“2010 wasn't a very good year for public education—or public anything, for that matter,” lamented Klonsky (2010, December 29), adding:
It was just about a year ago for example, that Education Secretary Arne Duncan began his "no excuses" campaign, announcing in the press that he had "no patience for teachers and schools" that tick off all the reasons why their poor or minority students can't score as high on standardized tests.
Duncan has chosen to ignore poverty's downward effect on test scores and focus entirely on what he calls "bad teachers" and "failing schools." Recently confronted by educators teaching in some of the nation's highest-poverty areas about the need to do something about the living conditions of their students, Duncan cynically responded, "poverty is not destiny."
His "no excuses" mantra, essentially blaming poor students and their teachers for low test results, is now being echoed by many governors, urban mayors and school administrators like Springfield's Milton, all hoping their compliance will somehow be rewarded with federal dollars from Duncan to fill the holes in their shrinking school budgets.
Klonsky’s characterization of the complex and powerful dynamic among politics, funding, education, and poverty captures directly both how a political narrative shapes education policy and how that same narrative distorts the stated democratic aims of universal public education.
Regardless of political partisanship, the ruling and corporate elite share a notebook of narratives that simultaneously recognizes poverty by ignoring it. In the contorted logic of political and corporate discourse, poverty is both a primary correlation with social and educational problems needing reform and a fact of existence those in privilege are not allowing those living in poverty to use as an excuse. This perverse manipulation of acknowledging the essential nature of human agency is one of the most disturbing aspects of the elite maintaining the status quo of their privilege by constantly celebrating individual freedom and empowerment.
What, then, should we take from these narratives about poverty and education? First, any discussion or characterization about a class of people should raise concerns. Class is a debatable concept—at best a set of tentative parameters based on evidence and at worst mere bigotry. Those people living in a class designated by whatever terminology (“upper,” “lower,” “labor,” or “leisure”) can be labeled by using careful data and classification, but the question must be should that labeling occur and if such labeling contributes anything valuable to individuals or the society at large. This same problem of labeling class is reflected in the labeling of children in school—labels that tend to stratify and isolate students in ways that parallel social stratification.
Next, discussions of class often create the risk of self-fulfilling prophesies, as exposed in the work and popularity of Ruby Payne's poverty industry built on peddling classism. Gorski (2008), along with numerous scholars*, identifies the allure and harm embedded in Payne’s claims about poverty, families in poverty, and students in poverty, cataloging
“eight elements of oppression” in her framework—the ways, according to existing critiques, that Payne’s work contributes to classism, racism, and other inequities: (1) uncritical and self-serving “scholarship,” (2) the elusive culture of poverty, (3) abounding stereotypes, (4) deficit theory, (5) invisibility of classism, (6) the “it’s not about race” card, (7) peddling paternalism, and (8) compassionate conservatism. (p. 131)
As Gorski explains, Payne’s claims work against the exact conditions and people she and those who purchase here workbook and workshops suggest they are seeking to help (itself a problematic stance of paternalism). But Dudley-Marling (2007) sees Payne’s popularity in context:
Ruby Payne portrays the lives of the poor as pathological, deficient in the cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and spiritual resources needed to escape poverty and move into the middle class. At a moment when “scientifically-based” research is a dominant theme of educational reform, Payne’s work is without a research base. Yet, Payne’s sensationalist caricatures of people living in poverty have achieved enormous popularity with teachers, administrators, and policy makers (Keller, 2006).
Since Payne’s framework lacks scholarly credibility and promotes “classism, racism, and other inequities” (Gorski, 2008, p. 131), that her work is popular and profitable reveals that many educators remain victims of their own unfounded assumptions about class—a truly damning fact.
Payne is wrong about class, but her popularity exposes hard and critical truths about cultural and educational beliefs and practices concerning children who happen to live in poverty through no fault of their own. Cultural and educational perspectives that focus on the flaws and deficits of individuals and that decontextualize those deficits from causes outside the control of the individual create a dehumanizing cycle of addressing both poverty and people living and learning in poverty: The person must be corrected, repaired, and provided that which the person lacks.
Haberman (1991) explains that deficit approaches to children in poverty, notably children of color in urban schools, reaches back at least into mid-twentieth century and then characterizes this pedagogy of poverty:
There are essentially four syllogisms that undergird the pedagogy of poverty. Their "logic" runs something like this.
1. Teaching is what teachers do. Learning is what students do. Therefore, students and teachers are engaged in different activities.
2. Teachers are in charge and responsible. Students are those who still need to develop appropriate behavior. Therefore, when students follow teachers' directions, appropriate behavior is being taught and learned.
3. Students represent a wide range of individual differences. Many students have handicapping conditions and lead debilitating home lives. Therefore, ranking of some sort is inevitable; some students will end up at the bottom of the class while others will finish at the top.
