I read Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty before our day-long professional development meeting, and like Anita Bohn, writing for Rethinking Schools, I didn’t know whether to laugh at the stupidity or to rage at the offensive stereotyping of people in poverty. For example, a few of Payne’s 18 “hidden rules” for surviving in poverty (p. 38):

• I know which grocery stores’ garbage bins can be accessed for thrown-away food
• I know how to get someone out of jail.
• I know how to get a gun, even if I have a police record.
• I know how to live without electricity and a phone.

Mostly, I was irritated that I would be required to spend a day listening to comic book scenarios, stereotyped bad guys, and make-believe solutions to real problems. In her Rethinking Schools piece, Anita Bohn remarked, “I am still hard pressed to understand why ideas like this have made Payne the hottest speaker/trainer on poverty on the public school circuit today.”

I’d suggest, simply, that Payne’s appeal for teachers and education reformers is the same as Batman’s mythical superhero storybook appeal: A community faces extraordinary challenges which regular institutions fail to address, and a hero steps forward promising to restore order and harmony for the general good. It’s very simple! Find a villain, characterize the threat by deploying stereotypes that ring true for a worried middle-class person’s biases, and suggest a few self-evident solutions. BAM! BANG! A modern myth.

I voiced my frustrations with the book at our meeting before the presenter arrived when we were doing a brief book talk, jigsaw style. My group was chosen to summarize chapter one. All of the people in my particular group had read the book and found it offensive in various ways. We had a pretty animated discussion, and they asked me to be the spokesman. “I’m speaking for the (otherwise all women) group,” I said, because I am a man, and we are better at public speaking than women. Men have more physical resources with our louder voices, and we have more emotional resources due to our assertiveness. We are also more accustomed to being in charge. We have a culture of leadership, you might say.” I had everyone’s attention, mostly smiling.

Payne builds a case for poverty being about more than just economic need, I said, because she wants teachers to take a measure of responsibility for remedying their condition. She presents us with several case studies of supposedly real people in order to exemplify the problems that poor people face, and along the way she tosses out numerous gross generalizations about what she calls a “culture of poverty” and the moral failures inherent in this entire class of people. As in, “The poor simply see jail as a part of life and not necessarily always bad” (p. 22). Or, “And one of the rules for generational poverty for women is this: you may need to use your body for survival” (p. 24).

It disturbed to me that this so-called training was required as part of our professional development. As far as the hidden rules go, I said, what we really need to think about is whether we want to try to fit kids into a sick society or whether we want to work to make the world a better place for them to live.

Ruby Payne on her website and in her workshop handout, describes the research base for her book:

A Framework for Understanding Poverty is a cognitive study that looks at the thinking or mindsets created by environments. It is a naturalistic inquiry based upon a convenience sample. The inquiry occurred from being involved for 32 years with a neighborhood in generational poverty. This neighborhood comprised 50–70 people (counts changed based upon situation, death, and mobility), mostly white. From that, an in‐depth disciplinary analysis of the research was undertaken to explain the behaviors. It does not qualify as “research” against university standards because it does not have a clean
methodology.

Translation: Ruby Payne made all of this up. It isn’t worth a damn thing, and nobody with any credibility pays any attention to it.

Even with the disclaimer, I cringed when the presenter, who enthusiastically called herself The Billy Graham of Ruby Payne quoted this mind-boggling little hypothetical chain of causality regarding language and cognition as if it was gospel, from Chapter 8, Instruction and Improving Achievement:

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 …

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.90).

Outrageous! With all of those italicized phrases, I should mention something about what is known as the deficit model. Payne explains (p. 169-176 ) why her approach does not employ a deficit model, even though she says, “When individuals in poverty encounter the middle-class world of work, school, and other institutions, they do not have all the assets necessary to survive in that environment because what is needed there are proactive, abstract, and verbal skills.” She uses the glass half empty/half full metaphor, and calls her “framework for building resources” a way to fill up the glass (p. 173). Even though she calls her approach, The Additive Model, she nonetheless tries to create a rationale for becoming a glass-filler, to implement what Martin Haberman called the Pedagogy of Poverty, which merely preserves the status quo.

