Pathologizing The Poor: A Framework For Understanding - Nana Osei-kofi

Equity & Excellence in Education, 38: 367–375, 2005 c University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education Copyright
ISSN 1066-5684 print /1547-3457 online DOI: 10.1080/10665680500299833

Pathologizing the Poor: A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne’s Work Nana Osei-Kofi

Payne, R.K. (2003). A framework for understanding poverty (3rd rev. ed.). Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc. ISBN: 1929229-14-3 Paperback. $22.00. The poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. —Gustavo Guti´errez

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mericans display a profound resistance to engage issues of class (Barone, 1999; Biddle, 2001; Bracey, 2003; Collins, 1996; Darder, 2002; hooks, 1994, 2000; Nesbit, 2004). To acknowledge and struggle with matters of class disrupts the hegemonic notion of America as a meritocracy, where anyone that really wants to make it, is rewarded materially, spiritually, and otherwise, in proportion to the effort they are willing to put forth. Based on this understanding, the majority of American’s view themselves and most people around them as belonging under a large umbrella known as the “middle class.’’ At the margins of this all-inclusive fictional middle are the poor on one side and the super rich on the other. The poor, while rarely recognized (when acknowledged) are viewed as a small portion of the population and largely conceived of as synonymous with black and brown folks. In contrast, the super rich are worshipped, as they, in accordance with the ideology that prevails, represent what anyone in the middle class can become with the right amount of drive, dedication, and smarts. Rather than talk about the existence of a class-based society, the acceptable and more palatable euphemism is that of “socioeconomic status.’’ Meanwhile, the social, economic, and political realities of the present underscore the absolute necessity to engage the realities of a class-based society. According to the Children’s Defense Fund (2004), presently the me-

Address Correspondence to Nana Osei-Kofi, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Iowa State University, N243 Lago Marcino Hall, Ames, IA 50011. E-mail: [email protected].

dian income of the wealthiest 20% of U.S. households is 10.7 times as much as that of the poorest 20%; more than 12 million children live in poverty; over 9 million children have no health insurance; and 13 million children and over 20 million adults live in households where hunger or food insecurity is a part of every day. When it comes to public education, the children whose lives we speak of when referencing the aforesaid staggering figures, are concentrated in schools that are described in the recent Williams v. State of California case as “schools that shock the conscience.’’ These are schools where children are expected to “learn without books and sometimes without any teachers, . . . in schools that lack functioning heating or air conditioning systems, that lack sufficient numbers of functioning toilets, and that are infested with vermin, including rats, mice, and cockroaches’’ (Williams, 2000, p. 6). Clearly, to look critically at public education today, it is impossible not to take seriously the impact of class-apartheid (Darder & Torres, 2004). Despite this reality, we see little informed discussion class and poverty in mainstream discourse on education today. As Bruce Biddle (2001) so aptly conveys: Unfortunately, most Americans (even educators, let alone politicians) seem to be unaware of the size of poverty effects on education, and the concept of poverty is largely absent from today’s debates about education policy and “reform.’’ Nor has much research yet surfaced concerned with the mechanisms through which poverty plays out its evil effects in education. (p. 3)

Enter Ruby Payne. As growing poverty meets highstakes testing, in schools across the nation, the void of a desperately needed critical engagement of class is presently often supplanted with the work of former educator-turned-entrepreneur, Ruby Payne. As the darling poverty expert de jour of many school superintendents and educators alike, Payne travels the country providing in-service training programs and reform consulting to school districts, keynote addresses to national conference audiences, and seminars open to the general 367

