Equity & Excellence in Education, 38: 367–375, 2005
Copyright
c University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education
ISSN 1066-5684 print /1547-3457 online
DOI: 10.1080/10665680500299833
Pathologizing the Poor: A Framework for Understanding
Ruby Payne’s Work
Payne, R.K. (2003). A framework for understanding poverty
(3rd rev. ed.). Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc. ISBN: 1-
929229-14-3 Paperback. $22.00.
The poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny.
His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not
ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in
which we live and for which we are responsible.
—Gustavo Gutiérrez
A mericans display a profound resistance to en-
gage issues of class (Barone, 1999; Biddle, 2001;
Bracey, 2003; Collins, 1996; Darder, 2002; hooks,
1994, 2000; Nesbit, 2004). To acknowledge and struggle
with matters of class disrupts the hegemonic notion of
America as a meritocracy, where anyone that really wants
to make it, is rewarded materially, spiritually, and other-
wise, in proportion to the effort they are willing to put
forth. Based on this understanding, the majority of Amer-
ican’s view themselves and most people around them as
belonging under a large umbrella known as the “middle
class.’’ At the margins of this all-inclusive fictional mid-
dle are the poor on one side and the super rich on the
other. The poor, while rarely recognized (when acknowl-
edged) are viewed as a small portion of the population
and largely conceived of as synonymous with black and
brown folks. In contrast, the super rich are worshipped,
as they, in accordance with the ideology that prevails,
represent what anyone in the middle class can become
with the right amount of drive, dedication, and smarts.
Rather than talk about the existence of a class-based so-
ciety, the acceptable and more palatable euphemism is
that of “socioeconomic status.’’
Meanwhile, the social, economic, and political reali-
ties of the present underscore the absolute necessity to
engage the realities of a class-based society. According
to the Children’s Defense Fund (2004), presently the me-
Address Correspondence to Nana Osei-Kofi, Educational Leader-
ship and Policy Studies, Iowa State University, N243 Lago Marcino
Hall, Ames, IA 50011. E-mail: oseikofi@iastate.edu.
Nana Osei-Kofi
dian income of the wealthiest 20% of U.S. households
is 10.7 times as much as that of the poorest 20%; more
than 12 million children live in poverty; over 9 million
children have no health insurance; and 13 million chil-
dren and over 20 million adults live in households where
hunger or food insecurity is a part of every day.
When it comes to public education, the children whose
lives we speak of when referencing the aforesaid stagger-
ing figures, are concentrated in schools that are described
in the recent Williams v. State of California case as “schools
that shock the conscience.’’ These are schools where chil-
dren are expected to “learn without books and sometimes
without any teachers, . . . in schools that lack function-
ing heating or air conditioning systems, that lack suffi-
cient numbers of functioning toilets, and that are infested
with vermin, including rats, mice, and cockroaches’’
(Williams, 2000, p. 6). Clearly, to look critically at public
education today, it is impossible not to take seriously the
impact of class-apartheid (Darder & Torres, 2004).
Despite this reality, we see little informed discussion
class and poverty in mainstream discourse on education
today. As Bruce Biddle (2001) so aptly conveys:
Unfortunately, most Americans (even educators, let
alone politicians) seem to be unaware of the size of
poverty effects on education, and the concept of poverty
is largely absent from today’s debates about education
policy and “reform.’’ Nor has much research yet surfaced
concerned with the mechanisms through which poverty
plays out its evil effects in education. (p. 3)
Enter Ruby Payne. As growing poverty meets high-
stakes testing, in schools across the nation, the void
of a desperately needed critical engagement of class
is presently often supplanted with the work of former
educator-turned-entrepreneur, Ruby Payne. As the dar-
ling poverty expert de jour of many school superinten-
dents and educators alike, Payne travels the country
providing in-service training programs and reform con-
sulting to school districts, keynote addresses to national
conference audiences, and seminars open to the general
367
368 BOOK REVIEWS
public. Payne’s schedule is currently booked at least three
years out (Bicksler, 2003), and according to her marketing
materials, she conducts somewhere in the neighborhood
of 200 seminars a year.
I was first exposed to Payne’s work through my role
as a consultant to a number of school districts. These dis-
tricts were seeking to develop K-16 partnerships for the
purpose of increasing access to higher education for un-
derserved students. Soon after my introduction to these
school districts, I started to hear about the incredible
work Payne was doing to help teachers and adminis-
trators understand issues of class and poverty. My in-
terest was immediately peaked. This praise was curious
to me in light of the wide-spread resistance within the
education community to critically engage issues of op-
pression and domination. As I began to learn more about
Payne’s work and had an opportunity to attend one of
her seminars, my cautious interest turned to great con-
cern. Payne’s ideas about “understanding’’ poverty do
great violence to any ideas of education as a positive
force in creating a socially and economically just society.
