Another take on Ruby Payne and the so-called "culture of poverty"

The PEN Weekly Newsletter summarized an article in Teaching Tolerance magazine. It's an important topic for educators, so we're reprinting it here. We encourage educators to read the entire article.

For too long, educators' approach to understanding the relationships between poverty, class and education has been framed by studying the behaviors and cultures of poor students and their families. So says Paul Gorski in "The Question of Class," a provocative article published in Teaching Tolerance magazine.

If only we -- in the middle and upper-middle classes -- can understand their culture, why those people don't value education, why those parents don't attend our functions and meetings, why those kids are so unmotivated, perhaps we can "save" some of our economically disadvantaged students from bleak futures. And so we set about studying what Ruby Payne and others describe as the "culture of poverty," how poor people see and experience the world, how they relate to food, money, relationships, education and other aspects of life. This, despite the fact that research has shown again and again that no such culture of poverty exists. It's all too easy, for even the most well-meaning of us, to help perpetuate classism by buying into that mindset, implementing activities and strategies for "working with parents in poverty" or "teaching students in poverty" that, however subtly, suggest we must fix poor people instead of eliminating the inequities that oppress poor people.

The question, of course, for any educator of privilege committed to educational equity is this: Do we choose to study supposed cultures or mindsets of poverty because doing so doesn't require an examination of our own class-based prejudices? By avoiding that question, we also avoid the messy, painful work of analyzing how classism pervades our classrooms and schools, never moving forward toward an authentic understanding of poverty, class and education.

We should never, under any circumstance, make an assumption about a student or parent -- about their values or culture or mindset -- based on a single dimension of their identity. There is no more a single culture of poverty than there is a single culture of woman-ness or of African American-ness.