The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education: Utopian Accountability and Deficit Assumptions of Middle-Class America

This article was downloaded by: [Thomas, P. L.] On: 20 August 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 926038055] Publisher Taylor & Francis Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Souls Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713723579 The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education: Utopian Accountability and Deficit Assumptions of Middle-Class America P. L. Thomas Online publication date: 19 August 2010 To cite this Article Thomas, P. L.(2010) 'The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education: Utopian Accountability and Deficit Assumptions of Middle-Class America', Souls, 12: 3, 262 — 283 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.499795 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2010.499795 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Souls The Politics of Public Education The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education Utopian Accountability and Deficit Assumptions of Middle-Class America Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 P. L. Thomas Historically and currently, education discourse and policy are impacted by crisis rhetoric and utopian expectations for public education. Schools are failing, the narrative goes, but that failure is measured against a standard of success by all students without regard to the impact of socioeconomic conditions on student outcomes. Further, our educational approaches to children living in poverty are corrupted by deficit assumptions and practices as characterized by the workbooks and programs presented by Ruby Payne. Educational reform should be guided by a commitment to social reform and by a shift away from deficit perspectives and toward nuanced and realistic understandings of children living in poverty. The lives and education of children of color are disproportionately impacted by inequity and reduced practices, both reinforced by social assumptions driving educational discourse and policies that are doing more harm than good for an educational system designed to support a free people. Keywords: accountability, crisis rhetoric, critical pedagogy, diversity poverty, utopian expectations Souls 12 (3): 262–283, 2010 / Copyright # 2010 The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.499795 The Politics of Public Education ^ 263 Born into a working-middle-class white home, I entered public schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s when desegregation wedged its way into schools in upstate South Carolina—even though it had been the law for more than a decade. I attended school and played sports with African American friends, classmates, and teammates for twelve years, but the language of race among my childhood friends (when we were not segregating ourselves by race) and the language of white homes revealed that both racial unrest and racism were alive and well in the South. Even more damning was that very little was being done anywhere, especially in schools, about that racism, about those cultural assumptions. Poet Adrienne Rich has claimed that what is ‘‘rendered unspeakable, [is] thus unthinkable.’’1 And throughout my childhood we lived lives that we did not speak about frankly, as if the weight of our prejudices were not burdens everyone could see. In my sophomore year of high school, I was the only white player on the junior varsity basketball team, an ironic and early lesson in minority status that would not entirely affect who I was for a few more years when I began—during my college experience—to face my enculturation in the racist South. Below the surface of my rising awareness about racism lay the impact of affluence and poverty as well. But being a critical educator in the same high school I attended, teaching many children of poverty and a dwindling racially diverse student body (percentages of African Americans decreased steadily in my home town from my childhood and throughout my eighteen years teaching in the high school), was my true lesson in the inherent failure of utopian expectations and crisis rhetoric along with accountability measures in our education system, all of which appeared to seek more equitable schools, but in fact worked to maintain a status quo that honored middle-class assumptions about humans, intelligence, and success. In the mid-1990s, while I was in my doctoral program, I also learned that a significant chasm existed between the academic and scholarly world of higher education and the so-called practical world of K–12 education, where teachers and students suffered reductive practices—workshops and workbooks—that claimed to address complex situations such as poverty. The reality, however, is that education is about conforming children to the social norms—not the revolution that I had envisioned when I felt the call to be a teacher. Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 Utopian and Crisis Rhetoric in an Age of High Accountability In the spring of 2008, former Secretary of State Colin Powell toured the country as the very public face and voice of the America’s Promise 264 ^ Souls July^September 2010 Alliance. As a successful African American, Powell spoke forcefully about the alliance’s report on graduation rates in the United States.2 While concerns about lower-than-desired graduation rates have existed for a century,3 here Powell’s words indicate how we discuss virtually all issues related to education: ‘‘When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe.’’4 ‘‘Catastrophe’’? The political and public hand-wringing over graduation rates and the concurrent qualification that low graduation rates disproportionally affect minority children are representative of a century-long pattern of holding education to utopian standards for accountability (such as expectations that appear to be 100 percent for graduation rates) and of characterizing all educational failure with crisis rhetoric. Utopian expectations and crisis rhetoric are themselves self-fulfilling prophesies for failure, since both establish unrealistic goals that cannot be met. Utopian goals require perfection, and crisis rhetoric sparks an urgency that actually creates a perception of failure because complex problems cannot be resolved quickly or neatly. And more important are the embedded assumptions, normalizing middle-class templates, and the deficit language used within this discourse to express help for minorities. Parallel to the approach to poverty by Ruby Payne, whose workbook and workshop approach to teaching educators about poverty, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, has sold over one million copies and is used in forty states, Powell’s well-intentioned but uncritical message about the need for helping all children succeed in life ironically confirms the very worst racist and classist beliefs that work insidiously beneath the surface of human perception.5 First, let us consider the corrosive concoction that students and educators face today: High-stakes accountability, utopian expectations, and crisis rhetoric. A rarely acknowledged reality in the United States is that poverty and affluence are powerful indicators of many aspects of any child’s life. As well, poverty disproportionately affects children of color and non-native speakers of English both in school and in our broader society.6 Just as Powell’s campaign reinforces existing social barriers despite his best intentions, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act— with its focus on raising achievement, closing the achievement gap, punitive accountability, and utopian goals (100 percent success by 2014 for all students)—has codified the pervasive assumptions of U.S. society into something that may qualify ironically as a crisis.7 As political discourse, calls for educational reform parallel Powell’s ‘‘catastrophe’’ claim. Schools have a literacy ‘‘crisis,’’ a graduation ‘‘crisis,’’ an achievement gap ‘‘crisis,’’ and so on—just as we have a Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 265 teen pregnancy ‘‘crisis,’’ an absent-father ‘‘crisis,’’ and more, in our larger society. When we hear crisis rhetoric, we must notice that these crises have common elements, notably race and poverty. While using the language of crisis and a tone of concern, political and public discourse puts a mask on a disturbing stereotype—people living in poverty do not measure up to middle-class norms (norms associated with whiteness and affluence). The implication is that it is the fault of the poor for falling short. If we uncover the claimed ‘‘crisis’’ in education, we can often discover that the situation is not actually urgent, although the circumstances deserve action. A crisis requires an immediate response because the results are catastrophic; the consequences appear quickly and are irreversible. (Consider the jet that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January 2009. If people had not acted quickly, people would have died: this was an event that was both bound by time and irreversible.) If we return to graduation rates for a brief example, even those people who have failed to graduate and those young people destined not to graduate in the next couple years are not bound by time or by inevitability. We can, in fact, address nongraduates and help them without treating the circumstances as an emergency. Crisis rhetoric about events that are not crises works against a solution because the language places a false urgency on the response, resulting in a feeling of futility for everyone involved. When we act in the face of a crisis, we often sacrifice quality for time, but with educational needs of marginalized students, we can and should take the time needed to offer quality solutions to complex problems. Graduation rates are not the problem we should be most concerned about. We spend little time and energy addressing the many variables that create our dropout rates, and even less time with what often happens in the lives of people who do not graduate. When we raise any measurement to the level of our primary goal— such as a graduation rate or a test score—we risk allowing that goal to represent the more complex and nuanced conditions we genuinely seek. We may in fact raise a graduation rate in a number of ways, such as manipulating the formulas for calculating graduation rates. But such measurements and calculation mask the positive results we trust graduating from high school will accomplish. We know strong correlations exist between dropout rates and social realities we do not value—joblessness, crimes, homelessness—but maintaining a focus on the rates of graduation while ignoring prison populations, for example, is a serious failure of educational goals wrapped in crisis rhetoric. This brings us to the insidious nature of utopian expectations. Our goal, then, is not the graduation rate, but the conditions of peoples Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 266 ^ Souls July^September 2010 lives once that, or any benchmark, has been met. Utopian goals allow simplistic goals to distort the authentic aims of education. Crisis rhetoric is often set against a utopian goal in education. A 70 percent dropout rate in urban schools can be justified as a ‘‘crisis’’ when it is held against the expectation that 100 percent of students will graduate. Although this pattern of discourse has existed for over a century, NCLB has intensified the