The Class-Consciousness Raiser
By
PAUL TOUGH
Published: June 10, 2007 New York Times
For the
Glynn County Board of Education, Payne’s visit was a big deal. It was back in
2005 that Marjorie Varnadoe, the board’s director of
professional development, called to request a presentation from Payne, and this
particular Thursday, two years later, was the earliest available date.
Principals had ordered Payne’s books and DVDs by the boxload,
mostly her ur-text, “A Framework for Understanding
Poverty,” and they made the books required reading for their staffs. All over
the county, which is on the coast, down near the Florida border, schools held
small workshops on class and education, using Payne’s “Framework” as a guide,
and teachers sat down together for informal discussions and lunchroom chats
about poverty and wealth. When the big day came, the entire school system was
given the day off, and by 8 a.m. almost every single teacher and administrator
in the county was packed into the
The
morning went well. Payne, who is 56, has been giving this presentation for more
than 10 years, and she knows how to work it: alternating a funny story with a
sad one, mixing anecdotes from her own teaching career with references to the
work of learned academics, never lecturing or preaching, keeping up a steady
stream of one-liners. At 10 a.m., there was a 15-minute break, but not for
Payne. A line quickly formed in front of her, and she sat on the lip of the
stage, leaning on one arm, her legs tucked beneath her, signing books and
listening attentively as one audience member after another told her their own
stories about class and education and, usually, how her books had helped them
understand their students and themselves. A few of the teachers hugged Payne.
One woman kissed her hand. Another burst into tears.
And
now it was time for lunch, fried chicken and sweet iced tea and white sheet
cake for 1,400, served in a second giant conference hall just across the atrium
from the first. Payne sat in the middle of a small circle of admirers; across
the table was Charlotte Lawson, an instructional coach at a local elementary
school. Lawson was a veteran of the Ruby Payne system, a graduate of a four-day
in-depth certification course that authorized her to train other teachers in
the basics of Payne’s framework. But she had never met Payne one on one like
this, and she was gushing. “I’m so excited,” she said. “This is like a dream.”
Payne
laughed a friendly laugh.
“I’ve
shared so much of the training here,” Lawson said. “People are always telling
me, ‘It makes all the pieces fit together.’ When you work with children and
families from poverty, you don’t understand it till you hear this piece, and
then all of a sudden you’re going, ‘Oh, that’s why they did that.’ ”
At the
heart of Payne’s philosophy is a one-page chart, titled “Hidden Rules Among Classes,” which appears in most of her books. There
are three columns, for poverty, middle class and wealth, and 15 rows, covering
everything from time to love to money to language. In a few words, Payne
explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty?
About people and sex. In the middle
class? About situations. In
wealth? About social faux pas. In poverty, the
present is most important. In the middle class, it’s the future. In wealth,
it’s the past. The key question about food in poverty: Did you have enough? In
the middle class: Did you like it? In wealth: Was it presented well?
It may
be that the only people with abiding faith in the power of class divisions in
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.
Payne’s
critics say she is oversimplifying the complexities of poverty in the
Payne’s
journey into class consciousness began more than 30 years ago, when she met Frank,
the man who would become her husband. Ruby was raised in a middle-class
Mennonite family in
As
Payne studied her new surroundings, she came to appreciate more subtle nuances
of class division. She realized that her husband’s family’s poverty was what
she would later come to call “situational”: they had been middle class until
Frank’s father died when Frank was 6, and only then had they slipped down to
the economy’s bottom rung. Most of their neighbors, by contrast, were in
“generational poverty,” meaning their families had been poor for as long as
anyone could remember. Each group, she discovered, had its own distinct set of
beliefs and customs.
Payne’s
next lesson came when her husband took a job on the floor of the Chicago
Board of Trade. He wasn’t rich, but he was now spending his work
life with men who were, which meant that Ruby was expected to socialize with
their wives. She didn’t fit in with the rich any better than she had fit in
with the poor. More miscommunications and social awkwardness ensued, generating
more fodder for Payne’s growing understanding of class difference.
Payne
wasn’t quite sure what to do with this new knowledge. As her career in
education developed, from teacher to principal to administrator, she found that
her understanding of class came in handy. Because of her exposure to her
husband’s family and neighbors, it seemed, she was better able to communicate
with poor students than most other middle-class teachers. Her colleagues began
to ask her for help and advice on dealing with their most troubling students,
and Payne worked up an informal set of strategies and tips that she would pass
along.