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public. Payne’s schedule is currently booked at least three years out (Bicksler, 2003), and according to her marketing materials, she conducts somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 seminars a year. I was first exposed to Payne’s work through my role as a consultant to a number of school districts. These districts were seeking to develop K-16 partnerships for the purpose of increasing access to higher education for underserved students. Soon after my introduction to these school districts, I started to hear about the incredible work Payne was doing to help teachers and administrators understand issues of class and poverty. My interest was immediately peaked. This praise was curious to me in light of the wide-spread resistance within the education community to critically engage issues of oppression and domination. As I began to learn more about Payne’s work and had an opportunity to attend one of her seminars, my cautious interest turned to great concern. Payne’s ideas about “understanding’’ poverty do great violence to any ideas of education as a positive force in creating a socially and economically just society. Meanwhile, several education and social work entities1 now offer continuing education units for participation in Payne’s seminars. Additionally, a growing number of college and university programs in education and social work use her texts as a primary resource to educate students about issues of class. While one could argue that her work might possibly be used in higher education to promote critical analysis, a review of close to 60 course syllabi (including syllabi for courses offered at institutions like the Ohio State University, Indiana State University, and the University of Michigan), provide little to no evidence to support such a claim. Instead, alarmingly, Payne’s work is used in education and social work programs today simply as a pragmatic tool to “help’’ students “recognize’’and learn to “address’’issues with poor students/clients in their work and internships/field experiences.2 In an effort to address the aforementioned, in what follows, I undertake a critique of A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2003a), Payne’s most well-known book and the foundation upon which her work with schools is based.3 This book does not have sufficient merit academically to warrant scholarly critique. However, the uncritical embrace of this work by significant portions of the education community suggests a need for critical engagement of the substance of the work, as well as a consideration of the relationship between this historical moment and the conditions that make possible the legitimization of this work. My critique focuses primary on three areas of Payne’s work; her depiction of family life in poverty, her engagement of the hidden rules among classes, and her claims about the academic abilities of poor children in relationship to how educators can address poverty through teaching. Finally, I conclude with looking at the relation-

ship between Payne’s success and the present state of the political economy of schooling. My analysis seeks to foreground the ideology that underpins Payne’s work and the implications of this ideology on the national discourse on class and public education. While my critique is specific to A Framework for Understanding Poverty, the issues brought forth apply to the ways in which class is (dis)engaged in discourse on public education generally, particularly in the current political climate. My intention is not to take away from the recognition by many educators that there is an urgent need to engage issues of class. Nonetheless, the ways in which these matters are engaged need to be closely examined, as the implications for the future of public education and the lives of millions of children are paramount.

A Culture of Poverty Revisited In A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Payne draws on work from a broad range of writers like Oscar Lewis, Edward Banfield, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with which her work has clear connections, while misappropriating work by scholars like C. Wright Mills, Jonathan Kozol, and Luis Rodriguez. The end result is a stringing together of worn-out conservative platitudes to rationalize poverty as a choice of the individual. Specifically, her argument rests on the notion of a culture of poverty; poverty as choice is explained as a result of the culture of the poor. The notion of a culture of poverty is a concept first suggested by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1959, 1961, 1966) based on ethnographic studies he conducted with families in Mexico and with Puerto Rican families in San Juan and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis (1966) claimed that among the poor, there existed “a subculture [of poverty] with its own structure and rationale, . . . a way of life which was passed down from generation to generation along family lines’’ (p. xliii). He argued that the presence of pathological behavior was significant, describing this culture as encompassing “some seventy interrelated social, economic and psychological traits’’ (p. xliv). These traits, according to Lewis, were a response by a subgroup of the poor, to the conditions they faced as a result of being at the very bottom of capitalist social organization. He saw the culture of poverty as, on the one hand, representing a state of deprivation and disorganization; while on the other hand, it had a positive function as an essential survival mechanism. Although Lewis tried to emphasize (however problematic) that he was only speaking of a small subgroup of the poor and that his intention was to create greater understanding, the concept of a culture of poverty built on a long history of pejorative categorizations of the poor (Katz, 1989; Steinberg, 2001). Consequently it gained in popularity in academic and political discourse in the 1970s. It was an effective way of labeling the poor,

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serving important political functions for both the left and the right. For liberals the concept was used to justify policy interventions on behalf of the poor; while for conservatives, it functioned as a rationale for punitive policies regulating the poor (Katz, 1989; Steinberg, 2001). The culture of poverty argument was subject to numerous critiques (e.g., Leacock, 1971; Valentine, 1968), including that it misused the concept of culture, was ethnocentric, failed to engage structural issues, and was based on faulty circular reasoning. In spite of this, it was not long before the concept prevailed, and continues to prevail, as Payne’s work reveals, as a conservative concept to explain poverty as a behavioral psychological condition, separate from material realities. Based on this thesis of a conservative culture of poverty, the perpetuation of poverty is viewed as resulting from particular values and beliefs held by those in poverty, thus ultimately making the poor responsible for their own condition. These values and beliefs, as articulated by Payne in her work, amount to a way of life characterized by an inability to delay gratification; a belief in fatalism; a present orientation and an inability to plan for the future; a lack of emotional stamina; a high tolerance and acceptance of physical violence, crime, mental illness, and sexual promiscuity; a preoccupation with entertainment and humor; and a lack of value placed on education. Payne (2003a) explains that in learning about poverty, she “came to realize that there were major differences between generational poverty and middle class—and that the major differences were not about money’’ (p. 9).4 Additionally, she states that “the fundamental reasons for poverty are lack of educational attainment and the disconnection of family and/or community’’ (Payne & Ehlig, 1999, p. 12). Premised on this argument, Payne’s message to educators, broadly speaking, is that since poverty stems from cultural traits, they can, through the application of the appropriate cognitive development and behavior modification strategies, change the condition of poverty. What is more, as individuals largely belonging to the so-called middle class, they can do this without giving up any of their privilege. After all, Payne (2003a) notes “it costs nothing to be an appropriate role model’’ (p. 39).