dynamic because the law has put federal teeth into both funding and punishment for schools based on complex and flawed achievement targets. These targets are tied to standardized testing that culminates in a very real accountability goal of 100 percent success by 2014 and stringent expectations for subgroup achievement, adequately yearly progress (AYP), as mandated by NCLB.8 Human realities make a result of 100 percent of anything impossible. We may seek 100 percent survival rates for cancer, but that will never happen. Doctors will always work toward that goal, but we will never punish them for not achieving it. Yet with education, we hold schools accountable for a utopian standard that cannot be reached. More disturbing is that below the surface of both utopian goals and crisis rhetoric is a cultural racism and classism that has normalized some very narrow middle-class and white assumptions about appropriate life trajectories.9 If we believe, for example, that all children should graduate from high school, we must first consider that high dropout rates within subcategories by race and economic status may indicate that the expectations of high school are inappropriately narrow. Utopian goals and crisis rhetoric send a veiled message that educational failures are inherent in the children who fail and that the norms against which they are measured are as ideal as we assume them to be. In other words, the utopian goals of schooling are merely subsets of the much larger mythology of our society that tells us ‘‘a rising tide lifts all boats’’ and that all who fail simply need to ‘‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps.’’ Robin D. G. Kelley confronts these mythologies as corrupt: Besides making dubious, unfounded claims about the black poor’s moral weakness or the cultural impact of government supports, the negrocons often begin with the premise that self-help and state supports are mutually exclusive. Indeed, government assistance of any kind—including affirmative action—is generally defined as the opposite of self-help (unless one is talking about government subsidies to industry or tax breaks for the wealthy). Their arguments betray an incredibly naıve faith in the free market to do the work of creating equality . . . . ¨ They take for granted that the ‘‘free market’’ actually operates free of racism and the playing field is even—which is why they have called for ‘‘color-blind’’ policies, completely rejecting any race-based entitlements or special privileges.10 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 267 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 As utopian beliefs, these myths fail to acknowledge those without boats (as well as those denied boats through no fault of their own) and those without bootstraps (as well as those denied boots). American expectations for success are distorted by an idealized view of the rugged individual. We teach and live as if each of us is untouched by the social and cultural dynamics that we walk in every day. Somehow our mythology implies that our cultural beliefs affect each of us only in positive ways. The race to address race in public education is, in fact, a quest to normalize all students, a pursuit of conformity to an ideal that must not be questioned or challenged. The lack of critical perspective that undergirds our current quest for educational accountability and reform will fail our children in more than one way. This failing dynamic is coming under some fire, however, aimed at an institutional and bureaucratic approach to addressing poverty that is pervasive in public schools today, pioneered by the work of Ruby Payne, a selfproclaimed expert in poverty who founded aha! Process, Inc. in order to train educators in addressing the needs of students living in poverty.11 The Payne of Addressing Race and Poverty in Public Education A chasm stands between the scholarly work debated in higher education and the so-called practical world of K–12 education. While a rich debate exists in academia concerning the ‘‘culture of poverty,’’12 K–12 educators are trapped in a mechanistic and unprofessional dynamic that reduces scholarship to ‘‘in-service’’—a process that oversimplifies issues such as teaching children in poverty to workbooks and workshops, as typified by the programs and materials that Payne sells. Payne’s approach to understanding children living in poverty is arguably the default template for public educators across the United States: Measures of Payne’s influence are remarkable to consider. Her aforementioned book [A Framework for Understanding Poverty] has sold over one million copies and been translated into other languages such as Spanish since its publication in 2005. Payne has also launched a speaking career by conducting professional development workshops in 38 American states and internationally. She trains approximately 40,000 educators a year and reports having worked with 70 to 80 percent of the nation’s districts over the last decade with the assistance of her staff and consultants.13 For the past few years, Payne’s work has slipped into our educational system without much, if any, critical resistance. As her own statements reveal, Payne’s work has been overwhelming embraced by a 268 ^ Souls July^September 2010 middle-classed teacher workforce that feels her framework to be both accurate and necessary. Payne’s essential premise is that schools are obligated to identify the norms of society for students to help all students fulfill those expectations in order to be successful; the education of children in poverty is nearly always reduced to achieving economic success, to preparing poor children to be good workers. While NCLB mandates related to achievement of subgroups has accelerated the use of Payne’s