Then
in 1993, after moving to
Payne
began to give talks on class for small groups of teachers, and they were a hit.
Word spread. Soon she was addressing audiences all across the
She
now owns and runs her own business, called aha! Process, Inc.; it has more than
50 trainers on contract and accrues millions of dollars in annual revenues.
Ruby Payne has become a small industry: her company offers training sessions,
workshops, DVDs, audiotapes, T-shirts, autographed Ruby Payne coffee mugs and
lots and lots of books: a book about the hidden rules of class in the
workplace, a workbook to help people in poverty learn the rules to pull
themselves out, a Spanish translation of “A Framework for Understanding
Poverty.” In “What Every Church Member Should Know About Poverty,” which Payne
wrote with Bill Ehlig, a minister in Baytown, Tex.,
she not only urges middle-class and wealthy churches to welcome poor
parishioners in the door but she also lays out the extra steps they need to
take to make the newcomers feel at home. In “Crossing the Tracks for Love,”
Payne takes on romance, offering advice for those who enter into a relationship
with a person from another class. It’s not easy, Payne cautions: everything
from disciplining children to interior decoration is a potential flashpoint for
a class-based quarrel. So she provides tips:
“If
you’re from middle class and marry or otherwise move into poverty, understand
the need of your spouse/partner to protect you,” she writes. “You are his/her
possession. Try to see the positives in this.”
And
later: “If you come from a middle-class background and marry into wealth . . .
learn about extended silverware and silver settings and the different pieces of
crystal used to drink different beverages — and take cooking classes. Never,
but never, make fun of yourself as a deficient cook. Be extremely knowledgeable
about wine.”
In
“Crossing the Tracks,” as in all of her work, Payne emphasizes that she is not
making value judgments about the relative merits of the different classes;
she’s just explaining how they work. “I’m not interested in changing your
behavior or the behavior of your spouse or significant other,” she writes. “My
only goal is to provide you with options — and awareness. When you know the
hidden rules, you have more choices. You can choose whether or not you want to
alter your behavior or embrace a different way of doing things. But unless
you’re informed, you won’t get the opportunity to decide.”
Despite
Payne’s counsel, the reality is that in the nation’s bedrooms and churches,
bridges across the class divide are increasingly rare: most Americans worship
with and marry people who are just like them. In public schools, though, class
divisions are a frequent part of daily existence, sometimes within the student
body but also, and more significant, between teachers and students.
The
passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 brought a new urgency to the
issue of poverty in the classroom. For the first time, schools were required
not only to report their overall test results but also to calculate the scores
for various “subgroups,” including racial minorities, students for whom English
is a second language and students whose parents’ income is low enough to
qualify them for a free or reduced-price lunch. It soon became impossible to
ignore that there was a problem: poor students were scoring well behind their
wealthier peers. And schools suddenly had a powerful incentive to try to
address that disparity. Even otherwise well-performing schools could be labeled
failures if their poor students weren’t catching up.
Payne
believes that teachers can’t help their poor students unless they first
understand them, and that means understanding the hidden rules of poverty. The
second step, Payne says, is to teach poor students explicitly about the hidden
rules of the middle class. She emphasizes that the goal should not be to change
students’ behavior outside of school: you don’t teach your students never to
fight if fighting is an important survival skill in the housing project where
they live. But you do tell them that in order to succeed at school or later on
in a white-collar job, they need to master certain skills: how to speak in
“formal register,” how to restrain themselves from physical retaliation, how to
keep a schedule, how to exist in what Payne calls the “abstract world of
paper.”
At the
In
10th grade at Brunswick High, Kipp told me later, the
advanced students usually take chemistry, and the other students, the ones who
are more likely to wind up in technical college, take Kipp’s
class, which is called General Physical Science. And each year it’s the same, Kipp said: the rich and middle-class kids are tracked into
chemistry, and he gets the kids from poverty. Kipp
grew up in the middle class, and in the past, he said, before he read Payne’s
book, he would get frustrated by his poor students. They seemed unwilling or
unable to learn; they laughed when he tried to mete out discipline. And so he
found it hard to keep exerting himself. What was the point in teaching them, he
thought, if they weren’t going to make an effort?
