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A Framework for Understanding Poverty - A Cognitive Approach (Sixth Edition)

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A Framework for Understanding Poverty - A Cognitive Approach (Sixth Edition) [Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A Framework for Understanding Poverty - A Cognitive Approach (Sixth Edition)

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by Jennifer C. Ng & John L. Rury - Teachers College Record, July 18, 2006

Current estimates show that historically high percentages of American children live in poverty. In order to serve them well, educators must understand the particular experiences and challenges these children face. Increasingly, the professional development of teachers on the topic is drawn from the work of Dr. Ruby Payne, a self-proclaimed expert on poverty and poor children. In this article, we examine the conceptual and empirical foundations of Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty and vignettes in an accompanying teacher workbook that depict the lives of poor children and their families. Situating Payne's argument within decades of scholarship conceptualizing poverty, we assess the extent to which it accurately reflects a contemporary, research-based comprehension of the issue. Reminiscent of earlier "culture of poverty" perspectives, Payne's work essentializes the values, behaviors, and orientations of poor people; reinforces misconceptions and popular stereotypes; and suggests poor people have choices about whether or not to remain in poverty. This has serious implications for how teachers come to understand the nature and causes of poverty, and it misdirects well-intentioned efforts to educate poor children by disregarding the larger social context in which they live and are expected to succeed.
Research indicates that poverty rates among American children have reached as high as 22 percent in recent years, and from this historically elevated figure, perhaps a third can be described as experiencing "persistent" or "long-term" poverty (Hernandez, 1997; Mayer, 1997; Brady, 2003). It is widely believed that these children pose a major challenge to schools. Many reside in central-city neighborhoods or relatively isolated rural areas, compounding existing obstacles to equal educational opportunities and academic success. (Books, 2004) Yet, studies consistently document that most educators themselves come from middle-class backgrounds, making it difficult for them to relate personally with students who live in poverty (Zeichner, 2003). As a result, the capacity of teachers to work with poor children is shaped by teacher educators, school district administrators, educational researchers, and other experts. It is not clear, however, just what lessons about the poor are being transmitted to teachers and other educators, and how they are being prepared to work with them more effectively. In the absence of a well-defined research base on educating children affected by poverty and corresponding programs of training and professional development, a wide range of perspectives and approaches can flourish.

Arguably, one of today's most conspicuous speakers on issues of poverty and education is Dr. Ruby Payne, president of a company called "Aha Process, Inc." and author of a self-published book titled A Framework for Understanding Poverty, currently in its fourth revised edition (2005). Payne has sold more than half a million copies of her book since 1996 as well as related workbook materials, and her organization conducts workshops and training sessions for tens of thousands of educators, administrators, and other human-service professionals across the country and abroad. A principal thrust of these activities is teaching people about poverty and working with poor children in school settings.
Payne's remarkable popularity reflects growing concern about poverty and its effects on children's educational experiences. As educators grapple with the challenge of meeting performance standards for all groups of students, districts have been actively seeking answers to the problem of working with children in poverty. Payne and her organization have been actively involved in these developments, providing professional development designed to explicitly address these issues. In this article, we examine the conceptual and empirical foundations of her work and conduct a critical analysis of descriptive case scenarios included in an accompanying workbook for teacher practice. What viewpoints do Payne's ideas about poverty represent? And what recommendations are conveyed in these training sessions? Situating Payne's argument within decades of scholarship about poverty, we assess the extent to which it accurately reflects a contemporary, research-based comprehension of the issue. The fact that her characterization of poverty mirrors earlier "culture of poverty" theses and lacks recognition of social structural dynamics contributing to inequality could have significant implications for how educators ultimately come to view poverty and the children who experience it.
Payne's framework for understanding poverty
In the introduction of her book, Payne explains that her expertise on poverty resulted primarily from being married for over 30 years to her husband, Frank, who grew up in "situational" (or temporary) poverty, but lived for several years with others who were in "generational" (or long-term) poverty. As she spent time with his family and got to know "the many other players in [their] neighborhood," her personal observations led her to conclude that there were major differences between those in generational poverty and those in the middle class-the most important of which were not about money (2005, p. 1). These insights were confirmed in her mind after Payne spent six years as a principal in an affluent, Illinois elementary school and was able to further contrast the differences she witnessed between children in poverty, the middle class, and wealth.
Payne recalls several informal conversations she had with concerned colleagues about the growing disciplinary problems they were experiencing as more and more of their students came from low-income families. She offered them her explanation of why these behaviors were occurring, and then word-of-mouth referrals from teachers, principals, district, and state officials launched her into a series of speaking engagements where she could more formally share her insights with other educational practitioners. Central to Payne's analysis of poverty is the idea that there are "hidden rules" which distinguish the thinking, values, and behaviors of people in poverty from those who are middle class or wealthy. And because most schools operate from an implicitly middle-class perspective foreign to poor children, educators must first understand the class culture from which their students come and then teach them explicitly the rules of the middle class needed to function more successfully in schools and society.
According to Payne, poverty is characterized not only by lack of financial resources, but also the extent to which individuals possess other resources such as emotional stability, mental skills, spiritual guidance, physical health and mobility, support systems, role models, and knowledge of a group's hidden rules (2005, p. 7). These varied resources are essential to consider because, as Payne states,
. . . the reality is that financial resources, while extremely important, do not explain the differences in the success with which individuals leave poverty nor the reasons that many stay in poverty. The ability to leave poverty is more dependent upon other resources than it is upon financial resources. (p. 8)
Payne argues the cultivation of emotional resources is of utmost importance, defined as "being able to choose and control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This is an internal resource and shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and choices" (2005, p. 7). The involvement of role models is critical, then, because "it is largely from role models that [a] person learns how to live life emotionally" (2005, p. 9). Although all individuals have role models, Payne cautions, "The question is the extent to which the role model is nurturing or appropriate" (2005, p. 9). Good role models and support systems should be able to offer advice about and demonstrate a more desirable alternative than living in poverty.
Being a teacher allows one quite naturally to serve as a role model or support to children in poverty. Payne explains,
Even with the financial resources, not every individual who received those finances would choose to live differently . . . But it is the responsibility of educators and others who work with the poor to teach the differences and skills/rules that will allow the individual to make the choice. (2005, p. 113)
A teacher's involvement is essential since "many individuals stay in poverty because they don't know there is a choice-and if they do know that, have no one to teach them hidden rules or provide resources" (2005, p. 62). Payne identifies education as:
. . . the key to getting out of, and staying out of, generational poverty. Individuals leave poverty for one of four reasons: a goal or vision of something they want to be or have; a situation that is so painful that anything would be better; someone who "sponsors" them (i.e., an educator or spouse or mentor or role model who shows them a different way or convinces them that they could live differently); or a specific talent or ability that provides an opportunity for them. (p. 61)
Given the "tremendous opportunities to influence some of the non-financial resources that make such a difference in students' lives" (2005, p. 25), Payne recommends that educators first learn to analyze the resources poor students and their families have before offering advice to improve their situation. To this end, the workbook that accompanies Payne's main text presents fourteen different scenarios of poor children and their current situations for educators to practice evaluating. Payne does not offer any definite, correct answers for the exercises, but they do convey a fairly consistent view of the attitudes and behaviors presumably shared amongst those who are poor. It is useful, for this reason, to carefully examine the descriptive case scenarios Payne provides in her effort to help educators better understand poverty, its effects on children, and its implications in school settings.

