Case in Point:  In the January issue of Kappan Mistilina Sato and Tim Lensmire is a very good article critiquing Payne and proposing work that more substantively prepares teachers to understand the lives of poor students. They note, as many others have also done,  that Payne’s work is based on many unsubstantiated claims.

Payne responds in the same issue with a more general response to criticism of her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. She begins with the tiresome claim that she’s made elsewhere that most people criticizing the book are nontenured assistant “professors of higher education” [sic] as if that addresses any of the detailed concerns raised in critiques of her work published in  rigorous academic journals.

But more troublesome are her  attempts to justify her work as actually supported by  “research”.
In her Kappan article  she cites herself as the source for her claim of much higher rates of child abuse among poor children than children “not in poverty”, even though Payne herself has done no research on the demographics of child abuse.

Several paragraphs later, she refers to  “peer reviewed” research on her website showing statistically significant achievement differences in schools implementing her approach, an astounding distortion of conventional peer review process.  For Education and Class readers who don’t publish in academic journals, “peer review” means that a study has been scrutinized by scholars who do not know the identity of the author,  who are charged with assessing whether an author has complied with expected norms of scholarly inquiry, and who critique the study for the extent to which it builds and extends the body of existing research around a given question.

Payne’s “peer review” consists of nothing more than a brief commentary of some of her research methods by some faculty members (no explanation was given for why these men were chosen) who seem to have no background in school achievement studies and  who clearly knew the source of the work they were reading.

Payne’s reasearch consists of nothing more than a handful of   simple pre-test/post -test studies of single schools.  Students in Intro to Research courses learn the pretty serious limitations of interpreting data from studies that presume that the only thing that has affected achievement in complex schools  (and their communities) over time is the particular teaching methodology of interest to a particular author.

In spite of how often her supporters contrast Payne with “those academics” who lack credibility because of their distance from classrooms, Payne proudly identifies herself as a Ph.D.

So she should know better.

And so should school districts looking for support for teachers who want to learn more about how how best to teach poor children.

There was a lively discussion in the comments on Scott’s post, and Alice Mercer, one of the women chiming in there, has continued the conversation on the In Practice blog with the first of what she promises will be a series of posts  on “Why not ‘cure’ poverty instead”.

The conversation threatens to degenerate into camps of “theorists/ practitioners”, as if those lines are completely clean.

But perhaps, in these ongoing discussions,  there’s the chance to move beyond the unfortunate assumption in too much of this discussion that people who critique Payne for ignoring the deeper structural causes of poverty somehow expect teachers to solve problems of poverty themselves or to simply suspend further work in classrooms until all children come to school well fed, toting their photos from Disney World, and dreaming of Harvard.

So, perhaps some of the teachers, scholars, parents, staff people, and the idly curious who read Education and Class could head over there to  join the conversation.

McLeod asks, reasonably:

First, should districts be spending their monies on a consultant whose work has been accused of being riddled with hundreds of unproven assertions? …  Are most districts that hire Dr. Payne aware of the criticisms that have been leveled against her work? And, third, even if so, should districts’ professional development work involve a consultant/speaker that’s this controversial, no matter how famous or widespread her message is?

Don’t miss Scott’s inclusion of a  You Tube critique of Payne posted by a 14 year old reader.  If a 14 year old gets it, why don’t more district staff development offices?

And don’t miss the comments.

(And I’m honestly ready to move on from the “people who criticize Payne’s work are just Ivory Tower Academics living without any clue about what really goes on in schools for poor kids” rebuttals.  Honestly, don’t you folks have anything better than unfounded personal criticism to answer the research?  For the record, I’ve taught in rural southern Appalachia, in the urban south, in the working class Midwest and I was appalled by what I saw in  my very first skim through Payne’s book because it was so clearly  poorly researched. )

The article, Miseducating Teachers about the Poor:  A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne’s Claims, by Randy Bomer, Joel Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semington is among the most carefully researched, thorough, and detailed analyses of Payne’s writing that I’ve found.

The authors systematically weigh the claims made by Payne against what can readily be found within peer-reviewed research about the causes of poverty and the lives of the poor (their reference list alone runs to five pages), and as others have already observed, Payne comes up very short.

They review research on the lifestyles, values, goals, language, and educational aspirations of the poor.  They find evidence for little of what Payne writes and teaches, and instead cite solid and respected research that directly contradicts much of what she claims.

As I’ve written before here, here, here, and here, this sort of analysis makes it very difficult to understand why schools settle for Payne’s work when there is so little support for her claims, and so little evidence that poor kids are well-served by teachers who have experienced her training.

I’d encourage folks who have dismissed  criticism of Payne’s work as “academic jealousy” (or other personal, rather than intellectual motives) to read this article.

And I’d welcome discussion here — not about the motives of the article authors, but about the research that they cite.

It would be a violation of Fair Use policies to attach the entire article here, but it’s worth the effort to track down a copy.  Readers with access to  academic libraries can find copies there, you can get a PDF (for a fee) from the publisher here , or you might email the lead author, Randy Bomer, at rbomer at mail dot utexas dot edu.