Meanwhile, several education and social work entities1
now offer continuing education units for participation
in Payne’s seminars. Additionally, a growing number of
college and university programs in education and social
work use her texts as a primary resource to educate stu-
dents about issues of class. While one could argue that
her work might possibly be used in higher education to
promote critical analysis, a review of close to 60 course
syllabi (including syllabi for courses offered at institu-
tions like the Ohio State University, Indiana State Uni-
versity, and the University of Michigan), provide little
to no evidence to support such a claim. Instead, alarm-
ingly, Payne’s work is used in education and social work
programs today simply as a pragmatic tool to “help’’ stu-
dents “recognize’’and learn to “address’’issues with poor
students/clients in their work and internships/field ex-
periences.2
In an effort to address the aforementioned, in what
follows, I undertake a critique of A Framework for Under-
standing Poverty (2003a), Payne’s most well-known book
and the foundation upon which her work with schools
is based.3 This book does not have sufficient merit aca-
demically to warrant scholarly critique. However, the
uncritical embrace of this work by significant portions
of the education community suggests a need for critical
engagement of the substance of the work, as well as a
consideration of the relationship between this historical
moment and the conditions that make possible the legit-
imization of this work.
My critique focuses primary on three areas of Payne’s
work; her depiction of family life in poverty, her engage-
ment of the hidden rules among classes, and her claims
about the academic abilities of poor children in rela-
tionship to how educators can address poverty through
teaching. Finally, I conclude with looking at the relation-
ship between Payne’s success and the present state of
the political economy of schooling. My analysis seeks to
foreground the ideology that underpins Payne’s work
and the implications of this ideology on the national dis-
course on class and public education. While my critique
is specific to A Framework for Understanding Poverty, the
issues brought forth apply to the ways in which class is
(dis)engaged in discourse on public education generally,
particularly in the current political climate. My intention
is not to take away from the recognition by many edu-
cators that there is an urgent need to engage issues of
class. Nonetheless, the ways in which these matters are
engaged need to be closely examined, as the implications
for the future of public education and the lives of millions
of children are paramount.
A Culture of Poverty Revisited
In A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Payne draws
on work from a broad range of writers like Oscar Lewis,
Edward Banfield, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with
which her work has clear connections, while misappro-
priating work by scholars like C. Wright Mills, Jonathan
Kozol, and Luis Rodriguez. The end result is a stringing
together of worn-out conservative platitudes to rational-
ize poverty as a choice of the individual. Specifically,
her argument rests on the notion of a culture of poverty;
poverty as choice is explained as a result of the culture
of the poor.
The notion of a culture of poverty is a concept first sug-
gested by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1959, 1961, 1966)
based on ethnographic studies he conducted with fam-
ilies in Mexico and with Puerto Rican families in San
Juan and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis (1966)
claimed that among the poor, there existed “a subculture
[of poverty] with its own structure and rationale, . . . a
way of life which was passed down from generation to
generation along family lines’’ (p. xliii). He argued that
the presence of pathological behavior was significant,
describing this culture as encompassing “some seventy
interrelated social, economic and psychological traits’’
(p. xliv). These traits, according to Lewis, were a response
by a subgroup of the poor, to the conditions they faced
as a result of being at the very bottom of capitalist social
organization. He saw the culture of poverty as, on the
one hand, representing a state of deprivation and dis-
organization; while on the other hand, it had a positive
function as an essential survival mechanism.
Although Lewis tried to emphasize (however prob-
lematic) that he was only speaking of a small subgroup
of the poor and that his intention was to create greater
understanding, the concept of a culture of poverty built
on a long history of pejorative categorizations of the poor
(Katz, 1989; Steinberg, 2001). Consequently it gained in
popularity in academic and political discourse in the
1970s. It was an effective way of labeling the poor,
 BOOK REVIEWS
serving important political functions for both the left
and the right. For liberals the concept was used to jus-
tify policy interventions on behalf of the poor; while for
conservatives, it functioned as a rationale for punitive
policies regulating the poor (Katz, 1989; Steinberg, 2001).
The culture of poverty argument was subject to numer-
ous critiques (e.g., Leacock, 1971; Valentine, 1968), in-
cluding that it misused the concept of culture, was ethno-
centric, failed to engage structural issues, and was based
on faulty circular reasoning. In spite of this, it was not
long before the concept prevailed, and continues to pre-
vail, as Payne’s work reveals, as a conservative concept to
explain poverty as a behavioral psychological condition,
separate from material realities.