What characteristics and circumstances constitute poverty?
As indicated earlier, money is one of several resources included in Payne's framework for understanding poverty, but she argues that it is of only slight to moderate importance compared to other factors. The logic of a position that seemingly disassociates one's financial resources with one's class status may initially seem perplexing. However, a closer examination of Payne's descriptive scenarios depicting poor people's lives helps to illuminate her overall view about how different resources function to maintain poverty, as well as her resulting recommendations.
For example, in her main text, Payne differentiates between situational poverty, a temporary state caused by circumstances such as death, illness, divorce, and generational poverty, a state which endures for two generations or more (2005, p. 3). The importance of this distinction is linked to the prevailing attitudes she associates with each group- people in situational poverty are often too proud to accept charity, whereas people in generational poverty believe society owes them a living (2005, p. 47). Representing the mentality of situational poverty in Payne's accompanying workbook meant for teacher evaluation is Opie, a 12-year-old African American girl, and her mother, Oprah, a 32-year-old widow supporting a senile grandmother and unemployed uncle. Oprah works long hours as a domestic for a doctor, and although she is not paid very much, she takes public transportation and seems able to make ends meet. There is no mention of the family needing public aid, and in fact, Oprah is hoping to be able to save some money for future emergencies that might arise (1998, p. 16). Another example of situational poverty is Steve, a 17 year-old White male who was put out onto the streets by his alcoholic, abusive father. At 16 he found a full-time job earning minimum wage to secure an apartment for himself and, later, to take care of his brother as well. Steve works hard and "all [he] has time to do is go to work, go to school, and sleep" (1998, p. 23). In both scenarios, the individuals strive to be self-sufficient through legitimate forms of employment and persist in an effort to improve their life circumstances.
In contrast, though, the sense of entitlement supposedly fostered in generational poverty more commonly leads to illegitimate means of securing financial resources. For example, Juan is a six-year-old Hispanic boy who lives with his grandmother who cannot speak English, and a 25-year-old uncle, Ramon. Juan's father was killed in a gang-related shooting and his mother is in jail, so Ramon looks after Juan. In order to support the family, Ramon sells drugs with his gang and makes an average of $1,000 a week. Ramon does not expect to live past his thirtieth birthday because of his dangerous lifestyle, but he continues leading his gang and plans to kill a rival gang member and then flee to Mexico for a while (1998, p. 18). A similar situation is discussed in the scenario about Geraldo, a 13-year-old Hispanic male who is a prominent gang member in his neighborhood. Geraldo remains involved with his gang as a "matter of pride," and makes $4,000 in a week selling drugs, sharing it with 10 other members. Like Ramon, Geraldo anticipates he will be dead before he turns 25 and therefore believes, "You might as well enjoy life and girls." Ultimately, Geraldo admits, ". . . faithful is not in my vocabulary. I'm only faithful to them streets" (1998, p. 22).
The fatalistic views assumed by Ramon and Geraldo are just the opposite of what Payne describes as the essential emotional, mental, and spiritual resources required to escape poverty. Because Payne generally conceives of poverty-and staying in poverty-as at least partly a matter of choice, an individual must have the ability to identify and reason through various courses of action, particularly those necessitating deferred gratification and personal restraint. The scenario of Magnolia, a 16-year-old White girl in tenth grade who single-handedly takes care of her eight siblings because her mother is neglectful and irresponsible, exemplifies a person who possesses these critical resources. Magnolia demonstrates her emotional resources by refusing to steal from others, even though her mother instructs her to do it so they can have food to eat and "[she] can't remember a time when [she wasn't] hungry sometime during the week" (1998, p. 24). However, Magnolia's commitment to caring for her siblings is clear as she sneaks the welfare check out of the mailbox to buy food for the family before her mother can waste it gratuitously on herself. Magnolia gets Bs and Cs in school but aspires to be a teacher. Payne tells us that she could earn As if only there was time to do her homework and maximize her mental resources.
Magnolia, however, is an exceptional case in Payne's workbook. Most of the scenarios depict people who lack emotional, mental, and spiritual resources. For example, Habib is a "likeable and easily persuaded" 18-year-old, African-American male whose one great attribute is that he is "one heck of a fighter" (1998, p. 21). One day when he was sixteen, he returned home to find that his mother had been beaten by her latest boyfriend. After calling an ambulance for her, Habib went looking for her boyfriend but decided it might be a good idea to break into and rob a pawnshop instead. Payne suggests that this course of action represented Habib trying to resolve his anger, and when he was caught, he also had a gun in his pocket. Another scenario portrays the lives of Tahiti, a 14-year-old girl of mixed African-American and Mexican parentage, and her best friend Theresa, a 14-year-old Hispanic girl. Neither of the girls does well in school, and Tahiti's family life is fraught with drinking and abuse. In order to give their lives meaning, these girls actively try to get pregnant so they can "have something of [their] own" (1998, p. 25).
All of the people in Payne's scenarios have physical resources, although they function differently for men and women. While men gain advantage from their ability to fight and willingness to utilize violence (as seen in the scenarios of Ramon, Geraldo, and Habib), Payne indicates that women can use their bodies and sex to elicit favors. The scenario of John and Adele best illustrates the significance of a woman's physical resources. Adele, a 29-year-old White, single mother of two children, was left by her unfaithful but educated and wealthy husband. Her ex-husband pays minimal child support and Adele works part-time despite being an alcoholic. When Adele's car breaks down, she is financially unable to have it fixed and may get fired if she cannot report to work the next day. Adele assesses the available choices and determines that one way to solve her problem is to invite the mechanic over for dinner. The mechanic later calls and invites her out to dinner instead, mentioning that they might be able to work something out in terms of payment. Adele thinks, "It has been a long time since [I] have been out, and he is good-looking and seems like a nice man" (1998, p. 15).

Payne suggests that Adele would likely benefit from having a support system for times of need, and that Ramon, Geraldo, and Habib could use role models to teach them appropriate, less destructive behaviors. The scenario of Wisteria and Eileen attests to the importance that Payne attributes to support from extended family. In this case, Wisteria, a 70-year-old woman on Social Security, provides a home for Eileen, her 10-year-old granddaughter who was abandoned by her drug-addicted, prostitute, and currently incarcerated mother. Wisteria only receives about $150 a week and is in declining health, but her willingness to take care of Eileen means that the child will not be placed in a foster home. Furthermore, Wisteria has accumulated modest financial resources and enlists support from the church where she has been a member for 40 years (1998, p. 17).