So, are we willing to get past questioning the motives of those who critique her work,  past the “but she seems to make sense” reasoning,  past  anecdotes about ones own family members, and down to the core questions of whether we’re simply settling for Payne rather than bringing all that we know to the education of poor children?

I have no doubt whatsoever that teachers exposed to solid, carefully done research such as that cited in this article can, together, formulate ways to better serve poor children in schools.  Given how this field is developing while Payne’s work stands still, I think that we should be well past the point that we depend so heavily on someone  who just hasn’t done her own homework  to tell us how to do this work.

One paragraph caught my eye: When teachers in a workshop with the author began complaining about parents not showing up for meetings or conferences, he asked how many of them had driven to work that day. 100% had. He asked them, then, how many of the parents of the students owned cars, so that they could freely come and go. The answer was 11%.

How did we come to have schools in which teachers hadn’t already asked themselves that question, where they assumed, instead, that parents simply didn’t care about education or about their kids when they didn’t come to things that the school had scheduled?

And more importantly, how did we come to live in a society in which the fact that a good number of families simply cannot afford cars is invisible to even well-educated and well-intended people?

A letter to the author of the NYT time article from Stephanie Jones, who says:

Frankly, it won’t matter if they know how to use the right silverware, substitute their old “ain’t”s for “isn’t”s, or speak with more (middle-class) clarity and in a more (middle-class) elaborated manner when they still find it improbable or impossible to pay the bills at the end of the month even when working two full-time jobs at a low wage. And in the meantime, if students really do learn all the “rules” of class and they still don’t find themselves in an upwardly mobile trajectory, they may end up blaming themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods.

And this, from Confessions of a Keyhole.

A quote:

I think there’s something very telling and tragic about the conjunction of, on the one hand, Payne’s noble New Age (but also modernist) wish to live “a life without institutional constraints” and, on the other hand, her preaching of the importance of lower-class adoption of upper- and middle-class personal stylings (what she calls “the hidden rules”).

And finally, a summary of what some bloggers are saying about the NYT article from the Payne organization blog itself, in which people who’ve never read her work or heard of Payne before reading the article are cited as those representing the “high points of the dialogue, examples in which people are thinking deeply and carefully about the issues at hand”. While they invited more comments and “dialogue” two days ago, they’ve not yet published any. One of those who resonates with Payne says:

Perhaps some discomfort with Payne’s approach also stems from the fact that as a nation we like to think the lines of class are nonexistent, or at least blurred. Defining class with such specificity denies that.

… which suggests, at best, that this “deep and careful thinker” didn’t even get as far as the two paragraphs summarizing the critique of Payne in the NYT article.

I have no problem with a blogger thinking out loud in her posts. But it’s curious that an organization would cite this very quote as being among the “highlights” of the discourse about their work.

Louis Vuitton this spring pre-sold its limited number of $40,000-plus handbags made up of a patchwork of samples from different spring and summer collections. The bags cost only slightly less than the median household income of $46,326, as reported by the Census Bureau.

And a second quote:

“Whether it’s a handbag, shoe or watch, the price of keeping up has gone up,”

One of the gurus of social class theory, Pierre Bourdieu, says that we’ll never eliminate class differences by simply teaching those at the bottom the rules of the game of those above because those who already enjoy the comfort, deference, and power of life further up the ladder have a vested interest in protecting their positions.

If too many people can figure out how to play by their rules (or, horrors, can begin to afford those $500 handbags), you can just much move the bar a bit further up.

Too many people getting college degrees? Start requiring graduate degrees for even routine jobs. Too many kids now doing as well as your kid in first grade? Start intensifying pressures to learn Japanese and calculus in your kid’s kindergarten. Too many people in off-the-rack clothes in your wine shop now? Find even more obscure vineyards and vintages so that you’re still set apart.

It’s about maintaining distinctions. That’s what Bourdieu says about the significance of different “rules of the game” between classes.

Those who suggest that we can eliminate poverty by teaching kids the “rules” of the middle class are imagining the middle class standing with open arms, just waiting to welcome all of those newcomers who will compete with their kids for college admission, jobs, political power, and privileges that are now theirs alone.

That’s what social class is about: Not just static rules of behavior among different groups, but about the power of some folks to set the rules and then to change them so that others have little hope of ever reaching them.

Update: A bit more of a response to Nancy’s thought-provoking post, now that I have a bit more time to write.

First, Ruby Payne isn’t really working “from her gut”. She’s working within a research tradition that, if I’m doing my math on her age right, was likely being taught and deliberated about when she was in teacher education in the late 60′s, early 70′s. This body of work tried to show that a “culture of poverty” was the reason that people were poor and that the solution to poverty was to get people to act better. One of the central — and widely read — books in this tradition was a novel Children of Sanchez, by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. This tradition informed welfare and other social policies (many of you will remember the stereotypes of the welfare queen driving her Cadillac).