Ironic, isn’t it, that “standards-based education reform” applies to curriculum and testing, but not to staff development? “Accountability” is for teachers, I suppose, and not for hired consultants.What we’re seeing is a good example of regulatory capture, in which private interests have hamstrung public institutions with crippling rules, encouraging businesses to contaminate the environment with worthless and even harmful products. Ruby Payne’s framework is a toxic waste.

Many thanks to Paul Gorski for his critical perspective on issues of poverty and social class in education.

Note: this post was slightly edited from an earlier version.

The role of poverty in what have come to be known as “school outcomes” (or more precisely, test scores) has been getting a fair bit of attention lately at Schools Matter, and elsewhere. Rightly so. At my own school we’ve even been given a reading assignment for our winter holiday, and have been invited to read Ruby Payne’s “Framework for Understanding Poverty” (summary here). This is to prepare us for the indoctrination session to follow upon our return from our break. I’m going to read the book since I opened my mouth at a staff meeting and said that many people disagree with Ruby Payne, and “Would we have a chance to air dissenting points of view?” Take Paul Gorski’s Savage Unrealities or Randy Bomer’s Miseducating Teachers about the Poor, for example. These authors tell us that Payne claims, without any real evidence, that the poor are trapped in a “culture of poverty” and need to be explicitly taught the “hidden rules” of being middle class. I don’t especially look forward to reading this, but I want to be prepared for the meeting, which is part of our school improvement plan after too many of our low-income students did not meet the standardized testing targets last spring.

Servicing the poor is actually a growth industry in our present economy, and it’s been a magnet for school reformers like Ruby Payne and Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America. Kopp’s organization was the subject of a critical piece by Andrew Hartman, who contextualizes the whole mess by pointing out:

The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion—Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic—glorify TFA at every opportunity. The Washington Post heralds the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”—a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama. TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

It’s exhausting, being on the lookout for all of the Trojan horses that are being wheeled into our schoolrooms these days. My response has been to try to maintain my focus on the kids, and try to ignore as much of the outside noise as I can. But occasionally, one does need to pay attention to it. I was grateful that Hartman closed his article with a reference to Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation. Goodman prefaces this short collection of essays by telling us that in his criticisms he does not choose to be generous or fair, since modern life has delivered us into an unprecedented set of conditions which have caused much confusion and resulted in the rigid application of old methods which is “grossly wasteful of wealth and effort and does positive damage to the young.” Hartman summarizes Goodman:

In Compulsory Mis-Education, Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

Goodman published Compulsory Miseducation in 1964. His criticisms are still strikingly, and disturbingly, apt. I would like to close here with just this one, more general recommendation – one which echoes a model of educational change outlined today by P.L. Thomas, Social Context Reform: Where to Start. It should concern us all that we are still trying to articulate a framework for progressive education reform, and I offer Goodman’s recommendation as a kind of mission statement for the era of the Occupy movement.

Fundamentally, there is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world. Indeed, our excessive concern with problems of education at present simply means that the grown-ups do not have such a world. The poor youth of America will not become equal by rising through the middle class, going to middle-class schools. By plain social justice, the Negroes, and other societies have the right to, and must get, equal opportunity for schooling with the rest, but the exaggerated expectation from the schooling is a chimera — and, I fear, will be shockingly disappointing. But also the middle-class youth will not escape their increasing exploitation and anomie in such schools. A decent education aims at, prepares for, a more worthwhile future, with a different community spirit, different occupations, and more real utility than attaining status and salary.

We need to make this happen.

I enjoyed the brief period of daylight we had today out on the trails near my home, running. It was 10 below zero, and the trail was firm and fast. It felt great. After many years going through this solstice season in the subarctic, I’ve learned to get out of the house and make use of the daylight as often as possible. Today’s excursion was a snowshoe run. I ski sometimes, too, but the snowshoes are simpler.

This is just the second season that I’ve done any snowshoe running. What got me started with winter trail running was Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run. It triggered a long chain of decisions which eventually lead to what might be called a “learning experience” this past September when I ran the Equinox Marathon.