The church is a critical institution in Payne's view, but it is unable to address the problems of poverty by itself. A church serves as a social support in the scenario about Maria and Noemi, a Hispanic mother-and-daughter pair from a devout Catholic family that receives food stamps but is otherwise quite loving and intact. What Payne suggests 10-year-old Maria learns from Noemi's role-modeling, however, is that she should get married, have children, and stay home like her mother (1998, p. 19). Similar patterns of early pregnancy are also perpetuated by the maternal example in the scenario of Tijuana Checosovakia, a 14-year-old African-American girl who had her first child when she was 11 (1998, p. 20); Sally's 15-year-old sister in the scenario of Sally and Sueann (1998, p. 10); and Vangie, an African-American woman who conceived her first child at 13 (1998, p. 12). Again, for Payne it is emotional and moral resources that count more than financial support. Even if the individuals and families in her various scenarios have adequate material means of subsistence, it is their values and behavior that most critically determine their prospects for escaping poverty.
Interestingly, the primary positive role models mentioned in Payne's scenarios are educators. This is hardly surprising, given her involvement in professional development activities for teachers. For instance, Magnolia's aspiration to become a teacher (discussed earlier) was inspired by the kindness of her own fifth-grade teacher who provided a Thanksgiving meal for her hungry family. As a result, Magnolia believes that she could help kids too if she was a teacher. In the scenario about Steve (also discussed earlier), it is a school counselor who persuades him to stay in school and graduate even though he is exhausted trying to balance a full-time job and classes. The counselor expresses faith in Steve's ability to learn, and personally meets him at 7:00 in the morning to provide algebra tutorials.
Through these interactions with teachers and other school officials, Magnolia and Steve have role models who can serve as their "sponsors" out of poverty. They can, in other words, finally be provided an opportunity to learn the hidden rules of the middle class to do well in school and become financially self-supporting, successful members of our society. Of course, these also are examples of educators who are going beyond the general call of duty, working with students outside of the normal workday and using their own resources rather than those of the school or district. What these individuals draw upon are emotional and moral resources as well, and their examples in Payne's scenarios reinforce the emphasis that she places upon these attributes. In framing the social problem of poverty in such basic human terms, Payne adds considerable force to her arguments about its origins and the possibilities for its resolution. On the other hand, the reality of working with such students is often considerably more complicated than her scenarios may suggest, and poverty may not be as closely tied to morality and associated "hidden rules" as she seems to believe.
A critique of Payne's framework
Without doubt, the conceptual clarity and apparent applicability of Payne's framework for understanding poverty are among its primary assets. Yet, given the heated scholarly debates regarding poverty over the last several decades, her authoritative-sounding pronouncements about children's socioeconomic status and their educational and behavioral outcomes are rather remarkable. This apparent certainty appeals to many people's common-sense notions of how poverty functions and how it can be eliminated. It is important to note, however, that the underlying logic of Payne's conception of poverty is not well-supported by contemporary social science research, and her straightforward explanations and conclusions may hold problematic implications for poor children and those educators who serve them. In the discussion that follows, we consider a number of potential criticisms of Payne's work, including her selective use of social science research to support her arguments about the impact of poverty on education and other outcomes for children in society.
One problem in Payne's framework of poverty is the extent to which she essentializes the values, behaviors, and orientations of those who are poor. Although Payne distinguishes between different circumstances of poverty, she routinely describes the poor in sweeping fashion as individuals who differ markedly from others in the middle and wealthy classes. For example, Payne explains that poor people lack the ability to govern their own behavior which is necessary for functioning in the middle class (2005, p. 77). As a result, the scenarios discussed earlier in this article are intended to illustrate how "the line between what is legal and illegal is thin and often crossed" so that the poor "simply see jail as a part of life and not necessarily always bad" (2005, p. 22). Also, she maintains that the poor assume their life circumstances are inevitable, so money is either shared or spent immediately. Disciplinary action is seen as being about penance and forgiveness rather than really changing negative behaviors; men value hard labor and identify as "a lover" and "a fighter" with bars and work as their main social outlets; and women learn that "sex will bring in money and favors. Values are important, but they don't put food on the table-or bring relief from intense pressure" (2005, p. 23-24).
Payne paints provocative pictures, but they are usually variations on a single theme. Life in poor families is characterized by constant chatter and background noise from the TV which is almost always on; disorganization and clutter; matriarchal and extended family structures; and multiple internal feuds "with nearly everyone having multiple relationships, some legal and some not" (2005, p. 51-56). Such scenarios convey powerful images, and all but a couple of them depict poor people as engaging in behavior of questionable moral character. Even if the main character in a story is a largely innocent student, she or he is usually presented as contending with adults who have proven to be morally weak. Whether it is an out-of-work uncle or a father in jail, an unwed pregnant sister or a drunken mother, the children in these stories are victims of the adults who have failed them. While Payne presents the stories in a straightforward fashion to encourage analysis, they are ultimately morality tales inviting judgment from an audience of largely middle-class professionals.
A second concern is that Payne's essentialized portrayal of the poor and problems related to poverty can lead to misconceptions or contribute to popular stereotypes about people in poverty. As noted earlier, central to Payne's analysis of poverty is the idea that there are "hidden rules" or "mental models" which distinguish the thinking and behavior of people who are poor from those who are middle class and wealthy. In identifying these characteristics, Payne appears to rely heavily on the work of Oscar Lewis (1968), Michael Harrington (1962), Richard Sennett (Sennett & Cobb, 1973), and other writers from the 1960s and early 1970s who, to one degree or another, endorsed a "culture of poverty" thesis about behavioral differences between the poor and others. Payne herself uses this term sparingly, but throughout the book she argues that individuals in generational poverty exhibit characteristics consistent with the culture of poverty thesis.
As evident in the descriptive scenarios, the poor are generally depicted as having a weak work ethic, little sense of internal discipline or future orientation, and leading lives characterized to one extent or another by disorder and violence. In making these characterizations, Payne seems to be unaware of the many studies dating from the late 1960s that challenged the culture of poverty thesis, in many instances directly testing the extent to which traits such as these were more prevalent among the poor than other groups. By and large, these studies found that such characteristics were not more likely to be evident in poor individuals or households. Indeed, people in poverty valued work, saving money, behaving properly, maintaining stable families, and a number of other "middle-class" attributes as much as their counterparts in higher social and economic strata. These results, moreover, held across groups with experiences of differing duration in poverty and across racial and ethnic lines (Roach & Gursslin, 1967; Irelan, Moles, & O'Shea, 1969; Coward, Feagin, & Williams, 1974; Davidson & Gaitz, 1974; Abell & Lyon, 1979; Carmon, 1985; Jones & Luo, 1999).
To put the matter another way, this body of research suggests that many of the attitudes that Payne attributes to the poor are also evident to varying degrees among the non-poor, groups that Payne would describe as the "middle class" and the "wealthy." After all, there is considerable evidence that individuals in these groups have characteristics of the sort that Payne attributes only to the poor: a variable work ethic, inability to save money, and uncertainty in interpersonal relationships. Recent studies indicate that traditional middle-class values on a range of issues have shifted in the past several decades. Divorce, for instance, is now widely seen as acceptable, a broad range of personal behavior is tolerated or accepted, and work judged to be demeaning is often spurned, even in the face of unemployment. (Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2001; Jaynes, 2000) Mainstream values of the sort Payne holds up as exemplary appear to be considerably less prevalent today than in the past, throughout all segments of the population.
Much of the behavior Payne describes, consequently, is not exclusively a problem of the poor and may therefore reflect values that she incorrectly attributes to poverty. Middle-class or upper-class individuals, of course, are less likely to suffer as a result of such behaviors because, as Payne notes, having monetary resources makes the consequences of such attitudinal or behavioral characteristics considerably less dire. However, a major problem in her interpretation is suggesting that there may be a causal force to these attributes. While they may make it difficult for some to escape poverty under current social and economic conditions, there is little evidence that such traits are especially prevalent among the poor, and they do not explain why some people fall into poverty and others do not. Studies challenging the culture of poverty thesis have cast serious doubt on the proposition that a clearly distinguishable "culture of poverty" in fact exists. By and large, it is a term that has fallen out of use in the social science literature today.
