Insisting on Equity: Uncovering Classism and Racism in Ruby Paynes Framework

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Insisting on EquityUncovering Classism and
Racism in Ruby Paynes Framework

• by Paul C. Gorski
• and the Minnesota Chapter of
• The National Association for Multicultural
  Education

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I. Introduction and Agenda

• Who is present?
• Introducing MN-NAME and me

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A. Agenda

• Setting the Context
• Introduction of Ruby Paynes framework
• Introduction of the lens for critical reflection
• Critical Reflection 1 Conservative frame of
  reference

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A. Agenda (contd)

• Critical Reflection 2 Failure to acknowledge
  systemic classism
• Critical Reflection 3 Deficit perspective
• Additional points for reflection
• An authentic framework for understanding poverty
  and eradicating classism
• Discussion

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Part II Setting the Context
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II. Setting the ContextAcknowledging Dangerous
Terrain

• Difficulty discussing class and poverty in the
  U.S.
• Most teachers are middle class and white
• Myth of meritocracy
• War against the poorwelfare mothers,
  unmotivated parents, violent criminals, lazy
  addicts
• Socialization for classism
• Popularity of Ruby Payne and her work
• I acknowledge and accept the negative backlash
  that results

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II. Setting the ContextMy Intentions

• Focus on Paynes work and positionality in
  relation to that work, not on Payne, the
  individual person
• Assume positive intentions in Paynes work, but
  dont assume that positive intentions lead to
  positive impact
• Raise sometimes-difficult questions in the
  pursuit of deeper understanding and the
  elimination classism and racism from schools and
  society

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II. Setting the ContextStarting with What We
Know

• Decades of documentation on systemic class
  inequities in and out of schools
• Growing concern over Ruby Paynes work among
  activists and educators (many people engaging in
  this critique)
• Increasingly conservative education system
  high-stakes testing, standards movement,
  prescribed curricula, NCLB, growing cost of
  higher education students in poverty most
  adversely affected
• Increasingly conservative public policy, cutting
  programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged
  families

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II. Setting the ContextStarting with What We
Know, Pt. II

• Poor children bear the brunt of almost every
  imaginable social ill. In disproportionate
  numbers, they suffer hunger and homelessness
  untreated sickness lead poisoning and other
  forms of environmental pollution

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II. Setting the ContextStarting with What We
Know, Pt. III

• These same children are assigned, again in
  skewed numbers, to the nations worst public
  schoolsschools in the worst states of disrepair
  and with the lowest levels of per-pupil funding.
  Not surprisingly, therefore, poor children as a
  group lag far behind others in educational
  achievement (Books, 2004).

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Part IIIIntroducing Ruby Paynes Framework
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III. Introducing Paynes FrameworkThe Hidden
Rules

• Economic realities create hidden rules,
  unspoken cueing mechanisms that reflect agreed
  upon tacit understandings, which the group uses
  to negotiate reality (Payne, 2002, p. 1).
• ?Payne establishes her understanding of these
  hidden rules as they pertain to various values
  and relationships for people in poverty, the
  middle class, and the upper class.

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III. Introducing Paynes FrameworkThe Purpose
of the Framework

• to help educators better understand the culture
  that students from families in poverty carry into
  school with them, and
• to instruct educators on the importance of and
  techniques for teaching students in poverty the
  hidden rules of the middle classvalues upon
  which the public school system is built.

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III. Introducing Paynes FrameworkThe Sources
Behind Paynes Framework

• Despite the fact that many people refer to
  Paynes work as research, it is not research,
  but a philosophical framework
• Based largely on the 1950s and early 1960s work
  of Oscar Lewis who studied small communities of
  peasants in Mexico.
• Much of Lewis work has been discredited within
  anthropology and sociology (Goode Eames, 1996).

