Putting Class Back in the Classroom

~ Laura

I’m working through Sunday’s Magazine, which was devoted to the issue of class.  One article focused on Ruby Payne. Payne is an author and trainer. She gives talks to educators across the country about how middle class teachers need to better understand the cultures of other economic groups. She hawks her DVDs and books.

And while Payne may not believe in class struggle, per se, she does believe that there is widespread misunderstanding among the classes — and more than ever, she says, the class that bears the cost of that misunderstanding is the poor. In schools, particularly, where poor students often find themselves assigned to middle-class teachers, class cluelessness is rampant.

Your class, Payne says, determines everything: your eating habits, your speech patterns, your family relations. It is possible to move out of the class you were born into, either up or down, she says, but the transition almost always means a great disruption to your sense of self. And you can ascend the class ladder only if you are willing to sacrifice many of your relationships and most of your values — and only if you first devote yourself to careful study of the hidden rules of the class you hope to enter.

It’s an interesting article. Worth the read. I had mixed feelings about this woman. On the one hand, class differences do exist (Lareau), and I imagine that culture clashes can exist in the classroom. On the other hand, the inspirational speaker stuff drives me crazy.

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Putting Class Back in the Classroom”

  1. I enjoyed the article, having only really heard of Payne in workshops/conferences where it is de rigeur to criticize her. Like you, I can;t stand the inspirational speaker stuff, and it is depressing that teaching is so anti-intellectual a profession that people need to listen to Payne rather than reading Lareau and Rothstein (every teacher in a high poverty school should read Lareau and also Rothstein’s Class and Schools). But that’s a fact, and its not her fault; and she is offering educators strategies to try (not forcing on them) so is really just part of the marketplace of ideas.
    The big reason why its de riguer for academics to disapprove of her is that she supposedly adopts a “deficit” model of poverty. I’ve been accused of this when I’ve spoken in ed schools, too. Yep, I do have a deficit model of poverty. Poverty is bad for people; it presents barriers to their being able to do what they want, makes it harder for them to raise their kids well, and screws with their agency and their mental health. If it didn’t, why would abolishing it be so important? If people living in poverty have just as much chance to live good and rewarding lives as people in wealth then inequality and poverty are nothing to worry about. If you reject a deficit model of poverty, you lose the moral reason to care about poverty.
    Sorry, don’t know where that rant came from. But Payne seems ok, from what little I know, to me.

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  2. I can see how your critics get to there position. If different economic classes have different cultures and if we think that ethnic cultures should be preserved and celebrated, then we should also celebrate the culture of the poor. Of course, that’s silly, but that’s how they get to their conclusion.
    To her credit, Lareau takes a critical and sympathetic view of class culture. She points out both the positive and negative elements of child rearing of the poor. Their kids seem happier than the over scheduled middle class kids, even if they aren’t well prepared for upper middle class life. The obvious conclusion for me after reading Lareau is that we need to blend the two models to raise our kids.
    It’s not just teaching that is anti-intellectual. After following another thread in the blogosphere last week, I found it rather depressing that academics have done such a poor job of getting the public’s ear and we have let others with their mugs and DVDs put together slick packages of folk wisdom and anecdotes.

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  4. The big reason why its de riguer for academics to disapprove of her is that she supposedly adopts a “deficit” model of poverty
    Hilarious!

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  5. A well justified rant, Harry. In my field, adult ed in the UK, “deficit model” is hissed rather than spoken, and using such a supposedly benighted model is heresy. Yet we spend almost all our time and effort trying to help poorly qualified and/or low-skilled adults catch up.
    Catch up from what, if there’s no deficit? I guess the idea is that we’re supposed to focus on people’s strengths rather than what they lack. Eg low-skilled people shouldn’t be seen as lowly people – and while poverty might cause deficits the impoverished shouldn’t be seen only in terms of those deficits. But the language police certainly take this way too far here in the UK.

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  6. Ruby Payne’s work may be coming from a deficit model – never really thought about it before because she gave many ways of working with students that worked in our district. She emphasized visual work and verbal work that worked to their strengths and allowed them to be successful in our reading and mathematics programs. That’s what our focus was when we worked with her and her materials.

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  7. The ‘deficit’ thinking model is the belief that students do not have any value in what they bring to the classroom, and therefore we must use middle class values to make them valued. This is Ruby Payne’s sick mind at work.

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