SAVAGE UNREALITIES 1

Savage Unrealities
Winter 2006

Classism and racism abound in Ruby Payne's

Framework

By Paul Gorski

The popularity of the vast array of products and

services available through Ruby Payne's for-
profit business, aha! Process Inc., has made her
one of the most influential voices in today's
education milieu. Rarely do I participate in
conversations about poverty without somebody
extolling her virtues or those of her book A
Framework for Understanding Poverty
(hereafter referred to as A Framework).

I remember, about seven years ago, when I first

heard rumblings about the Payne phenomenon, I
had been frustrated by what seemed to be a lull
in national dialogue about classism in education
since Jonathan Kozol's landmark Savage Illustration: Jordin Sip
Inequalities (1992). Finally, I was led to believe,
a scholar had emerged to lead the fight for socioeconomic equity in schools. And,
like Kozol, she had been a classroom teacher. I was thrilled by the possibilities.

Then I read A Framework. And I was horrified.

Instead of a commitment to equity and justice I found a framework for

understanding poverty that frames poverty as a deficit among students and parents
and draws on racist and classist stereotypes.

Yet, despite a growing avalanche of criticism by anti-poverty and anti-racist

educators and activists, schools and districts across the United States continue to
entrust Payne with preparing teachers to work with economically disadvantaged
students, sometimes at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I wanted to examine Payne's framework through a social justice lens, exposing

classism and racism in A Framework and her other books and essays. Here's what I
found.

Conservative Framing
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Despite common misperceptions, Payne's work is inspired by many right-wing

politicians and pundits most hostile to economically disadvantaged students and
their families. The result is a framework more concerned with conserving the status
quo than with dismantling systems of power and privilege.

For example, Payne remains an outspoken advocate of No Child Left Behind

(NCLB) even though she lives in Texas, where its precursors proved devastating to
students in poverty. She's written a four-part series of essays supporting the
legislation (see www.ahaprocess.com/Downloads. html). The scholar she cites most
heavily in these essays is Thomas Sowell, senior fellow of the right-wing Hoover
Institution and ultra-conservative critic of progressive social and education reforms.
Payne not only supports President Bush's education policies, she also supports Bush
himself. She has contributed thousands of dollars to his presidential campaigns and
the Republican National Committee since 1999, according to the Federal Election
Commission.

Consistent with this pattern, Payne's work is replete with conservative values. One
of the key tenets of her work is assimilation — the notion that economically
disadvantaged people must adopt the values and behaviors of the middle class in
order to achieve academically.

In order to make this argument Payne contends that people in poverty share a
"mindset" or "culture" different from that of upper- and middle-class people. In
actuality, a single mindset of poverty no more exists than a single mindset of
blackness, differently-abled-ness, or woman-ness. Can we assume, for example,
that poor white U.S. citizens from Appalachian West Virginia share a mindset and
culture with poor Somali refugees who arrived in Minnesota last month?

In another classic conservative reframe, Payne muddles the relationship between

the causes and effects of poverty. She writes, for example, "Poverty is caused by
interrelated factors: parental employment status and earnings, family structure, and
parental education." But parental employment status and parental education do not
cause poverty. They reflect the impact of poverty.

By minimizing the varied experiences of all economically disadvantaged people

into a single mindset, then identifying this mindset as the cause of poverty, Payne
builds a framework for understanding poverty that avoids larger questions about the
current wave of conservative education policy. And in doing so, she fails to address
what many students in poverty do have in common: inequitable access to the
highest quality education available, to high-quality healthcare and housing options,
and to other basic services that most professional educators, who are predominantly
middle class, take for granted.

Failing to Acknowledge Systemic Classism

Payne provides no analysis of institutionalized power or classism. She avoids

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mentioning the myriad inequities affecting high-poverty schools, which are more
likely to have unlicensed teachers, crumbling facilities, growing class sizes, and
insufficient classroom materials than low-poverty schools. How are we to
understand poverty in relation to education without understanding how the very
structure of formal schooling in the United States replicates the inequities that keep
many of our students' families in poverty?

Similarly, Payne never addresses the aforementioned wave of conservative

education reforms — high-stakes testing, prescribed curricula, tracking, re-
segregation, many "choice" and voucher programs — that maintain the legacy of
privilege for the wealthy at the expense of economically disadvantaged students.

Payne grew up middle class, worked predominantly in wealthy schools, and now
annually conducts millions of dollars worth of "anti-poverty" workshops through
her for-profit business. It may stand to reason, then, that instead of naming and
addressing classism, she falls in line with the kinds of inequities that ensure her
privilege rather than disrupting — or even mentioning — them.