Based on this thesis of a conservative culture of
poverty, the perpetuation of poverty is viewed as result-
ing from particular values and beliefs held by those in
poverty, thus ultimately making the poor responsible for
their own condition. These values and beliefs, as artic-
ulated by Payne in her work, amount to a way of life
characterized by an inability to delay gratification; a be-
lief in fatalism; a present orientation and an inability to
plan for the future; a lack of emotional stamina; a high tol-
erance and acceptance of physical violence, crime, men-
tal illness, and sexual promiscuity; a preoccupation with
entertainment and humor; and a lack of value placed
on education. Payne (2003a) explains that in learning
about poverty, she “came to realize that there were ma-
jor differences between generational poverty and mid-
dle class—and that the major differences were not about
money’’ (p. 9).4 Additionally, she states that “the funda-
mental reasons for poverty are lack of educational at-
tainment and the disconnection of family and/or com-
munity’’ (Payne & Ehlig, 1999, p. 12). Premised on this
argument, Payne’s message to educators, broadly speak-
ing, is that since poverty stems from cultural traits, they
can, through the application of the appropriate cogni-
tive development and behavior modification strategies,
change the condition of poverty. What is more, as indi-
viduals largely belonging to the so-called middle class,
they can do this without giving up any of their privilege.
After all, Payne (2003a) notes “it costs nothing to be an
appropriate role model’’ (p. 39).
Domesticating Class
A Framework for Understanding Poverty opens with cur-
rent statistical data on poverty in the United States.
Drawing primarily upon data from the U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Payne constructs a narrative that foregrounds
single-parent families, female-led households, teenage
pregnancy, child abuse, children with developmental de-
lays, and the increase in immigrant children in America,
as focal for grounding the readers understanding of
poverty. Through this discourse, Payne uses the State
to legitimate her work, masking the dependence of cur-
369
rent economic and political conditions on the continued
(re)production of poverty, while situating the “individ-
ual’’ living in poverty as scapegoat.
Through seven vignettes, readers are familiarized
with the characteristics and family life of the poor as
scripted by Payne. Readers are asked to identify the char-
acteristics of the poor and to determine whether vari-
ous forms of resources, such as financial, emotional, and
mental resources, are present in the lives of the children
portrayed in these narratives. Identifying the character-
istics and resources available to the poor, Payne suggests
is at the heart of interventions that educators can make
in the lives of poor children.
Behind this seemingly innocent exercise, the condi-
tions Payne depicts function to contrast the “deserv-
ing poor’’ with the “undeserving poor,’’ representative
of what Michael Katz (1989) describes as a supply-side
view of poverty. It is a view of poverty that eschews
the reality of political economy and categorizes the poor
according to arbitrary measures of “worthiness’’ of as-
sistance, given the presumption of limited resources. In
accordance with this line of thinking, Payne’s vignettes
function to sensitize readers to a continuum of deserved-
ness. At one end of the continuum, the exemplary de-
serving family is a hardworking, religious, two-parent
family. In the instance that a deserving family is headed
by a single mother, single motherhood comes only as
a result of death or a father unjustly leaving his fam-
ily. To describe the undeserving at the other end of the
continuum, Payne plays to the public imagination of the
so-called black welfare queen. The undeserving family
is headed by a black single mother with multiple chil-
dren. She has a boyfriend that comes and goes; she is
a high school dropout, and has difficulty with literacy.
She lives on welfare and moves her family around fre-
quently as she is unable to make ends meet. Throughout
these narratives, readers also are introduced to the pres-
ence of drugs, convicts, alcoholism, domestic violence,
gangs, drive-by shootings, promiscuity, multiple mar-
riages, multiple step-children, and a suggestion of incest.
This is after Payne introduces these vignettes by stating
that “these scenarios have omitted most of the physical,
sexual, and emotional abuse that can be present so that
the discussion can be about resources’’ (p. 18).
Payne (2003a) asserts that “poverty occurs in all races’’
(p. 10) and that disparity, rather than being about race, is
about class. As a result, in many ways her vignettes por-
tray families of color and white families as equally patho-
logical, if you will. Upon closer examination however,
her equal opportunity offense, is not so equal. Through
the use of racialization, Payne adds another layer to the
continuum of deservedness; this time juxtaposing the
deserving family of color with the undeserving fam-
ily of color. The “good’’ black family is religious and
hardworking; the “bad’’ family is headed by the welfare
queen. The “good’’ Hispanic family is a deeply religious,
370 BOOK REVIEWS
hardworking two-parent family; in contrast to the gang-
banging, drug selling family. These binaries are posited
in contrast to white families, in relationship to what I call
“perceived social dependence.’’This in essence translates
into middle-class readers’ sense of impact of these fami-
lies on their pocket books and quality of life. Illustrative
of this viewpoint, in the seminar I attended, Payne (2004)
told a story of friends from church commenting on her
work, and reminding her that the Bible says that there
will always be poverty, to which Payne replied, “Yes, but
ask yourself what percentage of poverty you can afford
in your community?’’ The “understanding’’ of poverty
and its effects on society conveyed here by Payne, sug-
gest that poor families of color are a direct burden on
society through their dependence on welfare and their
destruction of communities through drug sales and gang
warfare, whereas poor white families, while not free of
pathology, are involved in a more self-destructive behav-
ior (i.e., alcoholism, drug use, and illicit behavior) and
thus do not represent the same overt burden on society.