programs in schools, scholars have begun to challenge her work for lacking scholarly credibility and for perpetuating stereotypes and deficit views of children characterized by poverty.14 Even with the rise in scholarly challenges to Payne’s work, we have seen virtually no distancing from her philosophies in the public schools. Pre-service and in-service teachers are still being assigned her book and attending her workshops—and rarely is there any consideration of the assumptions upon which her ideas are based. The scholarly challenge did produce a brief back-and-forth between some of Payne’s strongest critics and Payne herself,15 but that exchange achieved little to defuse Payne’s influence in classrooms and districts across the country; however, as her web page reveals, Payne has begun to offer a research base for her workbook, which was published without such citations.16 In fact, Payne offers an uncritical injunction to label ‘‘deficit’’ children who are unaware of the expectations of middle-class norms. She unashamedly defends the call for schools to prepare students to be members of a culture that lacks critical considerations of fairness. The responses to Payne’s work, however, help clarify the scholarly rejection of her framework.17 Payne’s approach and its inherent flaws inform the larger phenomenon of utopian expectations and crisis rhetoric that we use to evaluate our schools and that ultimately drive school reform. As I noted, utopian expectations for graduation rates and student achievement are corrupted by social assumptions working as norms— just as Payne’s frameworks are. If we remain with graduation rates, utopian expectations necessarily marginalize those who are not graduating—disproportionately poor and minority children. Seeking to raise graduation rates focuses entirely on the flaws in those children, just as Payne offers lists and stories that detail a monolithic narrative of poor children. Despite Payne’s genuine intent to help teachers of poor children and poor children themselves, she at least appears unwilling to acknowledge the necessarily reductive nature of workbook and workshop approaches to complex social dynamics. The research she has added to her web site identifies a connection between her program and accountability mandates—not that her program is based on rigorous scholarship concerning the nature of the poor. Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 269 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 While utopian perspectives parallel the weaknesses in Payne’s framework, our crisis rhetoric creates an environment that is conducive to her success. A crisis keeps us rushed; we cannot waste time challenging those offering help, and we certainly cannot waste time challenging the very social expectations that drive the schools. If graduation rates are a ‘‘catastrophe,’’ as Colin Powell has claimed, then we need someone to help us now. Payne’s framework is a solution that comes in a workbook format and can be addressed in workshops. It is prepackaged, prescriptive, and, ultimately, efficient—although those qualities also serve to make the workshops of dubious utility at best. Parallel to Payne’s program matching our cultural assumptions and our need for efficiency in K–12 education, her claims also fit into the new paternalism that is growing within education, and a reform measure that is as equally oppressive as poverty itself.18 Whitman offers an argument for paternalistic schools, a contrast to the scholarly rejection of paternalism among critical educators (similar to the contrast between Payne and her critics concerning poverty): Yet above all, these schools share a trait that has been largely ignored by education researchers: They are paternalistic institutions. By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Unlike the often-forbidding paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are prescriptive yet warm; teachers and principals, who sometimes serve in loco parentis, are both authoritative and caring figures. Teachers laugh with and cajole students, in addition to frequently directing them to stay on task. The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap.19 If we pause for even a moment, as I have asked us to do with our crisis rhetoric (because graduation rates are troubling indicators of something, but they are not catastrophes), we can reject Payne’s framework and calls for a new paternalism because anything as important as the future of children struggling against the many hurdles associated with lives in poverty certainly cannot be addressed simplistically. Poverty and the struggles related to poverty are real and complex. Workbooks and workshops are artificial and disabling, as are the scripted lives of children in paternalistic schools. If you speak to a teacher trained through Payne’s method and ask about children in poverty, you are likely to hear an explanation for underachievement such as, ‘‘Poor families don’t eat meals together.’’ Her concepts are overly simplistic and anecdotal; they are also 270 ^ Souls July^September 2010 refuted by a large body of research. Also disturbing about Payne’s work is that it resonates with many educators who have uncritical perceptions of a world in which they have been raised or to which they have aspired without questioning its value. In my eighteen years as a public school teacher, I can attest to that reality for me—and my colleagues. Many K–12 educators fall victim to their own assumptions and feel powerless in the face of in-service prepared for them and programs supplied for them to implement. The embracing of Payne’s program is but one example of a much larger problem—the uncritical rush to address the crises in our schools. Thus, Payne’s uncritical and reductionist view of children in poverty parallels the societal problems that plague our schools—it is not the solution. Yet, despite a growing challenge to Payne’s work, little change has yet occurred in our schools, which are under increasing pressure to adopt programs and to document how they are addressing dropout rates and achievement gaps. Ironically, higher accountability and monolithic views of poverty and race fail all of our children for these reasons. First, race, gender, and class matter in our measure of student achievement. SAT scores, for example, reveal undeniable correlations between scores and demographics. However, Payne’s framework reinforces the premise that low student achievement is the result of flaws in the children being assessed and failures by teachers to teach those children in ways that will lead to higher test scores. If we focus only on helping children conform to the measurements, we fail to address rigorous standards for the assessment of children. We have ample evidence that standardized assessments are flawed, that disparities in test scores are embedded in the tests. The crisis rhetoric concerning test scores and achievement gaps keeps us too busy to reconsider our commitments to flawed testing practices. Second, workbooks and workshops, as noted, are inherently overly simplistic. As an educator and scholar, I have seen literacy reduced to worksheets and templates for decades, and I recognize that such a scripted approach is debasing the literacy of children, not fostering it.20 For example, Payne’s template approach perpetuates misconceptions about race and poverty in the United States: Racializing the representations of poverty means that Payne is portraying poor people as people of color, rather than acknowledging the fact that most poor people in the US are white . . . . By doing so, Payne is perpetuating negative stereotypes by equating poverty with people of color. Although there is a correlation between race and class, this does not justify her use of racialized ‘‘case studies.’’21 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The correlation between race and poverty is an issue of proportion, not raw numbers, but Payne’s work taps into the ‘‘blink’’ assumptions22 that we hold. As long as Payne’s workbooks and workshops The Politics of Public Education ^ 271 provide her a position of authority, the crisis context leaves little room for practitioners to challenge her claims. Third, NCLB has created an expectation that scientific evidence be the measure of achievement in education. Ironically, NCLB’s call for closing the achievement gap created fertile ground for Payne’s popularity—even though her work is noticeably lacking research. Educators must turn NCLB’s own criteria against its assumptions by offering a critical review of any sources that claim to be ‘‘research-based.’’ Fourth, directly and indirectly, Payne’s work perpetuates stereotypes about violence and its relation to both people of color and people living in poverty. Many who reject her work note that Payne uses hypothetical examples that are more stereotype than case study. Again, by activating stereotypes of those outside middle-class norms to educators who are very much invested in those norms, Payne fails both those teachers and their students. Violence, like poverty, is in fact a complex issue. When people are violent, the causes may be social, but if we characterize any population as inherently violent, we are abdicating the broader culture of any responsibility. Fifth, a powerful flaw in Payne’s framework is that she characterizes the language of children living in poverty as deficient.23 Payne’s view of children in poverty speaking and writing as incomplete or lesser language contrasts with scholars who see those same children’s language use as different but not deficient. This characterization is focused on identifying errors and associates proximity to formal English with intelligence. Payne’s deficit approach is one of the most damaging aspects of how we teach children—especially children whose home language appears to be unconventional. All uses of language conform to a system, but in organized cultures, one form of language use holds power over the others. While many in the field of literacy disagree about how we should view conventions, most in the field of literacy education recognize that students still learning the nuances of conventional language use come to school already possessing literacy. Sixth, Payne’s framework lays the problem at the feet of those who do not succeed. It builds on the myths dear to Americans, including the icon of the rugged individual, those people whose character allows them to overcome any adversity. So we ask Colin Powell to put his face on raising graduation rates with the implicit message that if he succeeded, then anyone can. Seventh, the framework also directly supports the ‘‘culture of poverty’’ or ‘‘cycle of poverty’’ premise24 that may be more a concept conjured out of our classist beliefs than a theory substantiated by research. One concern we could have about trusting and working from a ‘‘culture of poverty’’ perspective is that, once again, we have ignored the possibility that some agent or agents are creating that Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 272 ^ Souls July^September 2010 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 cycle from outside those impacted—instead of the cycle being the result of some choices and flaws of those caught in that cycle. Does corporate America actually thrive because a certain percentage of people are trapped in poverty? If we keep our eyes and ears attuned to describing and ‘‘correcting’’ the cycle of poverty by focusing on the flaws of those in that cycle, we are unlikely to