Relying on Deficit Theory

Among the downloadable materials available through the aha! Process website is
Payne's "Reflections on Katrina and the Role of Poverty in the Gulf Coast Crisis"
(2006). In this short essay Payne reflects:

The violence was to be expected. Words are not seen as being very effective in
generational poverty to resolve differences; fists are.... Furthermore, to resolve a
conflict, one must have the ability to go from the personal to the issue, and the
words largely are not there to do that.

She continues:

Additionally, in neighborhoods of generational poverty, two of the primary

economic systems are prostitution and drugs. After Katrina struck, both of these
economies were virtually wiped out overnight. Furthermore, individuals in jail were
released because there was no plan about how to handle them.

In just a couple of paragraphs Payne manages to exploit nearly every stereotypical

"deficiency" of high-poverty communities: violence, drug use and distribution,
crime, and prostitution. Meanwhile, she remains mum on racist and classist
government inaction before, during, and after Katrina. If only those people had
stronger values and fewer moral deficits, she seems to suggest, the Katrina tragedy
might have been avoided.

Deficit theorists explain social and economic hierarchies by identifying deficiencies

in the cultures and behaviors of some identity groups. They blame oppressed
people for their oppression by ignoring systemic inequities and drawing on
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stereotypes already established in the mainstream consciousness. Deficit theory has

been discredited by decades of research revealing that people in poverty have
similar aspirations and values as economically privileged people and that the
disadvantages they face result from injustice, not personal deficiency.

A Framework is a virtual case study in deficit theory. Payne draws on the most
egregious and unsubstantiated stereotypes of socioeconomically disadvantaged
people and people of color, supporting the notion that we must fix poor people
instead of eradicating classism. A brief flip-through of A Framework reveals
outrageously classist statements, none of which are substantiated by research.
Payne writes, for example, that poor people consider jail a normal part of life and
not necessarily bad (p. 36), that discipline in families of poverty consists of
verbally chastising and "physically beat[ing] the child" before forgiving and
ultimately feeding the child (p. 37), and that people in poverty commonly trade sex
for money and favors (p. 38).

Payne repeats these sentiments throughout A Framework. They appear most

explicitly in her "scenarios," brief vignettes that introduce readers to Payne's
prototypical families in poverty. The following chart summarizes all seven
scenarios from A Framework along with the stereotypes employed in them and the
racial identities of the characters involved.

Like Payne's reflections on Katrina, these vignettes exhibit all of the moral and
intellectual "deficits" usually attributed to economically disadvantaged people,
strengthening the message that the real change must happen within people in
poverty and not within the systems that create and maintain poverty. Meanwhile,
Payne renders the average person in poverty — the hard working, drug- and
alcohol-free, education-valuing, nonviolent, responsible, non-criminal person —
invisible. Such people simply don't exist in her framework.

Amazingly, in introducing the scenarios Payne informs readers that she has
"deliberately omitted most of the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse" from the
stories. How much more racist and classist might these depictions have been had
Payne provided a complete picture of the deficits she associates with people in
poverty?

Equally troubling is Payne's contention of a connection between poverty and a lack

of spiritual resources. In Hidden Rules of Class at Work, for example, Payne and
Don L. Krabill suggest that belief "in a higher power" and affiliation with religious
groups move people away from the culture of poverty.

Frameworks built upon deficit theory reinforce images of people in poverty as

morally inferior. This reinforces what Herbert Gans calls the middle- and upper-
class notion of the "undeserving poor" — a concept that leads to deterioration of
public support for effective anti-poverty policy (such as equitable school funding).
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This assertion of superiority, this practice of locating the problem of poverty in the
oppressed and not the systems that oppress them, is the epitome of deficit theory
and classism.

Ignoring Race, Supporting Racism

When challenged to explain her refusal to address the intersections between race
and poverty in the United States, Payne argues that her work is not about race but
about class. According to Payne and Philip DeVol, "One can be examined without
the other.... Class exists around the world with many different races. It can be
examined separately, and we do so." While it's true that class exists around the
world, Payne and DeVol are wrong on both other counts.

First, it's impossible to develop a deep understanding of class and poverty in the
United States without considering race, gender, and a host of other variables that
affect access to educational and economic opportunities. In fact, race and racism as
they exist in the United States have always been connected with economic
exploitation. Slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, segregational school
redistricting — these are all examples of how racism has been used to maintain
economic and political power in the hands of relatively few wealthy white men.

And although Payne ignores the relationship between race and class in most of her
work, the seven scenarios described above contradict her assertion that her work is
only about class. If she intends to focus solely on class, why does she name the
racial identities of the characters in these vignettes?