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Part IVLens for Critical Reflection
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IV. Lens for Critical ReflectionCritical Social
Theory

• Situated in historical and political context (as
  everything is)
• Challenges theories and practices that simplify
  complexities, ignore systemic oppression, and as
  a result, fail to uncover the power and privilege
  dynamics of social conditions
• Addresses both content and context of work,
  including the sources positionality

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Part VA Conservative Frame of Reference
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V. Conservative FrameConceptualizing
Conservative

• Aimed at conserving status quo rather than
  facilitating substantial shifts in consciousness
  or policy
• Inconsistent with philosophies of education
  equity, multicultural education, etc.
• Consistent with and supportive of a variety of
  other conservative social and educational
  policies (NCLB, high-stakes testing, assimilation)

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V. Conservative Frame The Critical Context, Pt.
1

• Ruby Payne has written in uncritical support of
  No Child Left Behind.
• Four-part series for Instructional Leader
• From part 1 Do We Really Need the Legislation
  No Child Left Behind? ... The short answer is
  yes (2003, p. 3).
• This, despite living in Texas, where NCLBs
  precursors led were devastating to
  socioeconomically disadvantaged students and
  students of color

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V. Conservative Frame The Critical Context, Pt.
2

• Ruby Payne cites extreme right-wing sources in
  her work.
• Staying with NCLB series, she cites
• Thomas Sowell (who she also identifies as her
  hero), fellow of the right-wing Hoover
  Institution and a leading conservative critic of
  any progressive school reform
• Hernando de Soto, right-wing economist
• Hannity and Colmes of Fox News

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V. Conservative Frame The Critical Context, Pt.
3

• Follow the money. Payne has contributed thousands
  of dollars to the Bush/Cheney campaigns.
• This, despite the fact that Bushs policies have
  been at best negligent toward socioeconomically
  disadvantaged people
• A tool Federal Election Commission Web site
  (web)
• Note Not a judgment of intent, but an attempt to
  understand Paynes work in context

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V. Conservative Frame The Reframing of Poverty,
Pt. 1

• Conservative Reframing 1 Blaming poverty on what
  are outcomes of and not reasons for poverty
• Poverty is caused by interrelated factors
  parental employment status and earnings, family
  structure, and parental education (2001, p. 12)
• These dont cause poverty. They reflect the
  impact of poverty (Rank, 2004).

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V. Conservative Frame The Reframing of Poverty,
Pt. 2

• Conservative Reframing 2 Culture or mindset
  of poverty
• But, Research has repeatedly demonstrated that
  those who fall below the poverty linehold the
  same fundamental aspirations, beliefs, and hopes
  (Rank, 2005, p. 48) as wealthy or middle class
  people.
• In other words, research shows that the mindset
  or culture of poverty DOES NOT EXIST.
• Such a focus diverts attention from classism.

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Part VIFailure to AddressSystemic
ClassismThe principal subject of poverty
researchought to be the forces, processes,
agents, and institutionsthat decide a proportion
of the population will end up poor. (Herbert
Gans in The War Against the Poor)
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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Data

• Compared with low-poverty schools, high-poverty
  schools have
• More teachers teaching in areas outside their
  certification
• More serious teacher turnover problems
• More teacher vacancies
• Larger numbers of substitute teachers
• More limited access to computers and the
  Internet
• Inadequate facilities (such as science labs)

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Data (contd)

• More dirty or inoperative bathrooms
• More evidence of vermin such as cockroaches and
  rats
• Insufficient classroom materials
• Less rigorous curricula
• Fewer experienced teachers
• Lower teacher salaries
• Larger class sizes and
• Less funding.

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Data
(References)

• Barton, P.E. (2004). Why does the gap persist?
  Educational Leadership 62(3), 8-13.
• Barton, P.E. (2003). Parsing the achievement gap
  Baselines for tracking progress. Princeton, NJ
  Educational Testing Service.
• Carey, K. (2005). The funding gap 2004 Many
  states still shortchange low-income and minority
  students. Washington, D.C. The Education Trust.
• National Commission on Teaching and Americas
  Future (2004). Fifty years after Brown v. Board
  of Education A two-tiered education system.
  Washington, D.C. Author.
• Rank, M.R. (2004). One nation, underprivileged
  Why American poverty affects us all. New York,
  NY Oxford University Press.

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Question

• Ruby Payne doesnt mention a single one of these
  savage inequalities in A Framework for
  Understanding Poverty.
• Can we understand the relationship between
  poverty and education without considering the
  ways in which the education system contributes to
  classism and the cycle of poverty?

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Other
Question

• What is the problem?
• That students dont know the culture of the
  middle class or
• That the education system is designed to
  privilege middle class and wealthy students at
  the expense of socioeconomically disadvantaged
  students?
• From the critical social theory perspective,
  addressing the former without addressing the
  latter is an expression of privilege.