Domesticating Class A Framework for Understanding Poverty opens with current statistical data on poverty in the United States. Drawing primarily upon data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Payne constructs a narrative that foregrounds single-parent families, female-led households, teenage pregnancy, child abuse, children with developmental delays, and the increase in immigrant children in America, as focal for grounding the readers understanding of poverty. Through this discourse, Payne uses the State to legitimate her work, masking the dependence of cur-

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rent economic and political conditions on the continued (re)production of poverty, while situating the “individual’’ living in poverty as scapegoat. Through seven vignettes, readers are familiarized with the characteristics and family life of the poor as scripted by Payne. Readers are asked to identify the characteristics of the poor and to determine whether various forms of resources, such as financial, emotional, and mental resources, are present in the lives of the children portrayed in these narratives. Identifying the characteristics and resources available to the poor, Payne suggests is at the heart of interventions that educators can make in the lives of poor children. Behind this seemingly innocent exercise, the conditions Payne depicts function to contrast the “deserving poor’’ with the “undeserving poor,’’ representative of what Michael Katz (1989) describes as a supply-side view of poverty. It is a view of poverty that eschews the reality of political economy and categorizes the poor according to arbitrary measures of “worthiness’’ of assistance, given the presumption of limited resources. In accordance with this line of thinking, Payne’s vignettes function to sensitize readers to a continuum of deservedness. At one end of the continuum, the exemplary deserving family is a hardworking, religious, two-parent family. In the instance that a deserving family is headed by a single mother, single motherhood comes only as a result of death or a father unjustly leaving his family. To describe the undeserving at the other end of the continuum, Payne plays to the public imagination of the so-called black welfare queen. The undeserving family is headed by a black single mother with multiple children. She has a boyfriend that comes and goes; she is a high school dropout, and has difficulty with literacy. She lives on welfare and moves her family around frequently as she is unable to make ends meet. Throughout these narratives, readers also are introduced to the presence of drugs, convicts, alcoholism, domestic violence, gangs, drive-by shootings, promiscuity, multiple marriages, multiple step-children, and a suggestion of incest. This is after Payne introduces these vignettes by stating that “these scenarios have omitted most of the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that can be present so that the discussion can be about resources’’ (p. 18). Payne (2003a) asserts that “poverty occurs in all races’’ (p. 10) and that disparity, rather than being about race, is about class. As a result, in many ways her vignettes portray families of color and white families as equally pathological, if you will. Upon closer examination however, her equal opportunity offense, is not so equal. Through the use of racialization, Payne adds another layer to the continuum of deservedness; this time juxtaposing the deserving family of color with the undeserving family of color. The “good’’ black family is religious and hardworking; the “bad’’ family is headed by the welfare queen. The “good’’ Hispanic family is a deeply religious,

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hardworking two-parent family; in contrast to the gangbanging, drug selling family. These binaries are posited in contrast to white families, in relationship to what I call “perceived social dependence.’’This in essence translates into middle-class readers’ sense of impact of these families on their pocket books and quality of life. Illustrative of this viewpoint, in the seminar I attended, Payne (2004) told a story of friends from church commenting on her work, and reminding her that the Bible says that there will always be poverty, to which Payne replied, “Yes, but ask yourself what percentage of poverty you can afford in your community?’’ The “understanding’’ of poverty and its effects on society conveyed here by Payne, suggest that poor families of color are a direct burden on society through their dependence on welfare and their destruction of communities through drug sales and gang warfare, whereas poor white families, while not free of pathology, are involved in a more self-destructive behavior (i.e., alcoholism, drug use, and illicit behavior) and thus do not represent the same overt burden on society. Family patterns in generational poverty are described by Payne (2003a) as confusing and difficult for the middle-class to figure out. This, according to Payne, is because in addition to marriages often being common-law arrangements, there are typically multiple complicated relationships with which to deal. These relationships involve husbands, wives, ex-wives, boyfriends, children, lesbian partners, and grandmothers, to name a few. Additionally, Payne suggests that men and women living in poverty have no identity outside of gender. She maintains that men in poverty are limited to the choice of either being fighters or lovers, while women are simply caretakers. In the interaction between men and women, she submits that a real man in poverty is “ruggedly goodlooking, is a lover, can physically fight, works hard, [and] takes no crap [while] a real woman takes care of her man by feeding him and downplaying his shortcomings’’ (p. 77). As fighters or lovers, survival for men means always being on the run; someone is always looking for them, whether it is the law or a former wife. Women’s survival is dependent on the use of their bodies. Women’s exploit of their bodies as commodities in exchange for favors, money, and survival, Payne submits, is “one of the rules in generational poverty’’ (p. 38, emphasis added). Through these narratives, Payne (2003a) plays to popular imagination, building upon and reifying a portrayal of the existence of a pathological “culture of poverty,’’ of which a daily dose is offered as truth through the neverending line-up of “reality’’ television shows (e.g., Jerry Springer, COPS, and Maury Povitch). Payne presents families in poverty through homogenizing, stereotyped caricatures, as stick figures lacking in any complexity, depth or “realness.’’ These depictions are implicitly posited in contrast to a mythical norm of the two-parent, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class family, with 2.4 well-adjusted children, a house in the suburbs,

