since my mode of discourse (if you will) is the dominant one in most places, other people there, and people in authority, will agree with me and conspire with me to silence her or drive her out.

I'm trying to say that, to my mind, denying class-based cultural differences carries its own set of dangers. I get that talking about these differences is a risky business, but nothing I have yet seen or read has convinced me that these differences don't exist.

Wrong Again

Yehva is having one of those mornings when it seems like she is deliberating devoting her time to doing things she knows perfectly well she shouldn't do: using her brother's motorized toothbrush, spitting chewed-up corn chips onto Eric's plate, getting down the sugar canister and scooping out a handful, letting herself out into the front yard, typing on the keyboard I'm using, pulling all the toilet paper off so she can put a new roll on the dispenser, trying to ride the dog, throwing the dog's metal bowl onto the wood floor to hear it clank (repeatedly), dumping a bowl of crackers into my bed. That's about 10 minutes' worth.

And yes, part of the solution to this is finding a way to help her burn off some energy, and steering her toward interesting appropriate activities. But those things aren't fixes. They're temporary patches when she's in this kind of mood. Because I have come to believe that for Yehva, part of the appeal (most of the appeal?) of doing certain things is that they are forbidden.

It's an interesting problem for a parent. And another of those great moments when you are reminded of two things: 1) Children are little human beings with their own complex set of desires and motivations; and 2) What you think you know from raising Child Number One or Child Number Two is not necessarily of any use with Child Number Three.

Eric, for instance, was also very difficult to deal with starting around three, lasting until The Great Upgrade at 7, when we began to get a glimmer of an easier life, and culminating in The Singularity Of 2010, when he left a whole stage of childhood behind and grew into himself. But Eric's form of difficulty was very different from Yehva's. Trying to figure out how to cope with him, I read every parenting book on the market, including a lot of discipline-y, reward-and-punishment based behavioral programs. And it was always clear that these books had nothing to do with Eric. When you asked Eric to do something and he didn't, or asked him to stop doing something and he didn't, it wasn't because he didn't want to. It was because he couldn't. So offering him a reward, or threatening a punishment, didn't help--any more than (in an example stolen from Ross Greene) you could get me to successfully perform open-heart surgery by offering me a new car if I did it, or threatening to kill my family if I didn't.

Eric's particular brand of sensitivity and inflexibility meant that, if you wanted him to stop and he didn't, it was probably because once he was set on a course, it was very difficult for him to veer off it (we called this "being on rails"). if you wanted him to do something and he didn't, it was probably because he was so overwhelmed by his environment that he couldn't function (we called this "being stuck"). So, for Eric, the answer was never to offer rewards or "consequences" (the modern PC word for "punishments"). Because if he could do what you were asking, he would. He just couldn't.

For Eric, what we did was much more about working to help him learn flexibility, becoming more and more flexible ourselves, and reducing the load on him so that he wasn't constantly topped-up on stimuli. I can't tell you how many people told me I just needed to be firmer with him or stop "letting him get away" with certain behaviors or learn to "set limits." They were all wrong. I've talked before about the book The Explosive Child, which was a terrific tool for us in dealing with Eric, reducing conflict, giving him the help he needed to succeed, and preserving our good relationship with him until development made new things possible for him.

I am amused by the little addendum I put at the bottom of that post: I have a suspicion that working on this with Eric has been good practice for life with Yehva.

Wrong again.

Yehva's behavior sometimes looks similar to Eric's at the same age, but she is not like Eric. I have come to believe that the underlying reasons for her behavior are very different. She is not inflexible, and does not get overwhelmed by people, noise, lights, crowds, activity. When she's having a fit or pushing limits--a concept that really made no sense to us with either Eric or Carl--she's doing it for other reasons.

I have come to believe she's doing it to find out where the limits are.

I know this is a truism of parenting, that kids will "test limits." But we never had a kid who did it before, or did it so intensively all the time. I just read a book called Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child. I read it when Eric was younger, too, and it just had nothing to do with us. But Yehva is the kind of child the author, Robert MacKenzie, is talking about.

MacKenzie suggests you think of your challenging child as a dedicated researcher who needs many data points before drawing a conclusion, or as a child who is wired to always learn things the hard way. A more adaptable, mellow child (like Carl, say) might respond to a request to turn down the volume on the TV by turning down the volume on the TV. Your more strong-willed child will hear that same request and think, "Hmmm...what happens if I don't?" And once that scenario has played out (you've argued with the kid until you lost it, or you've been all discipline-y and turned the TV off after one warning), the child takes that as just one data point. The next time you ask her to turn down the TV, she'll think, "Hmmm, last time mom got all purple-faced and screamy when I didn't do it...I wonder what will happen this time?"

When I read that description, my brain played a little movie-montage of shots of Yehva--holding her brother's toothbrush, heading out the door, holding an apple in one hand and a knife in the other, elbow-deep in the sugar canister, about to flush her stuffed bunny down the toilet--looking at me with a look that says, "And what are you going to do about it?"

It all rings so true with Yehva: she's testing all the time, collecting data all the time, wondering where the limits are and what will happen when she reaches them. This means that you can't assuage her by giving in to something she asks, because she'll just think, "OK, that wasn't the limit--what should I ask for next?" With Eric, flexibility on our part was essential. If he asked for something that wasn't originally on the agenda--even if he asked while upset--figuring out a way to give it to him was almost always a good idea (this was very controversial among people who felt moved to comment on it, because they thought we were "giving in" to bad behavior. They were wrong). With Yehva, that same kind of flexibility just ramps her up.

