Despite Payne’s counsel, the reality is that in the nation’s bedrooms and churches, bridges across the class divide are increasingly rare: most Americans worship with and marry people who are just like them. In public schools, though, class divisions are a frequent part of daily existence, sometimes within the student body but also, and more significant, between teachers and students.
The passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 brought a new urgency to the issue of poverty in the classroom. For the first time, schools were required not only to report their overall test results but also to calculate the scores for various “subgroups,” including racial minorities, students for whom English is a second language and students whose parents’ income is low enough to qualify them for a free or reduced-price lunch. It soon became impossible to ignore that there was a problem: poor students were scoring well behind their wealthier peers. And schools suddenly had a powerful incentive to try to address that disparity. Even otherwise well-performing schools could be labeled failures if their poor students weren’t catching up.
Payne believes that teachers can’t help their poor students unless they first understand them, and that means understanding the hidden rules of poverty. The second step, Payne says, is to teach poor students explicitly about the hidden rules of the middle class. She emphasizes that the goal should not be to change students’ behavior outside of school: you don’t teach your students never to fight if fighting is an important survival skill in the housing project where they live. But you do tell them that in order to succeed at school or later on in a white-collar job, they need to master certain skills: how to speak in “formal register,” how to restrain themselves from physical retaliation, how to keep a schedule, how to exist in what Payne calls the “abstract world of paper.”
At the Jekyll Island seminar, I met Steve Kipp, a science teacher at Brunswick High with a ponytail and a jumpy, eager energy. He looked as if he might be the kind of guy whom the other teachers would call when they couldn’t get their computers to work right. Kipp sat in the front row, dead center, and at the break he was the first person to come up and ask Payne for advice.
In 10th grade at Brunswick High, Kipp told me later, the advanced students usually take chemistry, and the other students, the ones who are more likely to wind up in technical college, take Kipp’s class, which is called General Physical Science. And each year it’s the same, Kipp said: the rich and middle-class kids are tracked into chemistry, and he gets the kids from poverty. Kipp grew up in the middle class, and in the past, he said, before he read Payne’s book, he would get frustrated by his poor students. They seemed unwilling or unable to learn; they laughed when he tried to mete out discipline. And so he found it hard to keep exerting himself. What was the point in teaching them, he thought, if they weren’t going to make an effort?
But after he immersed himself in Payne’s work, about five years ago, Kipp’s ideas changed. “I realized, these kids aren’t dumb,” he said. “They just haven’t had the enriching experiences that I had growing up.” So he pushes himself harder now to provide more experiments in the classroom, more hands-on learning to help his students develop the same kind of instinctive understanding of nature that he got running around in the woods as a boy.
Payne’s work in the schools has attracted a growing chorus of criticism, mostly from academia. Although Payne says that her only goal is to help poor students, her critics claim that her work is in fact an assault on those students. By teaching them middle-class practices, critics say, she is engaging in “classism” and racism. Her work is “riddled with factual inaccuracies and harmful stereotypes,” charges Anita Bohn, an assistant professor at Illinois State University, in a paper on Payne’s work. Paul Gorski, an assistant professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, writes that Payne’s central text “consists, at the crudest level, of a stream of stereotypes and a suggestion that we address poverty and education by ”˜fixing’ poor people instead of reforming classist policies and practices.”
I’ve worked with people from poor backgrounds in prison and they will tell you that what changes their life (aside from Jesus Christ) is to adopt the attitudes of successful people. There are now “life skills” classes where they are taught how to handle conflict verbally and appropriately. They learn the importance of appearance and dress and “bearing.” They learn to think like successful people.
Helping those who don’t have a middle/upper class background understand how that world “works” is not a type of “classism,” but a valuable skill. Are there things I would change about the “middle class?” Absoutely, but to help people from lower economic backgrounds understand the “rules” of the upper economic backgrounds is not classism – it is breaking down the walls of classism so that people may move from one “class” to another and are not stuck in the class of their birth.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
ah, but the critics don’t want more people to move from one ‘class’ to another. There seems to be a need by The Powers That Be to have a permanent underclass from which to point and say “See? We need to raise taxes to help them buy food” when a more prudent focus would be “See? We need to educate them to allow them to move up and out of their poverty and make something of themselves” which is what Payne is trying to do.
I had a most blessed person at the time I was in grade school (1-6th). We were poor yes, and my dad worked hard. Fortunately I had a mother who made my sister and I study and learn.
Is this not what Jesus did in John 4? He met the woman where she was at and gently lead her to where she needed to be. Not expecting an instant jump (as pharisees did) or leaving her in the predicament, but met her then guided her. I can say He done the same for me.
How ironic that Payne’s critics in the genteel world of academia are blind to their own actions that confirm her thesis. If anyone succeeds in publishing or consulting without following strict research protocol and without humbly seeking the benediction of one’s superiors in the ivory tower world, but rather simply observes, reasons, tests, reviews, confirms, and arrives at workable and true conclusions, that person must be shunned, not having followed the unwritten rules of the class of academia.
This is very relevant to the changes in the Episcopal Church. The old Episcopal Church provided spiritual depth while modeling what Payne calls the “hidden rules of the middle classâ€: soft spoken, restrained, on schedule and well ordered.
Many of the new innovations have modeled the behaviors that Payne say keep people trapped in poverty: rejection of discipline, chaotic and loud.
If Payne’s theory is correct, then a church that models the “hidden rules of the middle class†will attract the poor who are ready to change and help them move out of poverty.
Similarly, a church that models the behaviors that keep people trapped in poverty may attract the poor, but will not help them change out of the culture of poverty.
Payne is right. Overwhelmingly, kids act out because they don’t know how to act. It starts as a coverup to their embarassment and then snowballs into anti-social behavior until they are locked in.
Payne has “franchised” her presentation around the country to trained speakers. I’ve gone through it twice, and it has some very good points to it, but if you read allllllll the way through the NYTimes piece you see a glimpse of some of the New Age oddity that can creep into these talks, which traces back to where Ruby Payne got her original inspiration (?!). Agencies and supervisors can turn this into the next Myers-Briggs/What’s Your Color/Enneagram that will unpack the psyche and unscrew the inscrutable.
So my point is i encourage folk to attend the training, but not to drink any Grape Flavor-Aide that’s offered.
How justly, how completely do these two contenders for the lightweight belt deserve to square off against each other. Poor public education! LM
Dr. Payne is a communicant at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Corpus Christi.
Following the star to the manger was not a bad idea just ’cause the Magi were Zoroastrian either.