But
after he immersed himself in Payne’s work, about five years ago, Kipp’s ideas changed. “I realized, these kids aren’t dumb,”
he said. “They just haven’t had the enriching experiences that I had growing
up.” So he pushes himself harder now to provide more experiments in the
classroom, more hands-on learning to help his students develop the same kind of
instinctive understanding of nature that he got running around in the woods as
a boy.
Payne’s
work in the schools has attracted a growing chorus of criticism, mostly from
academia. Although Payne says that her only goal is to help poor students, her
critics claim that her work is in fact an assault on those students. By
teaching them middle-class practices, critics say, she is engaging in
“classism” and racism. Her work is “riddled with factual inaccuracies and
harmful stereotypes,” charges Anita Bohn, an assistant professor at Illinois
State University, in a paper on Payne’s work. Paul Gorski,
an assistant professor at
Payne’s
critics seem less aggrieved by what she includes in her analysis than by what
they say she has left out: an acknowledgment that the American economy and
American schools systematically discriminate against poor people. In this way,
Payne finds herself in the middle of one of the central debates about poverty
today. On one side are those, like Payne, who believe that poor people share
certain habits and behaviors that help keep them in poverty. Recognizing and
changing those behaviors, Payne and those who share her views believe, will help poor people to succeed. On the other side
are those like Payne’s critics, who think that the game is so thoroughly fixed
that most poor people can’t succeed no matter what they do. To them, locating
any of the causes of persistent poverty among poor people themselves is, in
effect, blaming the victim.
Academics
in the latter group can’t stand Payne. And academics in the former group find
it hard to defend her. There are plenty of sociologists, psychologists and
economists who have reached conclusions similar to Payne’s: poor parents are
more inclined to use corporal punishment; poor students are more eager to work
hard in a teacher’s class when they feel a personal relationship with a
teacher; poor homes are more often chaotic and loud. The problem is Payne’s
methodology, or rather her lack of one. She does have a Ph.D. in social policy,
and her book does have a few pages of footnotes. Her seminars include occasional
references to popular scholarly works of sociology and history, like Robert
Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel.” But
clearly, Payne’s preferred unit of research is the anecdote. Her talks are
nothing like university lectures. They’re a blend of cracker-barrel wisdom,
Tony Robbins-style motivational speaking and a Chris Rock comedy routine. And
that means that among academics in good standing, saying something nice about
Ruby Payne is a good way to invite the disapproval of your peers.
You
would think that Payne wouldn’t fret about a few angry assistant professors
whose collective audience is a tiny fraction of the size of hers. But somehow,
like gnats at a backyard barbecue, they drive her to distraction. Each time a
progressive education journal publishes a detailed Foucauldian
critique of her book (which she wrote, don’t forget, in a single week), Payne
feels compelled to write in with a paragraph or two in her own defense. It
doesn’t work, of course; the author invariably blasts back with another
extended volley of withering scorn. In the pages of the Teachers College
Record, the rich blond-haired white lady from
Still,
Payne won’t give up. She told me that she plans to spend a good part of this
summer bolstering the scholarship behind her work, digging into the latest
research, adding footnotes and references to her 11-year-old book.
For
now, though, she’s got her stories, one after another, some from her own life,
some from her trainers or from teachers and principals she has worked with.
They can seem rehearsed, a little neat; some she repeats almost verbatim from
one or another of her books. But for the teachers in the
As the
afternoon drew to a close, Payne cut out the jokes and grew serious. “I think
the hardest part about teaching is the stories that kids tell you that just
pull your heart out,” she said, gripping the sides of the lectern and scanning
the audience. “There isn’t a person in here who
doesn’t have a student whose stories still haunt you.” Her voice was quiet, and
her accent had softened. Every pair of eyes, it seemed, was on her. “What I’ve
learned to say to kids is this: ‘You know, I respect
you so much that you can handle this situation. I don’t know that I could. But
if you don’t want to live that way the rest of your life, then I can give you
the tools that will help you do things differently. It’s your choice. I can’t
change your situation right now, but I can certainly give you the tools to help
you change.’ And I think that’s the gift we bring. It’s a huge gift.”