Substandard housing and poor nutrition is not part of a “culture of poverty”. It’s part of living in poor neighborhoods or rural areas that don’t have decent food stores or about having no choice but to live in rental housing that landlords won’t maintain or being on waiting lists for years for affordable housing (as my relatives have been).

I’m glad that you’re finding success in your class because of what you’ve learned from her.

I do wonder, though, why, for someone who has been writing and running workshops as long as she has, she herself provides very very little evidence that teachers who follow what she recommends are more successful.

Sure, there are things that science can’t answer. But it would be pretty easy over 20 years to do at least some actual studies of whether kids in schools where teachers have been trained by our friend Ruby actually do do better and are more conversant with middle class lifestyles. The very minimal research she posts on her website would not pass muster in a basic research methods class, and there’s strikingly little of it there.

I ask a sincere question: Why do you think that she can’t provide the most basic evidence that teachers are more effective after working with her ideas and that their students are better off? We can still argue beauty and its opposites. of course. And we can also talk about things like the effects of water and light on that flower you mention. We can easily do both, and should.

Why do you think that she’s not doing any of the latter, given that she claims to be a researcher? Why can’t she provide any evidence the poor kids are better off in schools where teachers have done her training and read her books?

I did not read Payne’s work as belittling those living in poverty, but as illuminating some of the behaviors that may arise from that culture that affect successful classroom performance in a middle class based school system. In fact, I interpreted her work as saying we in the middle class often MISinterpret a lack of experience with what we take for granted as low intelligence or low motivation or laziness or whatever other negative label you want to place on it. I am a reasonably intelligent educator who has been pretty successful in my life; yet, I have no doubt I would be viewed as ignorant at best if I were suddenly thrust into the world of the wealthy. The lifestyles, the choices, the opportunities, the “required” knowledge, the innate understandings are things that are so far off my radar that it would be like moving to a foreign land with no preparation. Certainly, I could LEARN how to function there–just as Payne reiterates those moving from a culture of poverty can LEARN to be successful in a middle class society.

One of the underlying issues is that just as success as viewed from the culture of the wealthy is different than success in my world, so is success from the culture of poverty viewed differently. That does not mean my view is wrong or that either of the other views is wrong, simply that they are different; and to expect someone from one culture to find success in another WITHOUT instruction designed to help with that transition is ludicrous.

One of the big criticisms of Payne’s work is that it is not scientifically based and backed with numerical data. I would agree that much of it is not, that it is anecdotal and experiential. That does not make it any less true. We have developed into a world that places a greater value on scientific data than empirical evidence. Knowing all the scientific data about a flower does not explain its beauty; knowing the scientific data about a skunk does not explain our visceral reaction to its stench. And the beauty or stench level differs from person to person. Much of what Payne describes is not stereotype but statistics that have been accepted from other sources. It is a data-based fact that more people from low socioeconomic backgrounds are incarcerated than from other economic backgrounds. It a a data-based fact that more people from cultures of poverty have single parent homes, sub-standard housing, poor nutrition, and less success in school. Does Payne (or anyone) assert it is ONLY those in poverty who experience these things? NO. Does Payne (or anyone) assert it is ALL those in poverty who experience those things? NO.

I found that many of the suggestions for helping those arriving in my classroom from a culture of poverty (which I do believe exists) are echoed by both Payne’s supporters and detractors. (i.e. see Jensen’s TEACHING WITH POVERTY IN MIND or Gorski’s “The Myth of the Culture of Poverty”). I also find that many of these suggestions will benefit ALL of my students, as there are “dysfunctions” in many of their lives no matter what socioeconomic class they come from, and, as Payne makes clear, it is a complex and complicated blend of characteristics that impedes one’s ability to be successful. The supports she identifies are crucial to all people, and her work certainly rang true for me while offering concrete strategies that can only help every student entering my classroom.

Sure, all children learn in school to speak more formally than they do at home. All children learn that. Many southern young people learn to drop some of their accents as they enter the workworld in other places, and kids from Boston learn to drop some words from their vocabulary if they go to school or work in other places. Payne has no basis for concluding that what poor kids learn is any different. Payne did not invent the term “formal register” – a linguist doing extensive research did, and his study really has nothing to do the kinds of things Payne talks about. She just borrowed the term to sound scientific, and uses the term in very different ways than the person who first used it.

What you seem to be saying is that you conclude that she’s valid based on some personal judgment about her work, not any standards of research. If she’d written a novel without claiming to be doing scientific work, that would be fine. But she’s claiming to be basing her work on research to give it more credibility. That’s dishonest or worse.

All Ruby Payne would have to say is “don’t overgeneralize. I based my whole book on things that I saw while interacting with people in the neighborhood where my husband grew up, a whole generatio ago”. But she won’t do that, and I have to wonder if that’s not in part because she makes so much money claiming to speak about “the poor”.

And I still believe that Ruby Payne misses huge parts of their lives. It’s just not possible — especially without research — to generalize from the neighborhood in Indiana where her husband’s family lived (what she bases this book on) to every other poor child in the country where lives are very different.

Stereotypes can ring true because they always carry some element of truth. But just as with stereotypes of women as being more ditzy than men, Payne is missing many many layers of complicated lives, and pretending to be a “Scholar” means that people don’t always question what she may be missing.

I’d be curious to know what you think about why, in spite of some pretty solid research-based criticism of some of her core ideas, she hasn’t revised her book at all in decades. One explanation is that she’s making so much money telling this story, she’d risk losing some of her audience if she conceded now that she was wrong about some things. That’s a good business strategy, but it’s not at all what honest researchers in education do.

Some of her suggestions for teaching and classroom structure are just “what good teachers do”, regardless of the SES of the students. To teachers who are marginal or ineffective to begin with it can provide strategies to help them. These teachers may see her methods as the “aha!” moment.