The studies that Payne does reference offer little support for her formulation of "mental models" that distinguish the behavior of the poor. One study she cites a great deal is Susan Mayer's (1997) book, What Money Can't Buy. Mayer argues that ". . . activities, possessions and housing environments that are important to children's outcomes are only moderately related to parental income" (p. 113). In other words, the poor do not lack in resources necessary for children to succeed, and middle-class status is hardly a guarantee of a child's success. What matters are the "values" of parents, and Mayer (like many other researchers) offers scant evidence that the poor have different values than other groups. On the surface, of course, this point would appear to support Payne's argument, and it is no doubt for this reason that she cites Mayer's work. But Mayer's position is more complicated than this, and directly addresses the question of whether income is related to parenting practices, an issue at the core of Payne's argument. In examining this matter, Mayer reports that there is negligible difference between the poor and other families. After reviewing the evidence from survey data, she concludes, "These results provide little evidence that parents' income has a large influence on parenting practices. Nor do the results in this chapter suggest that parental income has a large effect on parents' psychological attributes other than their feelings of efficacy. And parental efficacy has only a moderate effect on children's outcomes" (1997, p. 124). By and large, according to Mayer, parenting practices and the values that inform them are generally unrelated to income. This is hardly a finding that provides support for Payne's framework for understanding poverty, despite her use of Mayer's book for confirmation of her theories.
Mayer does indicate that "some persistently poor parents are shiftless and neglectful," adding that their households exhibit "neither the moral nor the material standards that most Americans believe children require" (1997, p. 151). But she also makes it clear that families falling into this category are only a part of the persistently poor, who also suffer from illness, depression, and other limitations quite separate from their moral predilections. This suggests that poor families of the sort that Payne describes as reflecting "generational poverty" represent a modest proportion of the poor, perhaps less than a quarter and probably lower. Given these figures, it stands to reason that the children in such families would be a rather small fraction of all children, possibly just 3 or 4 percent. As Mayer concludes, "poverty alone is not synonymous with incompetence," and as the number of families living in poverty rises, "the average poor person becomes more like the average middle-class person" (1997, p. 152). This too is an argument in sharp distinction from Payne's, which suggests that the numbers of attitudinally deviant poor families are increasing (Payne, 2005, p. 61).
Another book Payne cites a number of times is a collection of studies edited by Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (1997) titled, Consequences of Growing Up Poor. Again, Payne appears to have been rather selective in choosing quotes from this source, as the various studies provide little support for her analysis. In the chapter examining the link between income levels and parenting practices, for instance, Hanson, McLanahan, and Thomson (1997) echo Mayer's points described above, "We found that household income and debt are only weakly related to effective parenting. Consequently, differences in the levels of parenting do not account for much of the association between economic resources and children's well being" (p. 219). While the researchers did find evidence that various approaches to parenting had different effects in poor and non-poor households (with control and supervision being less important in the latter), this did not materially affect the relationship between income and children's outcomes. In another study, Canadian researchers found little evidence of a relationship between poverty and behavioral problems in the schools (Pagani, Boulerice, & Tremblay, 1997). These and similar conclusions throughout the book indicate that the relationship between poverty, the values and behavior of parents, and the welfare of children are a good deal more complicated than Payne suggests.
What is perhaps most problematic about Payne's framework for understanding poverty is its underlying logic that suggests poor people have choices about whether to remain in-or escape from-poverty. As illustrated in the scenarios described earlier, Payne argues that the poor may not realize they have a choice to live differently, and even if they do recognize their own agency, they may be reluctant to exercise it without the aid of a sponsor who can model the appropriate use of emotional resources. Payne explains that in poverty,
There is a freedom of verbal expression, an appreciation of individual personality, a heightened and intense emotional experience, and a sensual, kinesthetic approach to life usually not found in the middle class or among the educated. These patterns are so intertwined in the daily life of the poor that to have those cut off would be to lose a limb. Many choose not to live a different life. And for some, alcoholism, laziness, lack of motivation, drug addiction, etc., in effect make the choices for the individual. (2005, p. 113)
As a result, Payne indicates that helping poor children develop self control requires both structure and choice so that they can recognize what behaviors are expected of them, identify the consequences accompanying particular actions, and ultimately "emphasize that the individual always has a choice-to follow or not to follow the expected behaviors" (2005, p. 78). Emphasizing that emotional resources are the most important factor in the perpetuation of poverty implies it is the poor themselves who bear the greatest responsibility for their condition, despite the extensive research literature suggesting otherwise. For example, Payne overlooks the predominant social and economic causes of poverty highlighted in social science literature such as deindustrialization, discrimination, unequal educational resources, and socioeconomic segregation (Massey & Denton, 1993; Wilson, 1996). These studies dispel prevalent beliefs that changing individuals' values and behavior can affect their social mobility, or that children in poor and lower-class households have the same objective opportunities for inter-generational social mobility as children from more affluent families.
Recent research on the state of the very poor in American society suggests that their social environment is considerably more influential than Payne's book indicates. The Gatreaux project in Chicago, for instance, has demonstrated that moving families out of inner-city communities with highly concentrated poverty can have a significant effect on the life chances of children and adults alike. Once relocated to middle-class neighborhoods, children performed better in school, adults found employment, and family prospects improved. (Kaufman & Rosenbaum, 1992) This research casts considerable doubt on the "mental models" theory that Payne postulates in her book. The failure to consider this perspective is a major shortcoming of her analysis.
Furthermore, although Payne's reference to individuals in situational and generational poverty does not correspond to data categories on the census and are thus difficult to quantify exactly, the research literature on poverty indicates that the largest group of these children are racial/ethnic minorities (mostly African-American) living in central-city neighborhoods where local employment opportunities are severely restricted. Payne, however, suggests that race is largely unrelated to poverty. In doing so, she sidesteps the critical issue of systematic, historical patterns of discrimination and exploitation that have contributed to the persistence of widespread poverty in the United States. Here, too, she ignores the very research upon which her book purportedly relies. A study cited by Payne reports that African-American families in 1980 were more than seven times more likely to experience "persistent" poverty (more than six years) than Whites. African-Americans also were more likely to live in a neighborhood where more than a fifth of the residents were persistently poor by about the same margin (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, & Maritato, 1997). Children in these families often live in environments where the effects of "concentrated poverty" are evident, a term employed by William Julius Wilson to describe to describe the impact of deindustrialization and long-term unemployment on inner-city communities (Wilson, 1987, 1996). These statistics tell a different story about the relationship between poverty and race than Payne describes, particularly with respect to the "persistent" poor.
Meaningful efforts to educate poor children and work towards the elimination of poverty in society at large necessitate a commitment to understanding and reforming the existing structure of socioeconomic stratification. This entails a critical analysis of contemporary economic shifts and needs (Books, 2004; Kantor, 1999; Ranney, 1999; Wilson, 1987), as well as attention to the advantageous functioning of the system to particular groups of privileged people (Gans, 1995; Jencks, 1972). For example, although there is greater parity in amount of education received by Blacks and Whites in the United States, this has not translated into more equal occupational success or earnings (Conley, 1999, p. 86). Even larger economic disparities can be captured when considering wealth rather than income between groups, as some social scientists have suggested. Oliver and Shapiro (1997) explain,
Wealth is money that is not typically used to purchase milk, shoes, or other necessities. Sometimes it bails families out of financial and personal crises, but more often it is used to create opportunities, secure a desired stature and standard of living, or pass along a class status already obtained to a new generation. (p. 171)
The measure of one's wealth-including things such as inheritance, investments, and property-has the "particular attribute of quantifying the social value of ideas or objects" (Conley, 1999, p. 144).
Payne concludes that in conceptualizing poverty,
Naming the problem is the first step toward a solution, and the most important step, for if the problem is not named accurately the course of action based on that faulty assumption will only lead further and further from a solution. So naming problems accurately-making the correct diagnosis-is crucial because it is on those definitions that the theories of change and program activities are based. (2005, p. 169)