a red picket fence, and a family dog playing in the front yard. Through these mediated representations of what it means to be poor and often of color, dominant pathological representations of poverty and “difference’’ are legitimized and perpetuated. By dehumanizing families living in poverty through a simplistic lens of selective morality, family structure and circumstances in Payne’s work are equated with pathology and indirectly posited as the cause of poverty. People living in poverty are objectified and reified as “other,’’ constructed as dependent, passive, and void of agency, minus their “choice’’ of poverty. Drawn to these representations and arguments with a sense of guilty voyeuristic pleasure, the “average’’ American (such as the well-meaning educator), constructs him or herself against the pathological, thus securing his or her “normalcy’’ in contradistinction to what is a comfortably familiar, anxiety-ridden, deficit-based hegemonic construction of the poor, continually reproduced by dominant social institutions. Based on this depiction of the poor, educators become perfectly situated to take on the role of middle-class, primarily white, saviors of children in poverty by being “good’’ role models, and teaching these children the so-called hidden rules of middle-class. Through the objectification of the poor, educators are implicitly posited as the true historical subjects with ability to act in creating social change.

Payne Meets Banfield: The Hidden Rules Among Classes The bedrock of Payne’s (2003a) work is the notion of hidden rules among classes. These hidden rules are described as cues and habits of different classes concerning a number of areas of life (e.g., how money is viewed, how language is used, and perceptions about clothing, education, food, and destiny). While Payne posits these hidden rules as her more or less revolutionizing contribution to increasing understanding of poverty, what she presents is nothing new in poverty discourse. Although Payne’s delineation of hidden rules is void of citations, her discussion reads like a re-write of “The Imperatives of Class,’’ a chapter in Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City, originally published in 1968, followed by two revised versions, one in 1970 and the other in 1974. According to Banfield, (1974), society consists of the upper-, middle-, working-, and lower-classes. The upper-class is the most future-oriented, while the lower-class lives from moment to moment. This, in turn, translates into a number of beliefs and behaviors that ultimately explain why individuals or groups find themselves in different classes. “The upper-class individual is markedly self-respecting, self-confident, and self-sufficient’’ (Banfield, 1974, p. 57); meanwhile, “the middle-class individual’s self-feelings are a little