The book tells a story about how McDougall learned about a tribe of Indians living in Mexico’s Copper Canyon who were able to run great distances. Even senior members of the tribe had the ability to go on long runs of up to 50 and even 100 miles. He marveled at the grace with which they moved, and noted that they did not wear running shoes, but instead wore simple sandals. He was amazed that they could run such long distances without sustaining the high rate of injuries so common among runners who wear highly engineered, commercially manufactured running shoes. He hypothesized that perhaps the cushioned shoes encouraged people to run with poor form, and were actually contributing to runners’ injuries. This eventually sparked a trend toward what is being called barefoot, or minimalist running in the running community.

McDougall’s inquiry lead him to look at the history of running, and he learned that there is a body of research suggesting that humans are natural-born runners, evolutionarily speaking. Our ability to sweat allows us to run great distances at a moderate pace, whereas other animal species – many of which humans like to eat – need to stop and pant to cool down. This would have enabled humans to engage in what is called persistence hunting, and to kill prey animals at close range. All in all, it was an intriguing book, and it made me wonder if I could ever get into good enough shape to tackle some long runs.

My wife remarked that if I was interested, I had the time and enough of a training base to train for the marathon in the fall, and so I started seriously thinking about it. I worked out at the gym every day, and ran every weekend for the rest of the winter. I ran several days a week throughout the summer, putting in 40+ mile training weeks. I went out on several long runs in excess of two hours, and I ran competitively in a series of longish trail runs put on by the local running club. I didn’t know if I was ready for the marathon, but I did know that the the only way to find out was to try it.

One of the unique features of the Equinox Marathon is that there is a 2000 foot climb up to the top of Ester Dome in the middle section of the race. It’s kind of a gonzo marathon, not one that anyone who wanted a good time would do. I’m pretty good at running hills, so I wasn’t concerned about the climb. That was probably a mistake. I went out a little too briskly, I think, given the amount of training I’d done. By the time I got to the top of the dome, at 12 miles, I was starting to feel some worrisome aches in my hips, and my legs weren’t as snappy as they’d been. But hey, I’d made it to the top. The hard part was over, I thought. Hah! By the time I started heading back down, at 17 miles, the aches had gotten much worse, and I was walking the steeper sections. Going down an exceptionally steep place, known as The Chute, my knees wanted to buckle, and I began having a hard time even walking. And I still had 9 miles to go!

Getting to the finish line was agony. I limped and walked most of the last 9 miles. Other runners streamed by me. I remember being passed by a little 8 year-old kid at one point. I was utterly destroyed. My own mental state became a focus point for me, though. I suppose that was because my physical condition was so beyond repair. I began to watch my expectations gradually get scaled back. I’d gone from hoping to finish in 4 hours to hoping I could just make it to the next set of mailboxes or the next telephone pole. When I got near the finish line I met my daughter running the course in reverse looking for me, and she paced me in, urging me to keep running, which I did. But it wasn’t without a fair bit of whining near the very end. The muscles in my hips, knees and calves were completely played out. All that was left was pain and determination.

I wasn’t proud when I crossed the finish line. Just done. I was disappointed because I’d wanted my finish to be more graceful, more under control, instead of the desperate slog it turned into. But what it was, was all I had. It took me several weeks of hearing congratulations from various people to see it as the achievement that it actually was. I’d run a marathon at age 58. I’d finished in the middle of my age-group, and I’d begun planning for next time.

If somebody had offered me money (as in merit pay), or somehow tried to “motivate” me do this, I wouldn’t have done it. Reaching beyond my capacity is something I would only do for personal reasons, beyond the realm of ordinary motivation, and tests like this have to be undertaken voluntarily. Tests, in and of themselves, don’t call people to their best efforts. Real teaching has to begin with the intentions of the learner, not the teacher, and certainly not the administrator or the policy maker. The more I work in the shadow of the standards movement, the less I want to listen to anyone but the kids, themselves, for guidance about what they really need to learn. What good is an education if, in the bargain, we all lose sight of who and what we really are?

The barefoot running movement is a reaction to corporate involvement in running, which in reality is something that any healthy person can do without special equipment. Running shoes represent a form of standardized “curriculum” for our feet and a marketing opportunity for corporate interests. And now there’s a question about whether they may actually be responsible for some of the many injuries that runners suffer each year. Corporate control of school reform, curriculum, and teacher education, coupled with mandatory high stakes testing will do the same to education as it has to running, and we’ll inherit an overbuilt, inhumane institution that accomplishes nothing that it isn’t already doing – except create more losers. Already, schools are becoming pressure cookers in which there are expectations that anyone who works hard can be a winner. Win what? Really, anyone? Ahh, well …..