Yet, Payne's own viewpoint is largely unsubstantiated in current research literature. Through a detailed analysis of the descriptive scenarios Payne provides to accompany her framework for understanding poverty, it is clear that the poor are portrayed rather monolithically in their values and behaviors, which generally correspond to the culture of poverty thesis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In like fashion, then, Payne recommends that educators serve to inspire and model change so the poor know there is a more desirable way of living. If only the problem of poverty could be so simply diagnosed, then the remedy would be fairly straightforward. Yet Payne's work may misinform well-intentioned efforts to educate poor children by locating the problem of poverty within the individual without regard to the larger social context in which they live and are expected to succeed.

The Payne phenomenon in perspective
Given the issues identified above, the influence of Dr. Ruby Payne presents something of a puzzle. If her viewpoint is so heavily tilted toward a certain perspective and the research base for her work is so questionable, what explains the popularity of her book and the apparent success of her workshops? As suggested above, the clarity of her explanation for poverty and related issues, along with the confident tone of her narratives and recommendations, may explain part of the appeal. The fact that she purports to draw upon decades of academic research no doubt lends credibility to her enterprise and its publications. But it is also possible that a good deal of the interest her perspective draws from educators is rooted in their own middle-class conceptions about the poor and the causes of poverty. Most educators, after all, are unfamiliar with the extensive research literature on poverty and its effects on children, and if Payne's citations seem to support their own views about the poor, they would hardly be in a position to challenge the interpretation of research that Payne offers. If they are predisposed to believing that the poor are lazy and impulsive as well as unreliable and temperamental, they are more likely to agree with Payne's analysis than to question it. In short, Payne may be popular simply because she echoes commonplace assumptions about why some individuals appear to succeed in American society while others do not.
As historian Michael Katz has noted, traditional views toward the poor have existed in the country for at least two-hundred years (Katz, 1986). In the past, observers of the poor distinguished between those considered "worthy" and "unworthy." The difference was typically linked to personal rectitude, much like the distinctions that Payne notes in separating "situational" from "generational" poverty. Her "mental models" conceptual framework and the scenarios she describes echo the ideas of middle-class welfare reformers from the past, for whom poverty was more a moral condition than a matter of economic status. Now, as then, children are depicted as victims of the problematic attitudes and behaviors their parents exhibit and deemed highly susceptible to inheriting the same dysfunctional worldviews. While this may elicit sympathy and concern for students who live in poverty, and perhaps cause teachers to devote more time and attention to their needs, it is unlikely to create a sound, research-based comprehension of the problems presented by poverty and the best ways to address them. Because of this, it seems unlikely that Payne's framework will lead to meaningful, long-term change in the circumstances of poor children's lives and the ability of schools to work with them.
Ultimately, it is necessary to consider whether the apparent success of Ruby Payne and her organization represents a failure on the part of teacher educators and the many social science researchers who have addressed the connections between poverty and schooling over the past several decades. After all, if thousands of professional educators have been misinformed to one extent or another by Payne's analytical framework, it is at least partly because the training they received in colleges and universities did not prepare them to critically assess its problems. If teachers and principals lack an understanding about how poverty and social class affect children's education, it may be because their own professional education provided little information or theory for them to draw upon for this purpose. At the same time, researchers focusing on these issues have not contributed to the development of successful in-service education programs that acknowledge the realities and needs of teachers and other education professionals in the classroom. Ruby Payne has thus filled a critical vacuum in the field. This, too, explains some of her success. Where others have been uninterested or perhaps unable to help teachers understand just how poverty and education are related, Payne and her collaborators have been quite willing to step into the breach.
Perhaps it is time for the research and teacher education community to take up the challenge of poverty and begin to engage the questions that Ruby Payne has addressed so actively for the past decade or so. This is not an easy undertaking since the links between poverty and schooling are far from fully understood. As a number of studies have noted, the particular mechanisms that account for why some individuals and families end up in poverty and remain there for any length of time are still poorly comprehended (Sawhill, 1988). Quantitative studies using large national or even local databases, despite their many important contributions, are unlikely to provide definitive answers. As the authors of a chapter on "intergenerational transmission of poverty" in the Duncan and Brooks-Gunn volume note, "While we know that growing up poor reduces children's economic mobility, these analyses tell us little about why" (Corcoran & Adams, 1997, p. 514). In their concluding chapter, Duncan and Brooks-Gunn refer to the absence of strong relationships between parental income and school performance in quantitative studies as an "enigma" (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997, p. 603). More fine-grained analyses of the effect of schooling and development of children living in poverty are needed before answers to these questions can be generated.
While teachers and schools do have an important role in addressing issues of educational opportunity and equity for poor children, much additional research will be necessary before effective programs of professional assistance for them can or should be undertaken. Ruby Payne's program, while doubtless well intentioned, is not based on a sound or thorough understanding of poverty and its causes. However, if her efforts to address the difficulties educators face in working with poor children generates increased research attention and a resolution to better connect researchers' findings with educators' instructional concerns, then perhaps her work will turn out to have been significant indeed.

References
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Books, S. (2004) Poverty and schooling in the U.S.: Contexts and consequences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brady, D. (2003). Rethinking the sociological measurement of poverty. Social Forces, 81(3), 715-752.
Brooks-Gunn, J., Duncan, G. J., & Maritato, N. (1997) Poor families, poor outcomes: The well being of children and youth. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 1-17). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Carmon, N. (1985). Poverty and culture: Empirical evidence and implications for public policy. Sociological Perspectives, 28(4), 403-417.