Family patterns in generational poverty are described
by Payne (2003a) as confusing and difficult for the
middle-class to figure out. This, according to Payne, is be-
cause in addition to marriages often being common-law
arrangements, there are typically multiple complicated
relationships with which to deal. These relationships in-
volve husbands, wives, ex-wives, boyfriends, children,
lesbian partners, and grandmothers, to name a few. Ad-
ditionally, Payne suggests that men and women living
in poverty have no identity outside of gender. She main-
tains that men in poverty are limited to the choice of
either being fighters or lovers, while women are simply
caretakers. In the interaction between men and women,
she submits that a real man in poverty is “ruggedly good-
looking, is a lover, can physically fight, works hard, [and]
takes no crap [while] a real woman takes care of her
man by feeding him and downplaying his shortcomings’’
(p. 77). As fighters or lovers, survival for men means al-
ways being on the run; someone is always looking for
them, whether it is the law or a former wife. Women’s
survival is dependent on the use of their bodies. Women’s
exploit of their bodies as commodities in exchange for fa-
vors, money, and survival, Payne submits, is “one of the
rules in generational poverty’’ (p. 38, emphasis added).
Through these narratives, Payne (2003a) plays to pop-
ular imagination, building upon and reifying a portrayal
of the existence of a pathological “culture of poverty,’’ of
which a daily dose is offered as truth through the never-
ending line-up of “reality’’ television shows (e.g., Jerry
Springer, COPS, and Maury Povitch). Payne presents
families in poverty through homogenizing, stereotyped
caricatures, as stick figures lacking in any complex-
ity, depth or “realness.’’ These depictions are implicitly
posited in contrast to a mythical norm of the two-parent,
white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class family,
with 2.4 well-adjusted children, a house in the suburbs,
a red picket fence, and a family dog playing in the front
yard. Through these mediated representations of what
it means to be poor and often of color, dominant patho-
logical representations of poverty and “difference’’ are
legitimized and perpetuated. By dehumanizing families
living in poverty through a simplistic lens of selective
morality, family structure and circumstances in Payne’s
work are equated with pathology and indirectly posited
as the cause of poverty. People living in poverty are
objectified and reified as “other,’’ constructed as depen-
dent, passive, and void of agency, minus their “choice’’ of
poverty.
Drawn to these representations and arguments with a
sense of guilty voyeuristic pleasure, the “average’’ Amer-
ican (such as the well-meaning educator), constructs
him or herself against the pathological, thus securing
his or her “normalcy’’ in contradistinction to what is a
comfortably familiar, anxiety-ridden, deficit-based hege-
monic construction of the poor, continually reproduced
by dominant social institutions. Based on this depic-
tion of the poor, educators become perfectly situated to
take on the role of middle-class, primarily white, sav-
iors of children in poverty by being “good’’ role models,
and teaching these children the so-called hidden rules
of middle-class. Through the objectification of the poor,
educators are implicitly posited as the true historical sub-
jects with ability to act in creating social change.
Payne Meets Banfield: The Hidden Rules
Among Classes
The bedrock of Payne’s (2003a) work is the notion of
hidden rules among classes. These hidden rules are de-
scribed as cues and habits of different classes concerning
a number of areas of life (e.g., how money is viewed,
how language is used, and perceptions about clothing,
education, food, and destiny). While Payne posits these
hidden rules as her more or less revolutionizing contri-
bution to increasing understanding of poverty, what she
presents is nothing new in poverty discourse. Although
Payne’s delineation of hidden rules is void of citations,
her discussion reads like a re-write of “The Imperatives
of Class,’’ a chapter in Edward Banfield’s The Unheav-
enly City, originally published in 1968, followed by two
revised versions, one in 1970 and the other in 1974.