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less strong than those of the upper-class individual’’ (Banfield, p. 59). The working-class individual “is selfrespecting and self-confident, but these feelings are less marked in him than in the middle-class individual and they extend to a somewhat narrower range of matters’’ (Banfield, p. 60). Finally, the lower-class individual “has a feeble, attenuated sense of self; he suffers from feelings of self-contempt and inadequacy, and is often apathetic or dejected’’ (Banfield, p. 62). Exemplifying the similarities between Banfield’s and Payne’s work, (2003a) Payne describes society as consisting of the poor, middle, and wealthy classes. For the poor, the “present [is] most important. Decisions [are] made for [the] moment based on feelings or survival’’ (p. 59). For the middle-class, the “future is [the] most important. Decisions [are] made against future ramifications,’’ while for the wealthy, “traditions and history [are the] most important. Decisions [are] made partially on [the] basis of tradition and decorum’’ (p. 59). The wealthy individual’s outlook on life, his view of destiny, is simply “noblesse oblige’’ (p. 59); that is to say, a belief in her or his honorable behavior as a responsibility of her or his social standing. The middle-class individual “believes in choice [and that she or he] can change [the] future with good choices now’’ (p. 59). Finally, the individual in poverty “believes in fate [and that she or he] cannot do much to mitigate chance’’ (p. 59). What Payne (2003a), in essence, does with Banfield’s (1974) categories is to combine his description of the upper- and middle-classes to primarily describe the middle-class, while she enhances the emphasis on tradition and social relations to describe the wealthy. Meanwhile, the characteristics of the poor in Payne’s version represent a merging of Banfield’s categories of workingclass and lower-class. What results is simply a recycled thesis of class stratification. Banfield’s thesis promoted the perpetuation of racism, sexism, and economic inequality in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his thesis functions no differently as it is parroted by Payne in the present era. The labeling upon which this line of reasoning depends said more about Banfield, and now Payne, than it does about the real qualities of the people they both so crudely stigmatize as deficient. This is not to suggest that there is no difference between living in affluence and living in poverty. Nor is it a failure to recognize “that even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims, or on the other hand, as superhuman agents’’ (Gordon, 1997, p. 4). The point however, is that to attribute these differences to class-dependent morally stratified behaviors and outlooks on life, is an expression of class-bias in defense of elite interests and an exercise in gross analytical reductionism. These simplistic and stereotyping assertions do more to maintain the status quo

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and justify racialized, gendered and economic inequality, than in any way contribute to the alleviation of poverty.

The Powerless and the Powerful What are educators to do with this information? According to Payne (2003a), there are four reasons people “leave’’ poverty: “It is too painful to stay, a vision or a goal, a key relationship, or a special talent or skill’’ (p. 11). Hence, educators have the opportunity to create what Payne calls a “key relationship’’ and thus function as the providers of transitional capital to students in poverty. Through the provision of transitional capital, which in plain language means teaching the poor middle-class norms, the poor, Payne claims, can achieve success in school, do well in the world of work, and ultimately transition out of poverty. Poor children are objectified as defective individuals in need of fixing. Hence, Payne (2003a) offers a number of prescriptions for how educators can achieve success with poor children: poor children need to be taught to speak in formal register; they need to be taught behavioral selfgovernance; they need to engage in procedural self-talk in order to compensate for lack of procedural memory, and thus their inability to follow instructions. As Payne takes a brief moment in her work to suggest that IQ tests do not measure intelligence or ability, she employs a “switch and bait’’ strategy wherein she replaces IQ with the language of “cognitive deficiencies.’’ The perception of conceptual distinction notwithstanding, she uses cognitive deficiencies as proxy for “common sense’’ notions about intelligence and the lack of it among poor children, effectively appealing to persistent supremacist notions deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Our teaching, she suggests must change, because as children from poverty come to school without “structure[s] inside . . . [their] head[s] to accept learning’’ (p. 119), “we simply can’t assign them all to special education’’(p. 120). Payne’s deficit-based claims about the intellectual abilities of children living in poverty read like Frank Riessman’s assertions in The Culturally Deprived Child (1962), although he, like Banfield earlier, is nowhere cited. Drawing also on the work of Reuven Feuerstein, whom is typically associated with special education, Payne describes the cognitive deficiencies of children from poverty as including, the lack of . . . systemic method[s] of exploration . . . impaired verbal tools . . . impaired spatial orientation . . . impaired temporal orientation . . . impaired observations of constancies . . . lack of precision and accuracy in data gathering . . . and the inability to hold two objects or two sources inside the head while comparing and contrasting. (pp. 123–124)

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Building on this characterization, she makes suggestions, such as the following: poor people cannot think abstractly, therefore they have no planning behavior, which is why poor children have problems with school projects; poor people have no clocks in their environment and instead keep time emotionally, therefore being on time is rarely valued, children determine when it is time to go to school in the morning by the smells and sounds around them. These children do poorly in math because they cannot think about space systematically and because their homes are dark without any contrast in colors, leaving them void of visual discrimination, thus negatively impacting their visual recall and their math skills. Problems with language stem from the use of causal register in poverty, which leads to random episodic memory, which in turn has adverse effects on thinking (Payne, 2004). Payne’s (2003a) classist script of conflating poverty with cognitive deficiency and pathology is maybe best captured in the following passage: If an individual depends upon a random, episodic story structure for memory patterns, lives in an unpredictable environment, and has not developed the ability to plan, then . . . [sic] if an individual cannot plan, he/she cannot predict. If an individual cannot predict, he/she cannot identify cause and effect. If an individual cannot identify cause and effect, he/she cannot identify consequence. If an individual cannot identify consequence, he/she cannot control impulsivity. If an individual cannot control impulsivity, he/she has an inclination toward criminal behavior. (p. 121)