Which means I'm being a very different mom with Yehva than I was with Eric at the same age. With Eric, I was exploring how flexible I could be; with Yehva, I'm exploring firmness. With all the kids, I am constantly being asked to give up my vision of what kind of parent I want to be, in order to better be the parent they need.

Edited to add: This is not true all the time. Sometimes she's getting into stuff just because she has energy to burn, and then it really is about helping her burn it off with dancing, or taking a walk; she's getting a trampoline for Christmas. And just like with Eric, if you mis-diagnose--if you think she's in a testing mood when really she's just restless with all that energy--then you just make things worse. It's tricky. It's always tricky.

Buffy! The second time

David is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with me. He should stop reading now to avoid spoilers.

We're up to Season 2 together, about halfway through--about one episode away from that one thing that happens, you know what I mean, that sets the whole tragic dramatic arc of the rest of the season into play? I'm all excited. If he weren't such a grown-up, we'd be sitting up watching until 5 in the morning, like I did a few years ago when I watched the series for the first time, instead of a stately two episodes per evening after the kids go to sleep.

One thing I'm enjoying the second time through is seeing how many things in the first two seasons get called back later on. Not just characters who show up in a small way and come back later to play a bigger part, but jokes that are set up two seasons before the punchline: A couple of episodes from now, for instance, Oz will be looking into the trophy case and observe that one trophy has eyes that seem to follow him. In an episode we watched last night, Xander did a funny offhand riff about his Uncle Rory, the drunken taxidermist, and I got all excited--last week I watched most of Season 6 on my own, including the Xander/Anya wedding episode. Uncle Rory was at the wedding! Drinking, and talking about taxidermy! Who in the writers' room, working on the wedding episode, said, "Hey, remember four years ago we had a line about Xander's Uncle Rory? Let's work him in!"

I've also spotted one or two continuity errors--in Season 2, Spike says Angel is his sire, but we who have watched the whole series know that Drusilla made him. (And what a great episode that is, when we see that--there's so much I just can't wait to get to with David.)

I also see how some of Joss Whedon's writerly tics can get kind of irritating. Ironically, it was from the blog of one of the Buffy writers--Jane Espenson, who also wrote for Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and a whole bunch of other shows over the years--that I learned some of the vocabulary of comic writing, and thus learned to recognize certain kinds of jokes by name (I haven't read Espenson's blog in awhile, and don't remember everything). One tic Whedon has that has come to irritate me is shining a light on a joke or awkward moment. If I were inventing a Buffy drinking game, you'd take a shot every time a character said, "Did I say that out loud?" or "Let's pretend I didn't say that," or something similar. One example: Spike says to Buffy, "So, you just came here to pump me for information." Buffy says, "What else would I want to pump you for?" and then, after a beat, she says, "I can't believe I said that," or some such thing. I would argue that these kinds of awkward/funny moments--which Whedon and the Buffy writers' room love to pepper their scripts with--would be stronger and funnier if the awkward was just left to hang in the air a moment.

I can't remember the exact word, but Espenson calls this something like "lamplighting" a joke--some word that evokes an image of shining a spotlight on it, perhaps with a big illuminated sign flashing J-O-K-E JOKEJOKEJOKEJOKE. I reckon each Buffy episode would be about 30 seconds shorter if all of these moments were cut in favor of trusting the audience to notice the joke on their own.

So, David and I are in the middle of Season 2, the Greek Tragedy of the Buffy ouvre. But I just watched Season 6 for the second time on my own. I know fans are divided about Season 6, and the role Spike plays in it, but I'm a sucker for doomed romance, so I like it probably more than I should. I like Spike's striving. We who like cultish TV shows that spawn cosplay and attendance at conventions where people can pay as much as $75 to get a picture taken with a star (60 bucks for James Marsters!) are very used to the "non-human seeks humanity" trope: we've seen it with Data, Seven of Nine, Angel, Anya. If it weren't so late and my brain were at full power I could probably list another 10. We must like it or our favorite shows wouldn't keep giving it to us. I like Spike's version of it, I like how mixed-up his motivations are, I like how tragically wrong he keeps getting it, and yet how sincere he is. (And I like how ashamed Buffy eventually is about how she's been treating him.)

It's interesting to watch Season 2 right after Season 6. I found Buffy's constant abuse of Spike hard to take in Season 6, but you should hear her insulting Angel the first half of Season 2--seeing the two in juxtaposition made it clear how much of a character trait this is for Buffy, to be mean to men (OK, vampires--I'll have to see how she deals with Riley in Season 5) who are in love with her. It's of a piece with her constant whining. She's really not such a pleasant person, overall. David and I just watched the episode where Kendra appears for the first time , and I admit I couldn't help thinking that it might be kind of refreshing to watch Kendra's TV show for awhile, to just hang with a Slayer who is totally into being a Slayer and not so much about hanging around graveyards fondling Mr. Pointy and complaining about how she can't be a cheerleader and nobody understands her.

This is a lot of stuff about a TV show, and it's not all that coherent, but I'm going to let it stand because I haven't written anything in like three months and I have this huge backlog in my brain and in my notebooks, and everything I've tried to get down in order to break the bottleneck and get things flowing again has petered out after about 100 words. Perhaps this will do it.