see the forces in our society that may be to blame for people being trapped. These are not exhaustive concerns about Payne’s work; the sources I have identified have provided a more thorough challenge. But it is important that we move the challenges to Payne and the middle-class assumptions functioning in our schools to the detriment of many students from the academic journals to the actual classrooms themselves. Bomer et al. make a few final statements that emphasize the need to set aside our uncritical view of the poor—including of race, or class, or gender—and turn our attention to the power structures that are reflected in our schools: Nowhere in her book does Payne state that poverty, rather than the poor, is the problem that must be addressed. She offers no perspective that people should hold elected officials accountable for the number of families in poverty, or the conditions in which people must live when their incomes are low . . . . The success of the book and the business to which it is attached is not attributable to entrepreneurship alone. The appeal of the book relies on a set of values—a framework— that exists outside of education, and is pervasive throughout middle-class US society. Policy that constructs poverty as a problem of schools creates a large industry that consists of many more businesses than just Payne’s. Her success indicts all of us in education, indeed most of the American public, as it reveals the degree to which we use the education system to protect our own sense of entitlement to privilege.25 The solution to poverty is a historical and social one—one that must be placed in the larger context of our history and one that must be addressed at the societal level. As a contrast to the deficit view endorsed by bureaucratic responses to the graduation ‘‘crisis’’ and the achievement gap, I now turn to a speech delivered in 1963 by Ralph Ellison, who found himself accepted into the canon of American literature, but outside the civil rights movement soon after his acclaim for Invisible Man. Ellison, then, personifies the social tension between conforming to cultural norms and the nearly ignored voice of critical pedagogues: Ellison represented for the status quo a successful minority author, although many who challenged Ellison noted that his success depended on his work conforming to a status quo that also oppressed. ‘‘There Is No SuchThing as a Culturally Deprived Kid’’ Much like Colin Powell speaking about the dropout ‘‘crisis’’ throughout 2008, Ellison delivered a speech to educators at a The Politics of Public Education ^ 273 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 Massachusetts conference in 1963. Ellison’s address concerned ‘‘ ‘these children,’ the difficult thirty percent’’—African American children dropping out of school.26 While Ellison shares some of the criticism that has been leveled at Powell, Ellison’s critical and nuanced perspective is unlike Powell’s seemingly uncritical claims. In fact, Ellison’s words speak powerfully to us today. Decades before Payne’s frameworks reduced poverty and race to worksheets and lists, Ellison argued for both a complex and humane view of African American children. In his early remarks, in fact, he chastised our assumptions about ‘‘one monolithic culture . . . one which is perfect, the best of all possible cultures, with the best of all people affirming its perfection.’’27 Ellison challenged utopian goals flawed by assumptions that we treat as facts. American culture is in fact diverse, and any subgroup we care to create is a collection of unique and diverse people. Ellison also confronted the deficit thinking that is endemic to United States culture, its public schools, and claims made by Payne. He explained: There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid. That kid down in Alabama whose parents have no food, where the mill owner has dismantled the mills and moved out west and left them to forage in the garbage cans of Tuskegee, has nevertheless some awareness that he is part of a larger American scene, and he is being influenced by this scene . . . . How is his badly trained teacher going to view him and his possibilities as a future American adult? What I’m trying to say is that the problem seems to me to be one of really scrutinizing the goals of American education.28 According to Ellison, teachers must see each student for what she or he brings to our classes—not assuming that since a child comes from poverty (or is classified as this or that race), that child is lacking something we are obligated to provide. Further, Ellison challenged us to consider that some problems we face in education may lie in the flaws with the system itself and not in inherent deficits of the children. Ellison spoke from his own experiences as an African American to reject deficit thinking and monolithic views of any group of people. He explained that his view of African Americans was nuanced because he ‘‘live[d] principally with’’ them.29 But he moved beyond these points to call for how educators should view children of color and children living in poverty: ‘‘Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have. What do they have that is a strength? What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon?’’30 A profound failure of approaches such as Payne’s, as noted above, is measuring students against norms that highlight human deficits. Ellison argued against the conventional wisdom that characterizes African Americans in the South as language deficient; in fact, he 274 ^ Souls July^September 2010 proposed just the opposite, decrying the value of using tests to determine literacy. His argument expanded to include a belief that children living in poverty have strengths that are hidden by a system intent