4. Basic skills are a prerequisite for learning and living. Students are not necessarily interested in basic skills. Therefore, directive pedagogy. (p. 291)
These qualities—authoritarian teachers, compliant students, transmissional instruction, skill and drill—outlined by Haberman represent the traditional stratification of students in schools where students receive different access to education based on sorting structures that reflect the conditions of those children’s lives and insure that social inequities are perpetuated and even exacerbated.
From well before the civil rights movement of the 1960s and now into the twenty-first century, the pedagogy of poverty has gripped public education, highlighted by the rise of Payne’s framework scheme in the years after NCLB. As Haberman (1991) explained decades ago, “the pedagogy of poverty does not work” (p. 291) and
the pedagogy of poverty is not a professional methodology at all. It is not supported by research, by theory, or by the best practice of superior urban teachers. It is actually certain ritualistic acts that, much like the ceremonies performed by religious functionaries, have come to be conducted for their intrinsic value rather than to foster learning. (p. 292)
Like Payne’s deficit-based workbook approach to training children from poverty to conform to middle-class norms, the pedagogy of poverty, Haberman emphasizes, focuses almost exclusively on compliance and indoctrination—not academics, not challenging the intellect, not exploring the ethical, not pursuing human agency and empowerment. School for children labeled deficient is a social institution designed to monitor their cooperation, to reward their silence and compliance, and to insure that a labor class remains to support the leisure and privilege of the ruling elite.
Kohn (2011, April 27) recognizes that Haberman’s criticism of the pedagogy of poverty found little traction, and “[t]he result is that ‘certain children’ are left farther and farther behind. The rich get richer, while the poor get worksheets.” As well, Kohn notes that the enduring commitment to deficit views of poverty, to ideologies focusing on outcomes and ignoring causation, and to mechanistic and bureaucratic policies insures only a widening of the equity gap as reflected in the misleading achievement gap (even when outliers succeed in raising some test scores for some students by teaching strictly to the tests):
Unfortunately, that result is often at the expense of real learning, the sort that more privileged students enjoy, because the tests measure what matters least. Thus, it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap [emphasis in original].
Human agency is a central element of being fully human. We should not debate whether people feel compelled to read, re-read, write, and re-rite their own lives. But the neoliberal ideology driving the consumer culture of the U.S. depends on raising a small leisure class to its place of privilege on the labor of the vast majority of society who must be compelled to believe in a cultural narrative that has little basis in evidence. The rugged individual myth makes for powerful stories, but it is a harsh template for children, who cannot choose the station of their lives, who have no direct political power (except as proxy consumers of their parent’s capital), and who exist in a default position of subservience in all formal situations such as school.
Two powerful failures of logic sit beneath our deficit view of poverty, people of poverty, and children learning while living in poverty. First, those people under the weight of poverty are directly and indirectly blamed for their own circumstances, as if the people with the least capital and political power in the culture are creating the social realities of the entire country; this, of course, allows the ruling elite to be relieved of their primary roles as cause agents behind social inequity. The political and corporate elite at least tolerate increasing childhood poverty in the U.S. and at worst actively create it.
Second, the cultural deficit view of poverty is reflected in the deficit practice in the pedagogy of poverty that dominates the stratified public education system; students labeled deficient or failing are then subjected to the most scripted, least engaging, and ultimately least substantial curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment—assuring that some measurable and some qualitative learning is in fact deficient when compared against children learning and living in privilege. Not to be ignored in this second dynamic is that many people and entities, such as Payne and the testing industry, benefit handsomely by the market sprung up through bureaucracy around addressing the achievement gap.
Even poverty in the United States of consumerism creates wealth for those already living in the privilege of affluence, again built on the lives and labor or those marginalized by the privileged as lacking what it takes to succeed in their idealized free market.
References
Dudley-Marling, C. (2007). Return of the deficit. Journal of Educational Controversy, 2(1). http://www.wce.wwu.edu/...
Gorski, P. (2008a). Peddling poverty for profit: Elements of oppression in Ruby Payne's Framework. Equity & Excellence in Education, 41(1), 130-148. http://www.edchange.org/...
Haberman, M. (1991, December). The pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching. Phi Delta Kappan. 290-294. Retrieved 13 July 2011 from https://www.ithaca.edu/compass/pdf/pedagogy.pdf
Klonsky, M. (2010, December 29). The year they began calling poverty and homelessness an “excuse.” Huffington Post. Reteieved 13 July 2011 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Kohn, A. (2011, April 27). Poor teaching for poor children. . .in the name of reform. Education Week. Retrieved 13 July 2011 from http://www.alfiekohn.org/...
* See scholarship debunking Payne's framework of poverty here: http://rubypayneiswrong.blogspot.com/...