Conley, D. (1999). Being black, living in the red: Race, wealth, and social policy in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Corcoran, M. & Adams, T. (1997). Race, sex and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 461-517). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Coward, B. E., Feagin, J. R., & Williams, Jr., J. A. (1974). The culture of poverty debate: Some additional data. Social Problems, 21(5), 621-634.
Davidson, C. & Gaitz, C. M. (1974). Are the poor different? A comparison of work behavior and attitudes among the urban poor and nonpoor. Social Problems, 22(2), 229-245.
Duncan, G. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1997). Income effects across the life span: Integration and interpretation. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 596-610). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Gans, H. J. (1995). The war against the poor: The underclass and antipoverty policy. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Hanson, T. L., McLanahan, S., & Thomson, E. (1997). Economic resources, parental practices, and children's well-being. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 190-238). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Harrington, M. (1962). The other America: Poverty in the United States. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Hernandez, D. J. (1997). Poverty trends. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp.18-34). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Irelan, L. M., Moles, O. C., & O'Shea, R. M. (1969). Ethnicity, poverty, and selected attitudes: A test of the "culture of poverty" hypothesis. Social Forces, 47(4), 405-413.
Jaynes, G. D. (2000). Identity and economic performance. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568(3), 128-139.
Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Jones, R. K., & Luo, Y. (1999). The culture of poverty and African-American culture: An empirical assessment. Sociological Perspectives, 42(3), 439-458.
Kantor, H. (1999). Race, education, and joblessness in the inner city, 1970-1990. The Urban Review, 31(3), 225-242.
Katz, M. B. (1986). In the shadow of the poorhouse: A social history of welfare in America. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Kaufman, J. E., & Rosenbaum, J. E. (1992). . Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 14(3), 229-240.
Lewis, O. (1968). A study of slum culture: Backgrounds for La Vida. New York, NY: Random House.
Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mayer, S. (1997). What money can't buy: Family income and children's life chances. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Oliver, M. L., & Shapiro, T. M. (1997). Black wealth/white wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality. New York, NY: Routledge.
Pagani, L., Boulerice, B. & Tremblay, R. (1997). The influence of poverty on children's classroom placement and behavior problems. In G. J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 311-339). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
Payne, Ruby K. (1996). A framework for understanding poverty: Modules 1-7 workbook. Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc.
Payne, Ruby K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty. Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc.
Ranney, D. C. (1999). Class, race, gender, and poverty: A critique of some contemporary theories. In L. Kushnick & J. Jennings (Eds.), A new introduction to poverty: The role of race, power, and politics (pp. 39-56). New York, NY: New York University Press.
Roach, J. L., & Gursslin, O. R. (1967). An evaluation of the concept "culture of poverty". Social Forces, 45(3), 383-392.
Sawhill, I. V. (1988). Poverty in the U.S.: Why is it so persistent? Journal of Economic Literature, 26(3), 1073-1119.
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Thornton, A., & Young-DeMarco, L. (2001). Four decades of trends in attitudes toward family issues in the United States: The 1960s through the 1990s. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 63(4), 1009-1037.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Zeichner, K. M. (2003). The adequacies and inadequacies of three current strategies to recruit, prepare, and retain the best teachers for all students. Teachers College Record, 105(3), 490-519.

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Poverty and Education: a critical Analysis of the Ruby Payne Phenomenon by

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by Jennifer C. Ng & John L. Rury - Teachers College Record, July 18, 2006 Current estimates show that historically high percentages of American children live in poverty. In order to serve them well, educators must understand the particular experiences and challenges these children face.

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"the language lady" "esl games for esl learners" "vocabulary teaching activities for esl teens" "a day in the of an esl teacher" "esl games" "esl teacher" "k...

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Looking for effective and easy ESL resources, strategies, and techniques? I post videos so that all educators can implement esl strategies in their classroom to help English language learners succeed. I have a total of over 20 years experience in the classroom as a teacher and administrator.

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How teachers can help students navigate trauma

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“To make a difference in the life of a child ... I made the commitment to tell my personal story,” says educator Lisa Godwin. In this moving talk, she shares her experience of overcoming childhood trauma with the quiet, unwavering support of a teacher and school counselor -- and shows how educators can help students and families navigate hardships by sharing their own stories.

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What Representing Men in Divorce Taught Me About Fatherhood | Marilyn York | TEDxUniversityofNevada

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We need to change the conversation about fathers | Anna Machin | TEDxClapham

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Early Childhood Education

Being mindful of the many difficulties the youngest students may be experiencing is one way teachers can help them weather the pandemic.

As educators, we have a responsibility to provide learning environments that support our students holistically. Because we can never know the full extent of everything that's weighing on them, we should be proactive in this support for every child, and one way to do that is to intentionally practice and come to embody trauma-responsive educational practices in each choice that we make.

This is always important, but it is especially urgent at this moment, as children cope with the uncertainty, loss, and trauma that have accompanied the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. Trauma responsiveness lives in every choice that we make as educators and takes time and practice to embody fully.

4 Key Mindsets of a Trauma-Responsive Educator

1. Relationships are everything. Childhood trauma is correlated with significant challenges later in life, but these challenges can be mitigated through a safe, nurturing relationship between the child and an adult. We can be these adults. By making time for regular check-ins, asking students to share about themselves and their communities, and modeling vulnerability by sharing parts of ourselves with students, we build trust with students and prove to them our care and support.

We do this further by consistently leading with empathy, validating all emotions, and always giving opportunities for restoration following challenging situations. We build strong relationships with students by showing them, time and time again, that we believe in their abilities to grow and that they will always be accepted and supported in our care.

2. Consistency creates safety. A key component of building safe and secure relationships with students is the consistency of our own actions. Students feel safe when they know what to expect. They naturally seek out patterns around them and use these patterns to develop guidelines through which they understand the world. Therefore, we should strive for consistency over every element of the learning environment-from the daily schedule to routines, logical consequences, and our own reactions to students.

There should be a visual schedule that is followed and reviewed each day. Students should know exactly what to do when they need to do routine things such as walk in line, ask for help, or clean up materials. These should be taught and practiced at first, but students will quickly pick up on these routines, internalize them, and begin to lead them. This consistency provides students with power and control over their environment-something that experiencing trauma often strips away.

Further, by remaining consistent in our own reactions and the logical consequences we administer in response to specific student actions, we are building trust with students. We are showing students that they can rely on us to show up and support them again and again and that we will remain steadfast in our commitments to and expectations for them and for ourselves.

3. We can't expect what we don't teach. No matter the student's age, it's unfair to hold them accountable for meeting expectations that we neither share nor teach them how to meet. We can strip away assumptions about what students should and should not be able to do, and instead set the foundation and support each student with developing the skills to thrive in our classrooms. We can explicitly teach social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies, including (but not limited to) how to collaborate with others, how to express and manage emotions productively, and how to navigate social conflicts.

If we never teach a child how to ask for a turn, we cannot fairly administer a consequence when they yell and grab the toy from another student-we have no way of ensuring that they have ever learned or seen modeled a different way of solving this problem. If we ask this child to choose a new learning center, they will become more frustrated and confused. They still do not know how they could have acted differently or how to successfully get a turn next time. We should keep this in mind for every situation that our students might need to navigate in our classrooms-even if it seems minute.