The problem is that the research didn’t hold up. No one could really find common cultural practices between poor people in rural areas, in cities, in small towns, across ethnic groups. People started looking very closely for instances of generational poverty (in Ruby’s words) and actually didn’t find very much of it (and where it did occur, economic conditions were often such that even the best dressed, verbal, going-to-bed-early, reformed poor people couldn’t have found work. I saw this when I taught in Southern Appalachia where there was literally no flat land on which to build factories, the soil was about 2 cm deep so agriculture was a problem, and the coal was all owned by people up on the East Coast who decided when and how to mine it).

In other places, people born poor are likely to move up and down into and out of poverty depending on such things as the kinds of jobs that open in their areas, the extent to which the minimum wage is keeping up with inflation (or not, as lately), the depth of debt that they accrue for things like medical bills. Katherine Newman has done really beautiful, accessible work on the economic trajectories of people who begin their work lives in fast food restaurants and the ways that some move up, some stay in essentially the same place, and some fall back. She of course found some people who couldn’t get their acts together (I saw similar people in grad school, fully supported by their wealthy parents), but that was not the main story of how people fared.

So when Ruby Payne comes out 30 years later essentially repeating the “Culture of Poverty” line of thought, and supporting it with what seem to be pretty serious stereoypes of hard-drinking, loud-shouting, jail serving poor people (just as the Welfare Queen was used in the 70′s) it does raise questions. Does she have some new evidence that those who walked away from that line of thinking long ago missed? Did she simply draw on what “research” was familiar to her when she whipped out Frameworks in week, because she hadn’t kept up with what was going on in that conversation, even to the extent of reading debates in newspapers and magazines about whether a “culture of poverty” exists ? Those are fair questions.

But she’s not working from her “gut”. She’s seeing the world through a particular scholarly framework. And that framework doesn’t just say that there are “differences” (you eat cheez whiz, I eat brie). The framework says that we would not have poverty if everyone would stay out of jail and eat brie.

Second, I think that we could use some more shades of grey when talking about how universities and schools contribute to professional knowledge. I think that pretty much everyone understands that when research comes out of universities, it’s going to be translated and transformed multiple times to make sense for informing practice, and there is a long tradition of “consultants” and staff developers taking on the work of that translation, often building tidy little businesses as they go. Rick Stiggins in assessment comes to mind. I don’t know all of their names, but a whole cadre of consultants marched around the country doing workshops on cooperative learning after the original work of Slavin, the Johnson brothers, Elizabeth Cohen. There are scores of people out there doing classroom management workshops and math workshops and literacy workshops, most of them grounded at least at some level on current research on kids and learning. Academics get that that’s how it works.

And most of these people are visible and active in professional organizations. They write for professional publications. They go to conferences to hear what other people are saying about things. There are others doing the same work, so that they need to stay current and relevant. Pretty much none of them are saying the exact same things that they were saying 10 years ago (and, as far as I know, none of them are also selling coffee mugs and t shirts).

And then, the normal cycle would be that researchers would come back into schools to study (often, now, in collaborations with teachers, or teachers would do the action research themselves) how things were going in actual classroom practice.

But Payne seems to be operating pretty much outside of any other professional conversations — even to the point of publishing her books herself. That’s pretty unprecedented.

And third, critical scholars are often out there in schools themselves, not sitting back writing articles that they hope will spark the revolution. I think of Christine Sleeter and Carl Grant, Jo Beth Allen, Stephanie Jones (who writes brilliantly for scholarly audiences and also published a brilliant book with Heinemann, so that it would be accessible for teachers), Deborah Meier, Mike Rose, Carole Edelsky, all the folks who I mentioned in my last post who have often developed their practices to demonstrate how wrong “culture of poverty” theories were.

Many more of us invest pretty heavily in teaching in teacher education when we might otherwise be cranking out articles, and when districts clamor to hire the people we teach, and those teachers come back to fill our grad classes, we can sense that we’re probably doing something valuable in the work of teaching kids well.
So our objections to Payne really aren’t based on our cluelessness; nor is it based on the belief that poor folks should just sit around waiting until the intellectuals figure out how to write their way into social change.

Finally (phew!), I completely agree that we should be listening to teachers. And. We really haven’t talked about social class enough in teacher ed or in staff development. That’s the soap box I’ve been on now for a number of years. And there’s no question that teachers had a lot of questions about kids that they couldn’t understand. So when someone came along with what seemed to be answers to those questions, it of course was valuable and meaningful. The same thing would have happened if teachers had been grappling for years with how to teach music and a funny, witty woman came along with great stories “from her gut” about kids and music. People would have been all over that.

But I can’t imagine that person then being written up in the NTY as “the” expert on music education, and those who raised questions about her being dismissed as angry, jealous, self-interested, or worse. That’s just not how professional knowledge develops in any other part of the work of teaching.

So why are we settling for that in the work of figuring out how schools can help to address the problems of poverty?