on seeing only their weaknesses—that casting a dark shadow on children is actually a culture pointing over there so no one looks closely at that society: ‘‘As we approach the dropouts, let us identify who we are and where we are. Let us also have a little bit of respect for what we were and from whence we came.’’31 As Malcolm Gladwell explores in his work, nearly all of us conform unconsciously to the norms of our society. Similarly, Ellison suggested that all individuals are at risk of psychological conflict when their true self comes in conflict with the norms of society: Dropouts can only see themselves as failures because this is the message society sends; dropouts are the problems, not the system from which the child drops out or the society that creates the schools. Refuting dehumanizing views of children living in poverty, Ellison called for humane teachers ‘‘who can convey to [students] an awareness that they do indeed come from somewhere, some place of human value, and that what they’ve learned there does count in the larger society.’’32 Human potentiality of all children, regardless of race and regardless of economic disadvantage or advantage, is an essential for any teacher, for any school, and for any culture claiming to value human freedom. Instead, we are now trapped in a culture of standards and testing that distract us from those human potentialities, although Ellison had none of that. He maintained, ‘‘I do not believe that the basic problem is a Negro problem, no matter what the statistics tell us.’’33 Again, this speech is from 1963, but Ellison saw a mechanistic system characterized by narrow forms of measurement that leave our children ‘‘unprepared by their education to live in this world without extensive aid,’’ adding: We are missing the target, and all of our children are suffering as a result. To be ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed is not the only way to suffer deprivation . . . . When a child has no sense of how he should fit into the society around him, he is culturally deprived, no matter how high his parents’ income. When a child has no fruitful way of relating the cultural traditions and values of his parents to the diversity of cultural forces with which he must live in a pluralistic society, he is culturally deprived. When he has to spend a great part of his time in the care of a psychoanalyst, he is, again, culturally deprived. Thus I would broaden the definition . . . . For one thing, many American children have not been trained to reject enough of the negative values which our society presses upon them. Nor have they been trained sufficiently to preserve those values which sustained their forefathers and which constitute an important part of their heritage.34 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 Instead of paralleling Payne’s assessment that it is the duty of schools to help all children conform to the norms of their society, The Politics of Public Education ^ 275 Ellison countered that ‘‘these dropouts . . . are living critics of their environment, of our society and our educational system, and they are quite savage critics of some of their teachers.’’35 While Payne justifies her framework by providing anecdotal evidence—teachers raise their hands when she asks who is the first generation in their family to complete college36—in reducing any group of humans to a monolithic body, she is ignoring the complexities of being human; in educational settings, deficit practices are self-fulfilling prophesies of failure. I think we may do well to move forward with Ellison’s final words in mind: I don’t know what intelligence is. But this I do know, both from life and from literature: whenever you reduce human life to two plus two equals four, the human element within the human animal says, ‘‘I don’t give a damn.’’ You can work on that basis, but the kids cannot. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.37 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 Social Solutions for Educational Reform In one graduate course, I taught a student who had recently completed our certification and education degree program. In a journal reflection addressing the reading I had my students do on poverty (including many of the sources I reference in this piece), she began discussing another course she was taking on multiculturalism. This student is a person of color who was raised by a Caucasian family. In her journal, she wrote about the multiculturalism class: ‘‘We do so much discussion of others without ever talking about ourselves . . . . If we continue to look at ‘those other groups’ to help us understand differences, we’re still just dissecting ‘them.’ Instead of changing the way we act, we should change the way we think.’’ Here, this student, with her incisive metaphor (‘‘dissecting ‘them’ ’’), is approaching a grounding for our charge for treating children of color, children from poverty, and children whose home language is not English in humane ways that support their empowerment through their schooling—whether that schooling occurs in the classroom or in their lives outside of school. Much of what we need to do differently is about us (those with power in the educational system and in U.S. society)—ceasing to create a language and action that deems any child an Other. In a broad sense, one key to rejecting deficit thinking and practices is to reject simplistic dissemination mechanisms—workbooks and workshops. Regardless of the educational concern, we cannot allow any of our professional growth to be reduced to workbooks and 276 ^ Souls July^September 2010 workshops. Poverty, literacy, achievement, self-esteem—these are complex issues that require teachers to approach them as scholars. A middle-class teacher who grew up in a