Two Takes on Ruby Payne

Ruby Payne has a great deal of influence on the way teachers think about many at-risk children, so we're interested in the research behind and the validity of her conclusions. We ran across two articles that provide some perspective:

A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne (we nominate this for Clever Title of the Year) was published in the Winter 2006 edition of Rethinking Schools. The author's main concerns -- worthy of attention -- are the lack of research behind Payne's Framework for Understanding Poverty and stereotyping embedded in Payne's approach.

This article, The Class Consciousness Raiser, is also available online. The author covered one of Payne's presentations in a school district. It's a less academic, more complimentary look at the Ruby Payne phenomenon.

We'd recommend reading both.