According to Banfield, (1974), society consists of
the upper-, middle-, working-, and lower-classes. The
upper-class is the most future-oriented, while the
lower-class lives from moment to moment. This, in
turn, translates into a number of beliefs and behav-
iors that ultimately explain why individuals or groups
find themselves in different classes. “The upper-class
individual is markedly self-respecting, self-confident,
and self-sufficient’’ (Banfield, 1974, p. 57); meanwhile,
“the middle-class individual’s self-feelings are a little
 BOOK REVIEWS
less strong than those of the upper-class individual’’
(Banfield, p. 59). The working-class individual “is self-
respecting and self-confident, but these feelings are less
marked in him than in the middle-class individual and
they extend to a somewhat narrower range of matters’’
(Banfield, p. 60). Finally, the lower-class individual “has
a feeble, attenuated sense of self; he suffers from feelings
of self-contempt and inadequacy, and is often apathetic
or dejected’’ (Banfield, p. 62). Exemplifying the similari-
ties between Banfield’s and Payne’s work, (2003a) Payne
describes society as consisting of the poor, middle, and
wealthy classes. For the poor, the “present [is] most im-
portant. Decisions [are] made for [the] moment based on
feelings or survival’’ (p. 59). For the middle-class, the
“future is [the] most important. Decisions [are] made
against future ramifications,’’ while for the wealthy, “tra-
ditions and history [are the] most important. Decisions
[are] made partially on [the] basis of tradition and deco-
rum’’ (p. 59). The wealthy individual’s outlook on life,
his view of destiny, is simply “noblesse oblige’’ (p. 59);
that is to say, a belief in her or his honorable behav-
ior as a responsibility of her or his social standing. The
middle-class individual “believes in choice [and that she
or he] can change [the] future with good choices now’’
(p. 59). Finally, the individual in poverty “believes in fate
[and that she or he] cannot do much to mitigate chance’’
(p. 59).
What Payne (2003a), in essence, does with Banfield’s
(1974) categories is to combine his description of the
upper- and middle-classes to primarily describe the
middle-class, while she enhances the emphasis on tradi-
tion and social relations to describe the wealthy. Mean-
while, the characteristics of the poor in Payne’s version
represent a merging of Banfield’s categories of working-
class and lower-class. What results is simply a recycled
thesis of class stratification. Banfield’s thesis promoted
the perpetuation of racism, sexism, and economic in-
equality in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his thesis
functions no differently as it is parroted by Payne in the
present era. The labeling upon which this line of reason-
ing depends said more about Banfield, and now Payne,
than it does about the real qualities of the people they
both so crudely stigmatize as deficient.
This is not to suggest that there is no difference be-
tween living in affluence and living in poverty. Nor is
it a failure to recognize “that even those who live in
the most dire circumstances possess a complex and of-
tentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is
never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims,
or on the other hand, as superhuman agents’’ (Gordon,
1997, p. 4). The point however, is that to attribute these
differences to class-dependent morally stratified behav-
iors and outlooks on life, is an expression of class-bias
in defense of elite interests and an exercise in gross
analytical reductionism. These simplistic and stereo-
typing assertions do more to maintain the status quo
371
and justify racialized, gendered and economic inequal-
ity, than in any way contribute to the alleviation of
poverty.
The Powerless and the Powerful
What are educators to do with this information? Ac-
cording to Payne (2003a), there are four reasons people
“leave’’ poverty: “It is too painful to stay, a vision or a
goal, a key relationship, or a special talent or skill’’ (p. 11).
Hence, educators have the opportunity to create what
Payne calls a “key relationship’’ and thus function as the
providers of transitional capital to students in poverty.
Through the provision of transitional capital, which in
plain language means teaching the poor middle-class
norms, the poor, Payne claims, can achieve success in
school, do well in the world of work, and ultimately tran-
sition out of poverty.
Poor children are objectified as defective individuals
in need of fixing. Hence, Payne (2003a) offers a number of
prescriptions for how educators can achieve success with
poor children: poor children need to be taught to speak
in formal register; they need to be taught behavioral self-
governance; they need to engage in procedural self-talk
in order to compensate for lack of procedural memory,
and thus their inability to follow instructions. As Payne
takes a brief moment in her work to suggest that IQ
tests do not measure intelligence or ability, she employs
a “switch and bait’’ strategy wherein she replaces IQ
with the language of “cognitive deficiencies.’’ The per-
ception of conceptual distinction notwithstanding, she
uses cognitive deficiencies as proxy for “common sense’’
notions about intelligence and the lack of it among poor
children, effectively appealing to persistent supremacist
notions deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Our
teaching, she suggests must change, because as children
from poverty come to school without “structure[s] in-
side . . . [their] head[s] to accept learning’’ (p. 119), “we
simply can’t assign them all to special education’’(p. 120).