4. Student voices matter. Traumatic experiences strip children of their agency, power, and sense of control. We can provide students a sense of control in our classrooms by actively seeking and listening to their feedback and releasing the power to make decisions to students. We do this by inviting students to cocreate shared classroom expectations with us, following their preferences in daily activities (e.g., songs, gross motor activities), and inviting students to choose their learning centers and materials. This autonomy must also extend to the SEL strategies that we teach and allow students to use in our classroom. We can teach and provide students with multiple options for navigating themselves and their environments productively.

This might look like teaching and providing social problem-solving cards (such as those available for free from the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning), setting up a safe place for students to utilize emotion-management strategies, and asking harmed students what they need to move forward following challenging situations.

By consistently empowering students to make decisions about their own actions and learning environments, we are showing them that their voice and identity matter and that they have the power to influence their environment. This adds to the sense of safety we are building for our students when they are with us and further strengthens our relationships in the classroom, thus helping students to mitigate the harmful impacts of experiencing trauma.

Trauma responsiveness lives in every choice, every action, and every word of an educator. Often, it requires us to critically reflect on our practices and strip ourselves of assumptions and techniques that may have served us in the past but are not serving our students today. To make sure that we show up fully for every student, with everything that they are carrying with them, we should work to embrace trauma responsiveness, beginning by using these mindsets to drive our decision-making.

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Bringing a Trauma-Informed Lens to Early Childhood Education

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Early Childhood Education Being mindful of the many difficulties the youngest students may be experiencing is one way teachers can help them weather the pandemic. As educators, we have a responsibility to provide learning environments that support our students holistically.

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Making Classrooms More Inclusive for Multilingual Learners

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Taking an asset-based approach to supporting students who are new to the English language can help them thrive.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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When school leaders take great care in raising the idea of changing grading systems, they increase the odds of getting buy-in from parents and students.

One of the most iconic elements of American schools-right up there with yellow school buses and brass bells-is the way schools grade students. Grades are everywhere in our culture, and because they are, they're the most salient way people think about their own learning and the learning of their children.

Anxiety about grades has hit new highs this spring and summer, as many districts debate new grading policies and news outlets worry about the number of students who received Fs during the pandemic. Because grades are more controversial than ever, it's more important than ever to make sure that what grades communicate to families and students aligns with the values of educators.

In my organization's recent podcast series on grading, academics and practitioners alike agreed on the characteristics of an effective grading system. Good grading systems identify the purposes and intentions of grades. They engage students as copilots in the learning process, allowing them to take ownership over the processes and products of learning. They avoid grading student effort or other behavioral characteristics of students that distract from a focus on learning and that can lead to inequitable outcomes. They provide reassessment opportunities so that students can continually show their improvement. Finally, they keep at their center a focus on reporting learning so that little confusion exists about how a student got a particular grade or how they can improve it.

Despite this strong consensus, there's still a gap between what good grading policies look like and what happens in most schools. Instead, students, families, and the public see grades as a permanent measure of the kind of student you are. That attitude stops the conversation about how learning grows and matures.

It also has a deep impact on students' mental health. When we talked to students close to us about grading, one fifth grader told us a low grade made her "disappointed about herself." Another told us a low grade makes him "break out in tears, literally." Whatever else can be said about them, these comments show that traditional grading is failing its key purpose: helping students and families understand what they've learned.

Grades should represent not who a student is but where they are in their learning, one point in an ongoing journey. Whether your school system is considering a shift toward standards-based grading or competency-based grading, rethinking student feedback, or looking at any of the other high-value approaches to reforming grading policies and procedures, it should begin by clearly articulating for teachers, families, and students why the change is being made, what high-quality grading looks like, and what the benefits of high-quality grading are for them. When you're staging a conversation about the purpose of your grading system, there are several big ideas to keep in mind.

3 Steps to Starting the Conversation

1. Involve stakeholders: Find ways to involve students and their families so they understand the reasons behind changing grading systems and what those changes mean for learning. The stakes of these conversations are high: Grades have historically given students access to higher-level coursework, athletic eligibility, and the best colleges and universities. Understandably, parents don't want their students to lose out on these opportunities for success.

Having conversations during informal activities like a back-to-school night or an informational table during an extracurricular activity can help reduce the emotional stressors present at higher-stakes interactions such as a school board meeting.

Make sure that caregivers are hearing both from administrators and from the teachers they most trust. To succeed at changing hearts and minds around grading, school systems need to show that grading reforms have tangible, specific benefits for them.

2. Plan for follow-up conversations: Prepare teachers to have in-depth conversations with families about what their children have learned and are ready to learn next. Start by making sure that teachers are aligned on how they'll grade, and offer professional learning opportunities on how to assess students in more authentic ways.

Families are naturally curious about what good school performance looks like. As the role of grades in your district or school changes, they will look for you to guide them toward other ways of understanding learning. Teachers should be prepared to have conversations about the types of performance assessments, formative activities, and other pieces of evidence that may not find their way into the final grade. Parent-teacher conferences should always include this learning evidence.

3. Tap into parents' experiences: Find ways to build empathy and rapport across your school community by talking to students' family members and caregivers about their own grading experiences. Imagine asking your students to interview a parent about their grades in school or regularly making space for a family member's reflections in your newsletters home. Your PTA can support having more structured conversations with the community about what your school's grading culture should look like.

Because everyone has been to school and gotten grades, talking about their experiences can be a great opportunity to help folks think about the kinds of schooling experiences they want for their own children. You'll likely get back a variety of stories that will illustrate their feelings about school, both positive and negative. These stories provide invaluable data about how to connect with your community across a variety of issues.

Rather than creating stress and conflict, communicating about grades can be an opportunity to build family engagement and draw attention to the meaningful learning activities taking place in your classroom, school, and district. Changing mindsets can be hard work, but it is also the prerequisite to ensuring that a new grading process has support for the long term.

A high-quality, student-centered grading system that all stakeholders understand and believe in can be the cornerstone of a process that rewards student agency, deep conversations, and high levels of engagement around student learning.

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Starting the Conversation About Alternative Grading Systems

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When school leaders take great care in raising the idea of changing grading systems, they increase the odds of getting buy-in from parents and students. One of the most iconic elements of American schools-right up there with yellow school buses and brass bells-is the way schools grade students.

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Rural students often have fewer educational opportunities than metro-area peers, but teachers can work with families to improve outcomes.

Rural districts are an often-overlooked part of the complex American education system, even though 9.3 million students-or one in five nationally-attend a rural school. These districts are typically disregarded because of their small populations compared with larger single districts in more urban areas. In terms of funding, national and state legislation tends to be more directly applied to the larger districts in an attempt to effect the most positive change for as many students as possible. However, when considered as a group, rural districts encompass a large number of students nationwide.

Despite specific challenges within rural districts, students in these districts often score at or above their peers on state and national testing. According to the Economic Research Service at the USDA, in 2018, 22.4 percent of students in non-metro schools were in poverty compared with their metro school counterparts at 17.3 percent. While these students perform well on assessments statistically, their school experience is different from that of their suburban or urban peers in several ways.