Explicitly and implicitly, Payne (2003a) in her discussion of teaching and learning relies on the erroneous notion of a hierarchy of skills (Means, Chelemer & Knapp, 1991), conveniently overlaid upon the hierarchy of classbased values upon which her work depends. By privileging white middle-class knowledge and positing the lack of such knowledge as the equivalent of cognitive deficiency, Payne advocates the idea of cognition, the thinking/knowing subject, as a somehow neutral construct removed from context, power, privilege, and history. In so doing, she promotes the notion of progressive stages of cognitive development where the white middle-class is situated as norm against which lowerclass “deficient others’’ are constructed and must work to measure up (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993). Nowhere in Payne’s discussion is there any awareness that the values she understands as the ticket to success for poor children “are associated with the dominant social class[es] not because . . . [they] are inherently better but because they have higher social prestige as determined by the group[s] with the greatest power’’ (Nieto, 1999, p. 54). Drawing upon sociological and psychological theories that have long ago been challenged and exposed for their simplistic ahistorical, acontextual, classist, racist,

sexist foundations, Payne, in what I believe is probably more about opportunism and ideology than an incomprehensible profound lack of knowledge, presents this work as though it were something new that provides all the answers necessary in today’s education reform environment.

Poverty and Capital The worldview from which Payne’s prescriptions for education derive is made blaringly apparent in her discussions of the relationship among the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), intellectual capital development, U.S. world leadership, and capitalism (Payne, 2003b, 2004). Drawing on Hernando de Soto’s (2000) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Payne follows his lead in claiming that the success of U.S. and Western capitalism is a result of the use of abstract representational systems. To put this claim in context, de Soto’s position derives from the following logic, which he puts forth in the introduction to his thesis on capitalism: Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, not matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy. (p. 5)

Although poor countries are engaged in “activities that characterize a capitalist economy’’ (p. 5), what de Soto (2003) asserts is that the inability of these nations to achieve capitalist success is a result of the fact that “they lack the process to represent their property and create capital’’ (pp. 5–6). To make this point in the seminar I attended, Payne (2004) described how the lack of representational systems was the key to why countries like India are not doing well economically, why Saddam Hussein was able to come to power with such ease in Iraq, and why Russia is experiencing difficulties moving from communism to democracy! Against this world economic backdrop, the NCLB Act (2002), viewed as an accountability structure to measure the education system’s ability to develop intellectual capital (i.e., an abstract representational system), and thus the amount of wealth a community is able to create, is presented as critical to America’s “sustainability . . . survival . . . [and] leadership role in the world’’ (Payne, 2003b, p. 4). Payne maintains that this is not a choice; rather it is what must be done to keep the U.S. competitive. By using de Soto’s (2000) work to validate her own, Payne is able to extend her domestically-based argument about the reasons for poverty onto the global scene. In Payne’s work, domestic poverty is tied to the hidden rules among classes; in de Soto’s work, global poverty is

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tied to the mystery of capital. According to Payne, poor people in America cannot think abstractly, while de Soto claims that poor nations are unable to create abstract financial representational systems. In both cases, the wealth of a few is justified by rationalizing the lack of wealth of the many, as a result of choices made by individuals and nations, respectively. Playing in the background are the remains of deeply ingrained historical ideas of “primitive’’ people and ideas vis-`a-vis Western (read: advanced) people, and among the latter, the elite. Whether it is the hidden rules among classes or the mystery of capital, what is hidden and mystified is not how we eliminate poverty, but “the dynamics of power and subordination’’ (Katz, 1995, p. 87). Absent from these assertions are any considerations of history and the relationship of poverty domestically and internationally to imperialism, colonization, exploitation, slavery, and corporate greed. Only by completely ignoring any structural or historical realities, can de Soto and Payne make their outlandish allegations. By reducing education to the production of intellectual capital, Payne, albeit not her purpose, lifts forth and brings into focus the multiple and insidious functions of what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) so rightly called the banking concept of education. As the so-called “accountability measures’’ of NCLB (2002) produce a context wherein teachers spend most of their time teaching to the test, students are viewed as empty vessels to be filled with content (Freire, 1970/2000). The more content with which a teacher can fill students, the more competent he or she is considered (Freire, 1970/2000). When content is understood as intellectual capital, which—without minimizing multiple characterizations—essentially boils down to what Patrick Sullivan (1998) describes as “knowledge that can be converted into profits’’(p. 5), the public education system is reduced to an intellectual capital management firm to whom the elite have outsourced their dirty work. In the crudest form of this model, our children are viewed as empty bank vaults where intellectual capital managers deposit intellectual assets on behalf of their clients for use by these clients at their discretion. In rationalizing this distorted notion of what it means to learn and to be human, education is reduced to exchange value and a path to money, void of wonder, inquiry, praxis, and love.