Payne’s deficit-based claims about the intellectual abil-
ities of children living in poverty read like Frank
Riessman’s assertions in The Culturally Deprived Child
(1962), although he, like Banfield earlier, is nowhere
cited. Drawing also on the work of Reuven Feuerstein,
whom is typically associated with special education,
Payne describes the cognitive deficiencies of children
from poverty as including,
the lack of . . . systemic method[s] of exploration . . .
impaired verbal tools . . . impaired spatial orienta-
tion . . . impaired temporal orientation . . . impaired ob-
servations of constancies . . . lack of precision and accu-
racy in data gathering . . . and the inability to hold two
objects or two sources inside the head while comparing
and contrasting. (pp. 123–124)
372
Building on this characterization, she makes suggestions,
such as the following: poor people cannot think ab-
stractly, therefore they have no planning behavior, which
is why poor children have problems with school projects;
poor people have no clocks in their environment and in-
stead keep time emotionally, therefore being on time is
rarely valued, children determine when it is time to go to
school in the morning by the smells and sounds around
them. These children do poorly in math because they can-
not think about space systematically and because their
homes are dark without any contrast in colors, leaving
them void of visual discrimination, thus negatively im-
pacting their visual recall and their math skills. Prob-
lems with language stem from the use of causal regis-
ter in poverty, which leads to random episodic memory,
which in turn has adverse effects on thinking (Payne,
2004). Payne’s (2003a) classist script of conflating poverty
with cognitive deficiency and pathology is maybe best
captured in the following passage:
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 . . . [sic] 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 can-
not control impulsivity. If an individual cannot control
impulsivity, he/she has an inclination toward criminal
behavior. (p. 121)
Explicitly and implicitly, Payne (2003a) in her discus-
sion of teaching and learning relies on the erroneous no-
tion of a hierarchy of skills (Means, Chelemer & Knapp,
1991), conveniently overlaid upon the hierarchy of class-
based values upon which her work depends. By privi-
leging white middle-class knowledge and positing the
lack of such knowledge as the equivalent of cognitive
deficiency, Payne advocates the idea of cognition, the
thinking/knowing subject, as a somehow neutral con-
struct removed from context, power, privilege, and his-
tory. In so doing, she promotes the notion of progres-
sive stages of cognitive development where the white
middle-class is situated as norm against which lower-
class “deficient others’’ are constructed and must work
to measure up (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993). Nowhere
in Payne’s discussion is there any awareness that the val-
ues she understands as the ticket to success for poor chil-
dren “are associated with the dominant social class[es]
not because . . . [they] are inherently better but because
they have higher social prestige as determined by the
group[s] with the greatest power’’ (Nieto, 1999, p. 54).
Drawing upon sociological and psychological theories
that have long ago been challenged and exposed for
their simplistic ahistorical, acontextual, classist, racist,
BOOK REVIEWS
sexist foundations, Payne, in what I believe is probably
more about opportunism and ideology than an incom-
prehensible profound lack of knowledge, presents this
work as though it were something new that provides
all the answers necessary in today’s education reform
environment.
Poverty and Capital
The worldview from which Payne’s prescriptions for
education derive is made blaringly apparent in her dis-
cussions of the relationship among the No Child Left Be-
hind Act (NCLB, 2002), intellectual capital development,
U.S. world leadership, and capitalism (Payne, 2003b,
2004). Drawing on Hernando de Soto’s (2000) The Mys-
tery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else, Payne follows his lead in claiming
that the success of U.S. and Western capitalism is a result
of the use of abstract representational systems. To put
this claim in context, de Soto’s position derives from the
following logic, which he puts forth in the introduction
to his thesis on capitalism:
Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor
and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the
capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one
thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem
to produce for themselves, not matter how eagerly their
people engage in all the other activities that characterize
a capitalist economy. (p. 5)
Although poor countries are engaged in “activities
that characterize a capitalist economy’’ (p. 5), what de
Soto (2003) asserts is that the inability of these nations
to achieve capitalist success is a result of the fact that
“they lack the process to represent their property and
create capital’’ (pp. 5–6). To make this point in the sem-
inar I attended, Payne (2004) described how the lack of
representational systems was the key to why countries
like India are not doing well economically, why Saddam
Hussein was able to come to power with such ease in
Iraq, and why Russia is experiencing difficulties mov-
ing from communism to democracy! Against this world
economic backdrop, the NCLB Act (2002), viewed as an
accountability structure to measure the education sys-
tem’s ability to develop intellectual capital (i.e., an ab-
stract representational system), and thus the amount of
wealth a community is able to create, is presented as
critical to America’s “sustainability . . . survival . . . [and]
leadership role in the world’’ (Payne, 2003b, p. 4). Payne
maintains that this is not a choice; rather it is what must
be done to keep the U.S. competitive.
By using de Soto’s (2000) work to validate her own,
Payne is able to extend her domestically-based argu-
ment about the reasons for poverty onto the global scene.
