The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education: Utopian Accountability and Deficit Assumptions of Middle-Class America

Abstract

Historically and currently, education discourse and policy are impacted by crisis rhetoric and utopian expectations for public education. Schools are failing, the narrative goes, but that failure is measured against a standard of success by all students without regard to the impact of socioeconomic conditions on student outcomes. Further, our educational approaches to children living in poverty are corrupted by deficit assumptions and practices as characterized by the workbooks and programs presented by Ruby Payne. Educational reform should be guided by a commitment to social reform and by a shift away from deficit perspectives and toward nuanced and realistic understandings of children living in poverty. The lives and education of children of color are disproportionately impacted by inequity and reduced practices, both reinforced by social assumptions driving educational discourse and policies that are doing more harm than good for an educational system designed to support a free people.

Keywords:

• accountability
• crisis rhetoric
• critical pedagogy
• diversity poverty
• utopian expectations

Notes

Adrienne Rich, “Arts of the Possible,” in Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: Norton, 2001), 150.

Christopher B. Swanson, Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation (Bethesda, Md.: Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, 2008). According to the America's Promise Alliance's website (http://www.americaspromise.org/About-the-Alliance.aspx), “Founded in 1997 with General Colin Powell as Chairman and chaired today by Alma Powell, America's Promise Alliance is a cross-sector partnership of more than 300 corporations, nonprofits, faith-based organizations and advocacy groups that are passionate about improving lives and changing outcomes for children. We have made a top priority of ensuring that all young people graduate from high school ready for college, work and life. Our work involves raising awareness, encouraging action and engaging in advocacy to provide children the key supports we call the Five Promises: Caring adults, Safe Places, A Healthy Start, An Effective Education and Opportunities to Help Others.”

Paul Thomas, “Crisis Rhetoric, Utopian Thinking and School ‘Reform,’ ” The State, August 22, 2008: http://www.thestate.com/editorial-columns/v-print/story/498361.html (accessed June 29, 2009).

“Cities cited for low high school graduation rates,” MSNBC, April 1, 2008: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23889321 (accessed June 29, 2009).

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).

David C. Berliner, “Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success,” Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit, 2009: http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential (accessed August 25, 2009).

See Sharon E. Paulson and Gregory J. Marchant, “Background Variables, Levels of Aggregation, and Standardized Test Scores,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 17, no. 22 (November 20, 2009): http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v17n22 (accessed December 13, 2009). Paulson and Marchant summarize NCLB as follows: “The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002) created a dramatic movement towards standardizing accountability systems across the nation. Under NCLB, every state is required to develop a set of learning standards and a statewide test to assess whether or not students meet the standards. By 2014, every school must demonstrate that 100% of its students have reached proficiency on the standardized state test (where each state determines its own cutoff for proficiency). This system requires also that each school show adequate yearly progress (AYP) in meeting its goals, by demonstrating that there are improvements in the percentage of students meeting proficiency each academic year. Schools that fail to meet AYP two years in a row are deemed failures, and parents can move their children to a school that has met AYP. Inherent within the system are similar high-stakes consequences for students and for teachers. Students who do not reach proficiency may be held back or not allowed to graduate; teachers who do not show improvements in their students' scores from year to year may receive no pay raise or be let go. These are indeed high-stakes tests.”

Ibid. For example, many problems exist for calculating AYP and holding schools accountable by that process. “However, when AYP is calculated as the change in students' aggregate scores from one year to the next, a new layer of validity problems are added. Similar to current status accountability systems, growth models also are based on a number of assumptions. Most egregious is that growth models are based on the inference that changes in students' scores within a classroom or school are caused by the quality of instruction or education provided by teachers or schools; an assumption that is not valid on a number of counts…. Comparing the percentage of students reaching proficiency on a state's standardized achievement test from one year to the next to determine AYP is equivalent to a quasi-experimental research design that tests the effects of an intervention by comparing the scores of groups that have not been randomly assigned. Consequently, there are numerous threats to the validity of accountability systems based on growth.”