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism No Power and
Privilege Context

• Avoids discussion of class power and privilege as
  they relate to
• High-stakes testing
• Tracking
• Re-segregation of schools
• Curriculum
• Expectations
• All issues that uphold classist power and
  privilege structure in schools

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism Agents of
Assimilation?

• What does it mean that Ruby Payne is asking
  teachers, most of whom are middle class, to teach
  socioeconomically disadvantaged students the
  culture of the middle class?
• By not addressing systemic classism, is she
  asking us to assimilate students into the very
  system that oppresses them?

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism Band-Aid Reform?

• Payne provides a couple useful short-term
  strategies and add-ons that help students
  acculturate to a hostile system (see pp. 94-96).
• But the question left unaddressed How can we
  transform policies and practices so that these
  short-term strategies wont be necessary?

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism Summarizing

• Withoutattention to relations of domination and
  subordination as they reside in economic class,
  the attention to cultural backgrounds of
  students is inadequate on two counts First,
  culture is importantly influenced by economic
  class in contemporary society, and second, school
  cultures devalue the knowledge and practices of
  the working and poverty classes while privileging
  the knowledge and practices of the propertied
  classes. (Tozer, 2000, p. 156)

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism Summarizing Pt. 2

• Most scholars do not conjecture about the class
  structure, recent intensification of social class
  distinctions, or proliferation of tools designed
  to solidify and reify distinctions. They do spend
  time trying to explain the class-correlated
  differential educational outcomes in ways that
  are not attributed to their own desires or
  actions. (Brantlinger, 2003, p. 21)

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VI. Ignoring Systemic Classism The Effect

• Allows people from middle and upper
  classespeople privileged by the education
  systemto avoid responsibility for classism
• Can never effectively serve the needs of
  socioeconomically disadvantaged without
  understanding systemic classism
• The Taco Night effect

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Part VIIThe Deficit Perspective
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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveWhat Is It?

• Explains discrepancies in achievement by pointing
  to deficient cultures and behaviors in a group
  of people
• Draws on stereotypesusually those already
  socially established
• So, we address poverty by fixing poor people
  instead of fixing the conditions that maintain
  poverty
• Justifies continued oppression

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveExemplified in
Paynes Framework

• The root of her frameworkthat poverty persists
  because people in poverty dont know the rules of
  the middle class
• Drawing on stereotypes
• Invisibility of the average socioeconomically
  disadvantaged students or families

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveStereotype 1

• People in poverty are bad parents

• The typical pattern in poverty for discipline is
  to verbally chastise the child, or physically
  beat the child, then forgive and feed him/her
  (p. 37).

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveStereotype 2

• People in poverty are criminals

• Also, individuals in poverty are seldom going to
  call the police, for two reasons First, the
  police may be looking for them (pp. 37-38)

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveStereotype 3

• People in poverty are disloyal

• Allegiances may change overnight favoritism is
  a way of life (p. 74).

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveStereotype 4

• People in poverty are violent and on the
  streets

• If students from poverty dont know how to fight
  physically, they are going to be in danger on the
  streets (p. 100).

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveStereotype 5

• People in poverty are unmotivated addicts

• And for some people in poverty, alcoholism,
  laziness, lack of motivation, drug addiction,
  etc., in effect make the choices for the
  individual (p. 148).

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveThe Invisible
Reality

• Most people in poverty are responsible,
  hard-working, drug- and alcohol-free, and not on
  the streets. (Also, a majority live in rural
  communities and are white.)
• Where are these people in A Framework for
  Understanding Poverty?
• Critical consideration How do we conceptualize
  violent?

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveThe Scenarios

• Most egregious examples of stereotyping and
  deficit thinking found in Paynes Scenarios.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveFirst Scenario

• Features John, an 8-year old white boy with an
  alcoholic single mother.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveSecond Scenario

• Involves Vangie, an African American woman who
  dropped out of school, had a kid at 14, three
  more by the age of 18, and now collects welfare.
  Her boyfriend has been arrested for assault. Her
  sister is being beaten by her boyfriend. She just
  beat the fool out of her son, Otis, because he
  was misbehaving at school.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveThird Scenario

• Oprah, another African American woman, leaves
  her daughter, Opie, in the care of Opies
  senile grandmother and unemployed uncle. Oprah
  is 32 and has 5 children.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveFourth Scenario