CONCLUSION In light of the analysis I have put forth, the question I return to as I attempt to make sense of this work is the following: what does the popularity and embrace of A Framework for Understanding Poverty in the education community and beyond,5 say about this particular moment in American history and in the history of public education in this country? In large part, the parallels be-

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tween societal changes at the time of the industrial revolution, present patterns of change, and the coupling of these social shifts with changes in education are helpful to understanding Payne’s popularity. Shedding light on these corresponding contexts, Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres (2004) observe that

The historical parallels between the contemporary “accountability experts’’ in education and the “costefficiency consultants’’ of the early part of the twentieth century are worth noting. In both historical eras . . . [we see] increasing immigration, burgeoning student enrollments in urban centers, economic decline, and overt military action overseas. Moreover, big business leaders seeking to take control of public education in the early 1900s utilized the same rhetoric of corruption and the declining efficiency of public schools, so prevalent among corporate elites today, to legitimate their move. In addition elite businessmen . . . solicited the advice of efficiency experts like Frederick Taylor in their misguided effort to make schools function like well-oiled factory machines. (pp. 79–80)

Payne (2003b) also speaks of this context in her work. However, she presents the involvement of business in education in the past as well as the present, as necessary as a result of “schools not doing their job’’ (p. 1). In Payne’s view, NCLB (2002) and its singular focus on testing is self-explanatory as the necessary and obvious answer to current social trends. As testing was the answer to social shifts at the turn of the century, so it must be today, with the exception of testing in the latter instance placing emphasis on the system as opposed to the earlier focus on the individual student. The embrace of Payne’s work in education is in part explained by its alignment with the ideology of the State. By situating her culture of poverty thesis within the context of schools achieving “success’’ under NCLB,6 her work is posited as benevolent, neutral, and above all, apolitical. Regardless of whether some educators might be critical of NCLB, Payne’s work for many comes across as simply providing tangible tools to deal with the hand the federal government has dealt education. It is viewed as addressing immediate realities in schools, ostensibly removed from whether or not NCLB serves the interests of providing a quality education for all children. As such, her work plays powerfully to what Katz (1989) describes as “the anti-intellectualism never far from the surface of American culture’’ (p. 144). On the question of opposition to dominant knowledge forms such as Payne’s, Darder’s and Torres’ (2004) observations of how opposing views are neutralized by a variety of social agents are instructive in understanding why critiques of Payne’s work are so scant. They argue that there are at least four types of social agents that serve to quiet down opposition;

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1. those who knowingly support the limits and configuration of “official’’ authority within the fundamental order of public schools for their own personal gain; 2. those who are complicit as a consequence of insufficient knowledge and skills to contest the system; 3. those who protect their class interests by “playing the game’’ while paying lip service to the rhetoric of helping the oppressed; and 4. those who consent due to their overwhelming fear of authority. (pp. 92–93)

I would add to this, that as NCLB (2002) makes teachers the scapegoats of failing schools as measured by students’ performance on standardized tests, Payne’s rhetoric offers an opportunity for an attractive, yet misguided, form of resistance to NCLB. By accepting Payne’s rhetoric of poverty as pathology, the focus of analysis in relationship to school failure shifts from teachers and schools onto the culture of poverty. Meanwhile, the structural conditions through which education and the lives of our children are reduced to cost-benefit analyses remain intact. Relying on a culture of poverty thesis to address class inequalities in education is antithetical to working toward greater social and economic equity. The unreflective embrace by educators of work such as A Framework for Understanding Poverty only exacerbates and perpetuates the education system’s historical and continued dehumanization of children living in poverty and children from communities of color. Instead, to contribute to the work of radical change necessitates an understanding of the relationship between class and capitalism (Barone, 1999; Darder & Torres, 2004). Given the complex ways in which class functions in capitalist society, it is also critical to recognize capitalism as “a set of processes mediated through the simultaneous operation of gendered, sexualized, and racialized hierarchies’’ (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997, p. xxii).That is to say, considering class in the present era, we cannot look at this form of stratification in isolation; we must also consider the ways in which racialized and gendered class structures function to sort people into hierarchies to preserve the exploitive conditions upon which capitalism depends. At the same time, we must guard against fragmenting our understanding of class by using stand alone analytical categories like “feminized poverty,’’ “child poverty,’’ and “the urban poor,’’ as this places artificial boundaries on the issues of class, while obscuring both the wide-spread implications of poverty and the relation of poverty to the social system as a whole7 (Wiegers, 2002). In sum, in contrast to embracing Payne’s efforts to “sell’’ the education community on a culture of poverty, we must garner the courage to critically engage issues of class as relations of power in American society; if, and this is a big if, our commitment to education is in truth a commitment to social and economic democracy, and therefore a commitment to the humanity of all children.

