As educators, we are expected to have a certain amount of Professional Development hours each year, which is decided by the school system we work for. Since 1996, Ruby Payne has been a popular keynote speaker on the subject of understanding poverty and how to engage and teach students who live in poverty. Each year she speaks to tens of thousands of educators to teach them how to “understand the dynamics that cause and perpetuate poverty” (Ahaprocess). The problem, however, lies within Payne’s self-proclaimed expertise, the teacher-reader she attempts to engage along with the biases they bring into their classroom, the “culture of poverty” she continually refers to, the “hidden rules” she believes each socioeconomic group has, and the language registers she considers causes behavioral problems in the classroom. Sadly, through her book “A Framework”, Payne attempts to ally herself with educators with sweeping generalizations and negatives stereotypes of students who live in poverty.
In the article “What We All (Supposedly) Know About the Poor: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ruby Payne’s “A…show more content… Within these classes she says the middle-class makes up the majority of the population at 88%. As states “She does not take into account 40% being working class.” Thus far there is not a sociologist or anthropologist who back up her socioeconomic breakdown. In fact, Payne does not give a source from which she ascertained her information. Along with these mentioned, she concludes that schools and businesses operate on the middle-class norms and use the “hidden rules” exclusive to the middle-class. She tells educators that we must understand our students’ “hidden rules” and teach them the rules that will make them successful at school and work. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the school to fix the students in poverty and to bring them to the middle-class way of