• Noemi, a Latina who left school after sixth
  grade, married at 16, then had five kids in
  eleven years. Neither she nor her husband, who
  works sporadically, is familiar with the term
  encyclopedia. She doesnt speak English.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveSixth Scenario

• Ramón, a 25-year-old Latino drug dealer and gang
  leader, cares for his nephew, Juan, whose father
  was killed by a rival gang. Juans mother is in
  jail for gang-related activities. Ramón cant go
  to a parent-teacher conference because hes
  hiding from police.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveSeventh Scenario

• SueAnn has been married and divorced twice. Shes
  33 and a high school drop-out. Her older daughter
  is pregnant (she had this daughter in high
  school). Her third husband is unemployed and
  irresponsible, not wanting to take care of the
  kids. He was just arrested for driving while
  intoxicated.

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveSummarizing the
Scenarios

• Do these scenarios represent most people in
  poverty?
• Why are 5 out of the 7 scenarios about families
  of color when most people in poverty are white?
• How do these scenarios play into the stereotypes
  people already have about people in poverty?

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveLinguistic Deficit

• Language of students seen as the reason for
  achievement level
• Mocking discourse pattern beating around
  the bush circling the mulberry bush
  meandering almost endlessly through a topic
  (pp. 43 45)
• Underlying assumption of linguistic superiority

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveLinguistics The
Reality

• All language varieties contain formal and
  informal registersPayne connects these to
  specific classes
• Language varieties should be seen in light of
  resiliencethe maintenance of cultural ties
  despite generations of oppression
• Paynes simplistic analysis of language registers
  ignores enormous diversity among people of
  different classes

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveOther Examples

• Racism in Scenarios
• Students need classroom survival skills (p. 96)
• Recommends training for parents (p. 95)
• Spiritual poverty

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveImplications

• Reinforces middle- and upper-class notions of
  undeserving poor (Rank, 2004)as morally
  deficient
• Deterioration of public support for effective and
  systemic anti-poverty social and educational
  policy
• Relieves middle- and upper-class individuals of
  responsibility for dealing with their own
  classism

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveImplications
(Contd)

• ... American policy will continue to be the
  present subsistence level, which seeks to keep
  the undeserving poor functioning at the
  subsistence level, although that policy may start
  deteriorating to a survival mode, in which help
  to the poor is supplied only at the level that
  avoids politically embarrassing increases in
  extreme misery among them... (Rank, 2004, p.
  103)

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VII. The Deficit PerspectiveImplications
(Contd)

• it is all too easy to assign the primary onus
  of responsibility to parents in high-poverty
  neighborhoods In a nation in which fairness was
  respected, children of the poorest and least
  educated mothers would receive the most extensive
  and most costly preschool preparation, not the
  least and cheapest (Kozol, 2006, p. 54)

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Part VIIIOther Points for Reflection
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VIII. Other Points for Reflection

• Failure to connect poverty and racism
• Christian-centrism
• Shift from Kozol to Payne

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VIII. Other Points for Reflection

• There is something deeply hypocritical in a
  society that holds an inner-city child only eight
  years old accountable for her performance on a
  high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold
  the high officials of our government accountable
  for robbing her of what they gave their own kids
  six or seven years before (Kozol, 2006, pp.
  53-54)

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Part IXAuthentic Framework for Understanding
Poverty and Eliminating Classism
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IX. Authentic FrameworkKey Principles

• Based on understanding of classism in the context
  of a society hostile toward people in poverty
• Based on understanding of power and privilege
• Based on understanding of intersections of
  oppressions
• Critical of the war against the poor
• Shift of policy and consciousness as well as
  practice

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IX. Authentic FrameworkIn Practice

• Know your classism
• Never make assumptions about students or their
  parents
• Address invisibility of the poor and working
  class and their concerns in the curriculum
• Make parent involvement affordable and convenient

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IX. Authentic FrameworkIn Bigger Picture
Practice

• Eliminate structural inequities
• De-track
• Challenge NCLB
• Eliminate high-stakes testing
• Challenge consumer culture
• Fight vouchers and choice programs that further
  privilege the privileged

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Part XDiscussion

• Paul C. Gorski
• gorski_at_EdChange.org
• http//www.EdChange.org