NOTES 1. Quincy University (Quincy, IL), Texas State Board for Educator Certification, National Association of Social Workers, National Board of Certified Counselors, Inc., Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented. 2. A Google search on June 3, 2005 using the search terms “Ruby Payne, Syllabus, and Education,’’ generated over 5,000 web documents from which the syllabi I analyzed were collected. 3. While the focus of my critique is A Framework for Understanding Poverty, I also draw on other writings by Payne in order to more fully uncover the ideological underpinnings of her poverty discourse. 4. On her website (www.ahaprocess.com) Payne maintains a section titled “Research Base’’ where she makes the following claim (which contains striking parallels with Oscar Lewis’ work), about the information in her book: A Framework for Understanding Poverty borrows heavily from a 30-year, qualitative, ongoing case study, which uses several methodologies. The research methodology that was and is used relies heavily on an anthropological approach. In addition, the narratives/stories of a neighborhood are used extensively. The neighborhood that was and is observed is mostly white; some of the individuals are part Native American, and there are a few Hispanics. The number of people observed is between 50 and 70. Because of the greater likelihood of early death in poverty and the amount of mobility, the number fluctuates. The author is most interested in noting that the study has “ecological validity.’’ 5. In addition to writing about a culture of poverty and schools, Payne has self-published several other books that are near identical to A Framework for Understanding Poverty with only minor modifications made in relationship to the audience she is seeking to target, resulting in titles such as Hidden Rules of Class at Work (Payne & Krabill, 2002); What Every Church Member Should Know about Poverty (Payne & Ehlig, 1999); and Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities (Payne, DeVol, & Smith, 2001). 6. For details on Payne’s school reform consulting services see: www.ahaprocess.com/SchoolReform.html 7. I am not suggesting here that we are not to look at different elements and parts of an issue, what I am emphasizing however is the danger of not situating such analysis within the larger social, political, and economic context.

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Nesbit, T. (2004). Class and teaching. In R. St. Clair & J. A. Sandlin (Eds.), Promoting critical practice in adult education: New directions for adult and continuing education, no. 102 (pp. 15–24). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nieto, S. (1999). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New York: Teacher’s College Press. No Child Left Behind Act. (2002). Public Law 107–110. 107th Congress. Payne, R. K. (2003a). A framework for understanding poverty (3rd rev. ed.). Highlands, TX: aha! Process. Payne, R. K. (2003b). No child left behind: What’s really behind it all? [Electronic version]. Instructional Leader, 16(2), 1-3. Payne, R. K. (2004, July). A framework for understanding poverty. Seminar conducted at the meeting of the annual conference of the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships, Washington, DC. Payne, R. K., DeVol, P., & Smith, D. (2001). Bridges out of poverty: Strategies for professionals and communities. Highlands, TX: aha! Process. Payne, R. K., & Krabill, D. L. (2002). Hidden rules of class at work. Highlands, TX: aha! Process. Payne, R. K., & Ehlig, B. (1999). What every church member should know about poverty. Highlands, TX: aha! Process. Riessman, F. (1962). The culturally deprived child. New York: Harper & Row. Steinberg, S. (2001). The ethnic myth: Race, ethnicity, and class in America (3rd ed.). Boston: Bacon Press. Sullivan, P. (1998). Profiting from capital: Extracting value from innovation. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Valentine, C. A. (1968). Culture and poverty: Critique and counterproposals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wiegers, W. (2002). The framing of poverty as “child poverty” and its implications for women. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Status of Women Canada. Williams v. State of California. (2000, August 14). Plaintiff’s first amended complaint. Retrieved September 3, 2004, from http://www.mofo.com/decentschools/courtdocs/01 AmendedComplaint.pdf

Nana Osei-Kofi is assistant professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University. Her work focuses on critical education, transnational feminist thought, political economy of higher education, and arts-based educational research.