The days will soon be getting longer. Nothing to do but take care of each other and watch the changes unfold.

Long nights and dark days in the far north this time of year open a window to some magnificent light shows. From Finland’s travel and tourism site: “Aurora is a natural light display in the sky, particularly in the polar regions, caused by the collision of charged particles directed by the Earth’s magnetic field.”

You might want to watch this one full screen.

(via Alaska Dispatch and Eye on the Arctic)

I hate all the wasted motion in the classroom these days, doing things that are not particularly productive or rewarding for the sake of jumping through regulatory hoops. Jeff Bryant blames it on what he calls the Edu-Bubble, which seems right on target:

Then education reform advocates — either unwittingly or intentionally (does it matter?) –gave the venture crowd a huge gift by decreeing that student scores on standardized tests would define the learning “output” that schools would be accountable for. And all of a sudden everything monetarily related to schools — operations budgets, teacher salaries, classroom costs, government funds, grant money — could be related to a test score output.

This in effect turned student learning — and by extension, the students themselves — into a commodity that could be speculated on. Now that edu-venturists had something they could put on the other side of the balance sheet, they could now “flip” student test scores into a speculative market. And all sorts of “reform” schemes and start-ups — from starting charter schools to lowering teacher salaries to closing schools — could be rationalized on the basis of test scores. (via TFT.)

So my focus in the classroom has lately shifted from teaching practice to thinking about more interesting things, like human consciousness (my own, mainly) as I ask myself all day long, day after day, What the fuck am I doing now? And why? This is not really such a bad thing. The upside of it is that I spend way less energy worrying about curriculum and method, and more time watching my own interactions with the kids, trying to be as helpful and even-handed as I can be. It occurs to me that if a person was looking for a working model of resistance to reform, they really ought to spend a few weeks managing a sixth-grade classroom. It’s a test. Every day.

I was touched by the message in this video which begins, “You think this is just another day in your life,” narrated by Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who is also a social and environmental justice advocate. He calls upon us, as teachers, to become more child-like ourselves, and to be open to the meaning in our lives which gets overshadowed by our preoccupation with purposefulness. What are we here for, really?

This video says it all, quite eloquently, I think.

You think this is just another day in your life. It’s not just another day; it’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s given to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day of your life, and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.
– Brother David Steindl-Rast

We had our school Christmas concert yesterday, featuring each grade-level singing something in the spirit of the season. My students performed One Love, originally recorded by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The kids had a ukulele section and a pair of solo vocalists for accompaniment, and they did a fine job with it. Curious to see if there was a recording online, I found this version produced by the inspirational Playing for Change organization.

Believing that music is a universal language with the power to bring people from around the world together, the production crew travels with a mobile recording studio to wherever the music takes them. Pure genius.

The war on education that was declared with the passage of No Child Left Behind has been a class war all along. Teachers assumed that the stupidity of trying to reach 100% proficiency by 2014 would eventually become obvious, and the law would change. But alas, even as the deadline draws near, we don’t see that happening. Instead, we see waivers being offered in exchange for toxic policy changes that include more rigorous testing and linking student test scores to teacher evaluations. We are watching the life being sucked out of public schools by what amounts to a giant vampire squid, a reference taken from David Blacker who sees what’s happening to schools as a part of a larger neoliberal project aimed at privatizing everything:

What we are left with now is an all-out assault on anything in the system that might still have a little exchange value. Monster movie-like, we are now witnessing the full unleashing, to borrow Matt Taibbi’s famous image, of the neoliberal banking vampire squid, using its “blood funnel” to sniff out money in previously less accessible precincts such as schools, pensions, infrastructure, public health and safety — anywhere, really. All that is solid is liquefied and sucked up into the blood funnel, to be consumed by the megabanks, who perform no function whatever except a kind of super rent collection, a permanent life-destroying tax on all forms of human activity.

Blacker points out that the effort is framed as something that is positive, progressive, and natural. Given these benign qualities, who could object?