In Payne’s work, domestic poverty is tied to the hidden
rules among classes; in de Soto’s work, global poverty is
 BOOK REVIEWS
tied to the mystery of capital. According to Payne, poor
people in America cannot think abstractly, while de Soto
claims that poor nations are unable to create abstract
financial representational systems. In both cases, the
wealth of a few is justified by rationalizing the lack of
wealth of the many, as a result of choices made by in-
dividuals and nations, respectively. Playing in the back-
ground are the remains of deeply ingrained historical
ideas of “primitive’’ people and ideas vis-à-vis Western
(read: advanced) people, and among the latter, the elite.
Whether it is the hidden rules among classes or the mys-
tery of capital, what is hidden and mystified is not how
we eliminate poverty, but “the dynamics of power and
subordination’’ (Katz, 1995, p. 87). Absent from these as-
sertions are any considerations of history and the rela-
tionship of poverty domestically and internationally to
imperialism, colonization, exploitation, slavery, and cor-
porate greed. Only by completely ignoring any structural
or historical realities, can de Soto and Payne make their
outlandish allegations.
By reducing education to the production of intellec-
tual capital, Payne, albeit not her purpose, lifts forth and
brings into focus the multiple and insidious functions of
what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) so rightly called the bank-
ing concept of education. As the so-called “accountabil-
ity measures’’ of NCLB (2002) produce a context wherein
teachers spend most of their time teaching to the test, stu-
dents are viewed as empty vessels to be filled with con-
tent (Freire, 1970/2000). The more content with which a
teacher can fill students, the more competent he or she is
considered (Freire, 1970/2000). When content is under-
stood as intellectual capital, which—without minimiz-
ing multiple characterizations—essentially boils down
to what Patrick Sullivan (1998) describes as “knowledge
that can be converted into profits’’(p. 5), the public educa-
tion system is reduced to an intellectual capital manage-
ment firm to whom the elite have outsourced their dirty
work. In the crudest form of this model, our children are
viewed as empty bank vaults where intellectual capital
managers deposit intellectual assets on behalf of their
clients for use by these clients at their discretion. In ra-
tionalizing this distorted notion of what it means to learn
and to be human, education is reduced to exchange value
and a path to money, void of wonder, inquiry, praxis, and
love.
CONCLUSION
In light of the analysis I have put forth, the question
I return to as I attempt to make sense of this work is
the following: what does the popularity and embrace of
A Framework for Understanding Poverty in the education
community and beyond,5 say about this particular mo-
ment in American history and in the history of public
education in this country? In large part, the parallels be-
373
tween societal changes at the time of the industrial rev-
olution, present patterns of change, and the coupling of
these social shifts with changes in education are help-
ful to understanding Payne’s popularity. Shedding light
on these corresponding contexts, Antonia Darder and
Rodolfo Torres (2004) observe that
The historical parallels between the contemporary
“accountability experts’’ in education and the “cost-
efficiency consultants’’ of the early part of the twentieth
century are worth noting. In both historical eras . . . [we
see] increasing immigration, burgeoning student enroll-
ments in urban centers, economic decline, and overt mili-
tary action overseas. Moreover, big business leaders seek-
ing to take control of public education in the early 1900s
utilized the same rhetoric of corruption and the declin-
ing efficiency of public schools, so prevalent among cor-
porate elites today, to legitimate their move. In addition
elite businessmen . . . solicited the advice of efficiency ex-
perts like Frederick Taylor in their misguided effort to
make schools function like well-oiled factory machines.
(pp. 79–80)
Payne (2003b) also speaks of this context in her work.
However, she presents the involvement of business in ed-
ucation in the past as well as the present, as necessary as
a result of “schools not doing their job’’ (p. 1). In Payne’s
view, NCLB (2002) and its singular focus on testing is
self-explanatory as the necessary and obvious answer to
current social trends. As testing was the answer to social
shifts at the turn of the century, so it must be today, with
the exception of testing in the latter instance placing em-
phasis on the system as opposed to the earlier focus on
the individual student. The embrace of Payne’s work in
education is in part explained by its alignment with the
ideology of the State. By situating her culture of poverty
thesis within the context of schools achieving “success’’
under NCLB,6 her work is posited as benevolent, neutral,
and above all, apolitical. Regardless of whether some ed-
ucators might be critical of NCLB, Payne’s work for many
comes across as simply providing tangible tools to deal
with the hand the federal government has dealt educa-
tion. It is viewed as addressing immediate realities in
schools, ostensibly removed from whether or not NCLB
serves the interests of providing a quality education for
all children. As such, her work plays powerfully to what
Katz (1989) describes as “the anti-intellectualism never
far from the surface of American culture’’ (p. 144).