To begin with, a large portion of rural students must deal with a lack of access to quality reading materials and instruction at an early age (especially preschool), a lack of consistent access to medical care, the impact of opioid abuse and child homelessness in low-income and rural communities, and other factors. To meet the specific needs of rural students, there are a variety of strategies that can help guarantee access to learning.

The Education Equation

By engaging all components of the learning process-teachers, students, and families-teachers are more able to assess the specific needs of their students and address them with purpose. When positive bonds or relationships are cultivated between each of the components, teachers are more equipped to design learning experiences that fit the needs of their students.

Educators connect in meaningful ways with their students inside the classroom, employing a variety of strategies to build strong bonds and a community of learning. It can be more difficult to establish those purposeful bonds with families. Routinely making calls to parents, sending out weekly or monthly newsletters, or meeting with parents in person can go a long way toward fostering a focus on learning. In rural communities, families are often the central factor in student success in the classroom.

Regular transparent communication with families about your expectations for learning and behavior can have a tremendous positive impact and create an accessible environment for learning. This cultivates a system of accountability, includes families in the process, and helps build student agency within the classroom.

Equity in Learning

For rural students, it can be difficult to connect new learning with prior experiences. Many times, rural students lack life experiences that other students may have because of the typically isolated nature of their families and communities, which can limit their ability to fully benefit from a diverse curriculum. Additionally, rural students don't have access to a variety of accelerated courses that may be more available in urban or suburban school districts, including AP and dual credit courses.

While working with the district administration to provide these resources in a rural district can be a long and difficult process, administrators often respond positively when approached with possible solutions. Advocating for your students can help encourage administrators to make decisions that will improve the situation.

Rural students also lack consistent access to quality early reading opportunities because of the socioeconomic circumstances of some families and the absence of financial flexibility in rural districts to allocate money to address these issues. For example, while many students have access to local libraries not far from their homes in a rural setting, their districts may not have the time or funding to establish beneficial relationships with the library system that would enable and encourage families and students to take advantage of those resources, especially at the preschool level.

Within the classroom, teachers have the training and ability to modify materials and design curricula that provide greater access to learning at little to no cost with high levels of positive impact on student learning. A barrier for most struggling students is the inability to decode and comprehend complex grade-level texts in every subject. If you modify what texts specific students are required to read, or scaffold their learning by front-loading important vocabulary or other prerequisite information, rural students who may struggle to access the content will have a greater opportunity for success.

Additionally, a lack of funding in rural districts may also mean that many students might not have regular access to technology that would allow them to participate in generally more engaging learning activities.

Creating a School-Home Feedback Loop

These strategies for engaging rural students are centered around developing a feedback loop that consists of teachers, students, and parents. A feedback loop, when purposefully designed, can be an asset in the classroom in limitless ways. It should focus on setting and clarifying learning expectations on a weekly or monthly basis in addition to providing comments specifically focused on creating opportunities for students to revise their work for deeper learning. Parents should have enough information to hold their children accountable for learning.

Teachers need to make a fervent attempt to actively remove all forms of doubt from the rural classroom and continually seek to maintain open lines of communication that enable them to implement an engaging and accessible curriculum. Removing doubt from the curriculum requires that both families and students understand your expectations for their learning, what content is being addressed, and how they might succeed within the learning environment.

While educators in rural districts are capable of designing curriculum in this way, many may lack the experience or training to do so. There also may need to be a shift in the understanding of the nature of learning that may entail a period of adjustment to new styles of teaching. Rural students, in particular, require sound relationships between all of the stakeholders in their education, and teachers can create and foster this dynamic by taking a few purposeful steps toward a more collaborative and transparent classroom.

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Addressing the Challenges of Rural Students

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Rural students often have fewer educational opportunities than metro-area peers, but teachers can work with families to improve outcomes. Rural districts are an often-overlooked part of the complex American education system, even though 9.3 million students-or one in five nationally-attend a rural school.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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NEA's COMMITMENT

The National Education Association (NEA) is committed to ensuring that school is a safe, welcoming, and inclusive place where all students can thrive, regardless of circumstance or ZIP code, and where educators have the support and resources they need to be successful. We believe supporting students who suffer from childhood trauma requires whole school involvement and transformation. All school employees play a crucial role in supporting students impacted by childhood trauma. In keeping with this vision, the Association and its affiliates are actively engaged in finding ways for schools and educators to address the issue of trauma and its implications for learning, behavior, and school safety.

FRAMING THE ISSUE OF TRAUMA

From school shootings that shock the nation with grim regularity to the daily toll of violence, poverty, abuse, and addiction in our communities that rarely makes headlines, America's students and their families often experience traumatic events that can shape their lives forever.

Decades of research and studies have established that children who experience adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) not only are more likely to exhibit negative behaviors at school, but are more likely to develop risky behaviors. They are more likely to face a host of negative health consequences over their lifetimes, including reduced life expectancy. Data from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) showed that 46 percent of America's children had experienced at least one adverse childhood experience with the number rising to 55 percent for children aged 12 to 17. One in five U.S. children had two or more ACEs.

Given the pervasiveness of ACEs across the population, most educators encounter trauma-affected students throughout their careers, whether they know it or not. Often these students exhibit a sudden change in behavior, from social withdrawal to violent outbursts or self-harm. When an educator frequently interrupts instruction to address disruptive behavior, teaching and learning for the entire class can suffer.

These outbursts and the punishments that often follow affect the psychological well-being and safety of both educators and students and, left unexamined, contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline that NEA is committed to eradicating.

ADDRESSING THE ISSUE OF TRAUMA

Unions and districts across the country are working together to address the epidemic of trauma in schools with students' and educators' needs in mind. They are collaborating to transform schools into "trauma-informed" or "trauma-sensitive" environments, taking deliberate steps to become safe havens for every student and safe working environments for every educator.

ACEs awareness and engagement on a national level is imperative to ensure students are healthy, safe, engaged and supported so that they are ready to learn. Trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed environments allow educators the opportunity to collaborate in a way that supports a student's mental and physical health so that learning can occur. School communities that engage in paid professional development, practice and support for all school employees create a culture that builds resilience for all students. Trauma-sensitive focus on education fosters a school climate where students feel safe and confident in their ability to learn, can differentiate between trauma induced behavior and appropriate behavior, and connect with adults and peers in a positive manner.

NEA believes that supporting students' needs around the issues of trauma will enable them to come to school ready to learn and meet academic challenges that reinforce the development of life skills, mental stimulation, and student learning. When schools become trauma sensitive, they strive to ensure that all students are receiving the supports they need to succeed.

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Supporting students who suffer from childhood trauma requires whole school involvement and transformation. NEA and its affiliates are actively engaged in finding ways for schools and educators to address the issue of trauma and its implications for learning, behavior, and school safety.

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Trauma-Sensitive Schools: A Whole-School Approach - Trauma Sensitive Schools

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Trauma-Sensitive Schools and Safe and Supportive Schools benefit all children. TLPI embraces a whole-school approach that enables all children to achieve.