See Paul Gorski, “The Classist Underpinnings of Ruby Payne's Framework,” Teachers College Record, February 9, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 24, 2007); Mark Robert Rank, One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 91.

See Ruby Payne's products and services at her website, http://www.ahaprocess.com.

Philippe Bourgois, “Culture of Poverty,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 17:11,904–11,907 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001); Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (October 1966): 19–25; Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Eleanor B. Leacock, ed., The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971).

Jennifer C. Ng and John L. Rury, “Problematizing Payne and Understanding Poverty: An Analysis with Data from the 2000 Census,” Journal of Educational Controversy 4, no. 1 (Winter 2009): http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v004n001/a001.shtml (accessed June 29, 2009).

See Randy Bomer, Joel E. Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semingson, “Miseducating Teachers About the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne's Claims About Poverty,” Teachers College Record 110, no. 11 (2008), http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=14591; Joel E. Dworin and Randy Bomer, “What We All (Supposedly) Know about the Poor: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ruby Payne's ‘Framework,’ ” English Education 40, no. 2 (January 2008): 101–121; Curt Dudley-Marling, “Return of the Deficit,” Journal of Educational Controversy 2, no. 1 (2007): http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v002n001/a004.shtml (accessed June 29, 2009); Gorski, “Classist Underpinnings”; Paul Gorski, “The Myth of the ‘Culture of Poverty,’ ” Educational Leadership 65, no. 7 (April 2008): 32–36; Jennifer C. Ng and John L. Rury, “Poverty and Education: A Critical Analysis of the Ruby Payne Phenomenon,” Teachers College Record, July 18, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 24, 2007).

See Ruby Payne, “Using the Lens of Economic Class to Help Teachers Understand and Teach Students from Poverty: A Response,” Teachers College Record, May 17, 2009: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 29, 2009); Randy Bomer, Joel E. Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semingson, “What's Wrong with a Deficit Perspective?” Teachers College Record, June 3, 2009: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 12, 2009); Paul Gorski, “Responding to Payne's Response,” Teachers College Record, July 19, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 12, 2009).

See her research link: http://www.ahaprocess.com/School_Programs/ResearchResults.

Bomer et al., “What's Wrong with a Deficit Perspective?”; Gorski, “Responding to Payne's Response.”

See Mitchell Landsberg, “Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2009; David Whitman, “An Appeal to Authority,” Education Next 8, no. 4 (Fall 2008): http://educationnext.org/an-appeal-to-authority/ (accessed June 29, 2009).

Whitman, “An Appeal to Authority.”

Renita Schmidt and P. L. Thomas, 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted, Are We Literate? (Berlin: Springer, 2009).

Bomer et al., “Miseducating.”

See Gladwell, Outliers. Gladwell argues that our practices are driven by nearly instant decisions made based on unconscious biases, notably exemplified by Gladwell's own admission that as a man of color he exhibited negative views of people of color in a test of racism.

Curt Dudley-Marling and Krista Lucas, “Pathologizing the Language and Culture of Poor Children,” Language Arts 86, no. 5 (May 2009): 362–370.

Bourgois, Culture of Poverty; Lewis, “Culture of Poverty”; Valentine, Culture and Poverty; Leacock, Culture of Poverty.

Ibid.

Ralph Ellison, “What These Children Are Like,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 546.

Ibid.

Ibid., 547.

Ibid.

Ibid., 548.

Ibid., 550.

Ibid., 551.

Ibid.

Ibid., 553.

Ibid., 555.

Payne, “Using the Lens of Economic Class.”

Ellison, “What These Children Are Like,” 555.

Gorski, “The Myth.”

Rich, “Arts of the Possible,” 162.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993), 28–29.

Laura Bolf Beliveau, “Challenging Students to Critically Connect Literature and History,” English Journal 99, no. 1 (September 2009): 107.

Ibid.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 110.

Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2005), 2.

Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53, 57.

Alfie Kohn, Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996).

William Ayers, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 51.

Ibid., 132, xv.

Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Hails Judge as ‘Inspiring,’ ” New York Times, May 26, 2009.