On the question of opposition to dominant knowl-
edge forms such as Payne’s, Darder’s and Torres’ (2004)
observations of how opposing views are neutralized by a
variety of social agents are instructive in understanding
why critiques of Payne’s work are so scant. They argue
that there are at least four types of social agents that serve
to quiet down opposition;
374 BOOK REVIEWS
1. those who knowingly support the limits and configu-
ration of “official’’ authority within the fundamental or-
der of public schools for their own personal gain; 2. those
who are complicit as a consequence of insufficient knowl-
edge and skills to contest the system; 3. those who protect
their class interests by “playing the game’’ while paying
lip service to the rhetoric of helping the oppressed; and
4. those who consent due to their overwhelming fear of
authority. (pp. 92–93)
I would add to this, that as NCLB (2002) makes teach-
ers the scapegoats of failing schools as measured by
students’ performance on standardized tests, Payne’s
rhetoric offers an opportunity for an attractive, yet mis-
guided, form of resistance to NCLB. By accepting Payne’s
rhetoric of poverty as pathology, the focus of analysis
in relationship to school failure shifts from teachers and
schools onto the culture of poverty. Meanwhile, the struc-
tural conditions through which education and the lives
of our children are reduced to cost-benefit analyses re-
main intact.
Relying on a culture of poverty thesis to address class
inequalities in education is antithetical to working to-
ward greater social and economic equity. The unreflec-
tive embrace by educators of work such as A Framework
for Understanding Poverty only exacerbates and perpetu-
ates the education system’s historical and continued de-
humanization of children living in poverty and children
from communities of color. Instead, to contribute to the
work of radical change necessitates an understanding of
the relationship between class and capitalism (Barone,
1999; Darder & Torres, 2004). Given the complex ways in
which class functions in capitalist society, it is also crit-
ical to recognize capitalism as “a set of processes medi-
ated through the simultaneous operation of gendered,
sexualized, and racialized hierarchies’’ (Alexander &
Mohanty, 1997, p. xxii).That is to say, considering class
in the present era, we cannot look at this form of strat-
ification in isolation; we must also consider the ways
in which racialized and gendered class structures func-
tion to sort people into hierarchies to preserve the ex-
ploitive conditions upon which capitalism depends. At
the same time, we must guard against fragmenting our
understanding of class by using stand alone analytical
categories like “feminized poverty,’’ “child poverty,’’ and
“the urban poor,’’ as this places artificial boundaries on
the issues of class, while obscuring both the wide-spread
implications of poverty and the relation of poverty to the
social system as a whole7 (Wiegers, 2002). In sum, in con-
trast to embracing Payne’s efforts to “sell’’ the education
community on a culture of poverty, we must garner the
courage to critically engage issues of class as relations of
power in American society; if, and this is a big if, our com-
mitment to education is in truth a commitment to social
and economic democracy, and therefore a commitment
to the humanity of all children.
NOTES
1. Quincy University (Quincy, IL), Texas State Board for Ed-
ucator Certification, National Association of Social Workers,
National Board of Certified Counselors, Inc., Texas Association
for the Gifted and Talented.
2. A Google search on June 3, 2005 using the search terms
“Ruby Payne, Syllabus, and Education,’’ generated over 5,000
web documents from which the syllabi I analyzed were col-
lected.
3. While the focus of my critique is A Framework for Un-
derstanding Poverty, I also draw on other writings by Payne in
order to more fully uncover the ideological underpinnings of
her poverty discourse.
4. On her website (www.ahaprocess.com) Payne maintains
a section titled “Research Base’’ where she makes the follow-
ing claim (which contains striking parallels with Oscar Lewis’
work), about the information in her book: A Framework for Un-
derstanding Poverty borrows heavily from a 30-year, qualitative,
ongoing case study, which uses several methodologies. The re-
search methodology that was and is used relies heavily on an
anthropological approach. In addition, the narratives/stories of
a neighborhood are used extensively. The neighborhood that
was and is observed is mostly white; some of the individuals
are part Native American, and there are a few Hispanics. The
number of people observed is between 50 and 70. Because of the
greater likelihood of early death in poverty and the amount of
mobility, the number fluctuates. The author is most interested
in noting that the study has “ecological validity.’’
5. In addition to writing about a culture of poverty and
schools, Payne has self-published several other books that are
near identical to A Framework for Understanding Poverty with
only minor modifications made in relationship to the audience
she is seeking to target, resulting in titles such as Hidden Rules
of Class at Work (Payne & Krabill, 2002); What Every Church
Member Should Know about Poverty (Payne & Ehlig, 1999); and
Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities
(Payne, DeVol, & Smith, 2001).
6. For details on Payne’s school reform consulting services
see: www.ahaprocess.com/SchoolReform.html
7. I am not suggesting here that we are not to look at different
elements and parts of an issue, what I am emphasizing however
is the danger of not situating such analysis within the larger
social, political, and economic context.
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Nana Osei-Kofi is assistant professor of Educational Lead-
ership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University. Her work
focuses on critical education, transnational feminist thought,
political economy of higher education, and arts-based educa-
tional research.