This process of redistribution upward — one-sided class warfare from above — operates of course in a vast scale and is hardly limited to education. It includes the sale of public lands and resources; persistent privatization schemes involving pensions and, ultimately, social security; health care; and even formerly sacrosanct public preserves such as prisons, the post office, and the military. This is the neoliberal period of capital in all its fetid glory: the ruthless marketization of everything existing — including itself, in the sense that the marketization is itself marketed as, among other things, “natural,” “fair,” “win-win,” “progress,” and other empty signifiers.

Frank Rich wrote a great column last week about the Class War that has been engaged by the #occupy movement. He criticizes the clueless establishment for not seeing it coming, and which seems either unwilling or unable to admit what it’s now looking at. He compares what’s happening now with an event that took place in 1932, when a throng of WWI veterans converged on Washington D.C. and set up camp seeking the passage of a bill for a bonus that had been promised them for their service in the war. They became known as the Bonus Army. As with the violence in Oakland, things did not go well with the Bonus Army, as MacArthur’s troops razed the encampment and killed innocent people.

You can read or listen to find out more about it. It is believed to have contributed to FDR’s victory in the presidential election that year.

Rachel Maddow notes that the #occupy movement has gone mainstream now. And Dahlia Lithwick eulogizes the demise of our uncomprehending corporate media that remains apparently ignorant to what is obvious to everyone else:

Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity. Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.

By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance. The rest of America has little trouble understanding that these are ragtag, complicated, and leaderless times. This may not make for great television, but any movement that acknowledges that fact deserves enormous credit.

I see that giant squid is on the menu. Where’s the ink?

Republican consultant and strategist, Noelle Nikpour: “Scientists are scamming the American people right and left for their own ‘finansual’ gain.”

It’s all too obvious:

Donchaknow?

Our school finally made it to AYP level 5, the bottom step on the down escalator to reconstitution hell, but the superintendent, parents, and even the newspaper all say we’re doing a good job. So now, to stay clear of consequences for working with lots of poor kids, we’ve got to develop a plan to improve, which means wasting time in useless meetings discussing standards and “best practices” instead of planning actual lessons.

Our contract negotiations failed last spring, and we’ve been working without a contract since the start of school this year. Teachers are attending school board meetings now, and testifying during their non-agenda items time. This was my contribution last Tuesday evening:

I’m a sixth-grade teacher at Denali Elementary, and this is my 27th year working in the District. I’m here to talk about respect.

When Supt. Lewis was hired, Mrs. Hajdukovitch (then Board President) told the newspaper that a salary increase for his position was designed to help the District compete for the best leaders.

Last month, the administration successfully lobbied for the passage of two bond propositions (for $20.3 million) for renovations and upgrades to some of the District’s school buildings.

Supt. Lewis tells us that we’re doing a good job. He points out that our ACT, SAT, and AP scores are higher than the state and national averages. Yet, the District’s bargaining team made no salary offer during our contract negotiations prior to our contract’s June 30 expiration. Consequently, since the start of school this year, teachers have been working without a contract. We believe our proposal for a 2.5% increase to the base pay rate is reasonable and in line with other recent public sector contract settlements.

My question – What message is being sent when the District lobbies for building upgrades and salary increases for leadership personnel, but fails to similarly advocate for its teachers? Please think about that.

I didn’t stick around to hear the Board comments at the end of the night. No telling what’s going to happen. Hope for an amicable settlement is fading. What I didn’t say (yet) is that when the superintendent tells people about those above average test scores, who gets to take the credit for that? Because here’s the thing – teachers have been taking all of the blame and none of the credit for the broad range of student outcomes for too long now. And we are tired of it.

The Occupy movement has even hit Alaska, as many people may have already seen. It’s the best thing going on now. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the most fun things to read about on the internet. Down with Tyranny posted this short video this evening.

Occupy (We the 99).

Saw this on Adbusters.

Amy Goodman observes: “While the bankers remained secure in their bailed-out banks, outside, the police began arresting protesters. In a just world, with a just economy, we have to wonder, who would be out in the cold? Who would be getting arrested?”

Damn right.

Visit https://occupywallst.org/ for more.
#OccupyWallStreet