More importantly, why does she paint such racist portraits of the African-American
and Latino families in her scenarios? Payne identifies violent tendencies, whether
in the form of gang violence or child abuse, in three of the four families of color
depicted in the vignettes, but not in any of the three white families. Each of the
families of color, but only one of three white families, features at least one
unemployed or sporadically employed working-age adult. Whereas two of the three
white children have at least one stable caretaker, three of the four children of color
— Otis, who is beaten by his mother; Opie, who is left in the care of her "senile"
grandmother; and Juan, who is being raised by his gang-leader, drug-dealer uncle
— appear to have none.

In addition to the scenarios, Payne offers a series of case studies in which she
doesn't explicitly name the characters' racial identities. But she does include a case
study for LaKeitha, which is accompanied in the 2001 edition of A Framework by a
clip-art image of an African-American girl. LaKeitha, whose father is in jail, was
kicked out of class for being "extremely rude." Her mother missed a meeting with
the teacher about LaKeitha's behavior because she was arrested for driving without
a license. So, whereas Payne ignores the crucial intersection of racism and poverty,
she does find a way to draw race into her framework in the form of racist
stereotypes.
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Toward a More Authentic Framework

An authentic framework for understanding poverty must begin with a critical

examination of classism. Where does classism exist in our schools? How does this
classism replicate injustices outside our school walls? How do our policies,
practices, assumptions, and pedagogies privilege some students at the expense of
other students?

The challenge for many of us is that, in order to prepare ourselves for that
conversation, we must grapple with deeper issues about class consciousness such as
corporate capitalism and its influence on public schools, consumer culture, the
scarcity of living wage jobs, environmental deterioration that disproportionately
affects poor neighborhoods, the elimination of social programs supporting poor
families, skyrocketing costs of health care and higher education, and on and on.

As individuals, we must consider how we've been socialized to comply — even

unconsciously — with such injustices. It's this socialization, I believe, that has led
so many teachers and administrators to buy into Payne's framework, which calls on
people to comply, to locate the problem of poverty on the people it represses while
avoiding these larger issues and our own prejudices.

Other important tenets of an authentic framework for understanding poverty and

eradicating classism in our schools must include:

• Acknowledgement of the intersections of class, race, gender, (dis)ability,

and other equity issues.
• An insistence on and strategies for the elimination of the vast array of
structural inequities that privilege middle-class and wealthy students at the
expense of economically disadvantaged students.
• A critical examination of policies, conditions, and practices such as high-
stakes testing, tracking, and attacks on bilingual education, that
disproportionately rob economically disadvantaged students of
opportunities afforded their wealthier peers.
• Strategies, not simply for working with poor students and parents, but for
eliminating classism within one's school or district.

Most importantly, a genuine framework for understanding poverty must prepare

teachers and all members of society to be agents of social and educational reform.
We need to fix the structures, policies, and practices that contribute to the poverty
cycle, and not, as Payne's framework does, to "fix" the people most oppressed by
classism.

Resources on Class, Poverty, and Education Equity

Books
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Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky, 2004.

Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Education Reform to Close the
Black-White Achievement Gap by Richard Rothstein, 2004.

Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School
Advantage by Ellen Brantlinger, 2003.

Economic Apartheid in America by Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, 2000.

Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality, 2nd edition, by Jeannie Oakes,
2005.

Poverty and Schooling in the U.S. by Sue Books, 2004.

The Shame of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol, 2006.

The War Against the Poor by Herbert Gans, 1995.

Research Reports

A shared responsibility: Staffing all high-poverty, low-performing schools with

effective teachers and administrators by the Learning First Alliance, 2005.
www.learningfirst.org/news/edweekarticl/.

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education: A two-tiered education system by

the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2004.
www.nctaf.org/documents/Brown_Full_Report_Final.pdf.

The funding gap 2004: Many states still shortchange low-income and minority
students by the Education Trust, 2005.
www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/Product+Catalog/special+reports.

Peer-Reviewed Critiques of Ruby Payne's Framework

Gorski, P. "The Classist Underpinnings of Ruby Payne's Framework," Teachers

College Record, Feb. 9, 2006. www.tcrecord.org.

Ng, J. and Rury, J. "Poverty and Education: A Critical Analysis of the Ruby Payne
Phenomenon," Teachers College Record, July 18, 2006. www.tcrecord.org.

Osei-Kofi, N. "Pathologizing the Poor: A Framework for Understanding Ruby

Payne's Work, Equity and Excellence in Education 38(4), pp. 367-375.

Websites
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Amnesty International USA: www.amnestyusa.org

Economic Policy Institute: www.epi.org

Kids Can Make a Difference: www.kidscanmakeadifference.org

Make Poverty History: www.makepovertyhistory.org/schools

Poverty & Race Research Action Council: www.prrac.org

— Compiled by EdChange.org

Paul C. Gorski (gorski@edchange.org) is an assistant professor in the graduate

school of education at Hamline University and founder of EdChange.org.
References for this article are available from the author.

Retrieved on August 30, 2008 from

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/sava212.shtml