middle-class home with little disruption in her life cannot spontaneously understand other ways of living. But that teacher should understand the nuances of many different ways of living and how the home life of every child affects that child’s learning. Here is where the responsibility of the teacher comes into play. In the same graduate course I mentioned above, a teacher raised the claim made by many that African American children need African American teachers. I told the class about a former student of mine who is African American and now teaches in a high-poverty middle school. She is very successful, specifically, with African American males. As they nodded, I paused and then added that the teacher grew up in an affluent home. She obviously has a context for being African American, for being a woman of color, but she in fact did not have the life experience of being poor. Her gift for teaching (regardless of the students’ race or affluence) comes from her own scholarship, her own efforts to learn the nuances of children’s lives. A casual observer of an African American teacher succeeding with African American children would make many mistakes about the dynamics there—mistakes like Payne’s about the children and mistakes about the professional skills that help this teacher succeed. To identify those children only by their race or socioeconomic status is to trivialize those children; to identify the teacher only by her race is to trivialize her profession—and ours. We must not assume all children from poverty or all African American children share some monolithic checklist of weaknesses that prevent them from scoring high marks on the SAT. Similarly, we should not assume that Caucasian students from wealthy families are succeeding just because they scored well on the SAT. Simply put, our best approach to addressing poverty in schools is to teach each child as a unique human with strengths and hurdles that are complex for all humans. No child should ever be evidence of our own assumptions and prejudices; no child should ever confirm for us a checklist of what poor people are like. And the middle-class norm that works silently as our goal must be acknowledged and unmasked. Further, we must dedicate ourselves to an educational system that is revolutionary, one that actively seeks to change our society for the empowerment of all people. We need a critical educational system that can rise above ideology and that asks everyone in power to start with self-reflection and then move to systemic critique. Instead of assuming that low student achievement is the fault of the child, we must look at the causes for that low achievement and be willing to Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 277 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 look carefully at the assumptions of the system and the tests themselves. Low test scores and low graduation rates for African American students, for example, may be primarily the fault of the assessment processes used to determine achievement, which were devised under the influence of assumptions that disproportionately serve the groups who succeed in that system. The winners of the game are always the last to question the rules of that game. Those who have succeeded in the traditional educational system have moved into society with the credentials to acquire power. Without a critical lens, the winners view the system as fair. Solidarity must be forged between winners and losers alike to step back from our systems and reconsider the rules. Many reasons exist for low test scores and graduation rates—and most of those reasons have little to do with the deficits people claim exist in young people who happen to live in impoverished families. As Gorski states: ‘‘The socioeconomic opportunity gap can be eliminated only when we stop trying to ‘fix’ poor students and start addressing the ways in which our schools perpetuate classism.’’38 While we need to address how we conduct schooling, we must first admit that our society is impacted by larger and more immediate problems that we must identify and address. Inadequate graduation rates and test scores that reveal large gaps between races and socioeconomic groups are the symptoms of an ill culture—not the problems that must be addressed themselves. That we have larger social inequities to confront, however, does not relieve us of changes needed to the classroom itself. The Critical Classroom—‘‘A More Immediate History’’ In her ‘‘Arts of the Possible,’’ Adrienne Rich proclaims: Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally ‘‘gifted’’ few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope—toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole of society is incalculable.39 Instead of marginalizing students as ‘‘at-risk’’ (yet another code word for race and class), instead of seeking to close the achievement gap as if only the students are flawed (and not the testing machine), we need to cling tightly to some of the words that resonate in Rich’s 278 ^ Souls July^September 2010 commentary on public education—‘‘literate,’’ ‘‘democratic,’’ ‘‘radical equality.’’ We as teachers also need to listen to Paulo Freire: One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.40 For critical educators, Rich and Freire speak to foundational reasons we value education: Literacy is empowerment, and individual empowerment is essential in a free society. Critical educators recognize, however, that these commitments are not simple—and deserve the same skepticism traditional views receive. If critical calls for empowering literacy become simplistic slogans, these calls are no more authentic or valuable than workbook and workshop approaches I have challenged here. What does this mean for teachers faced with a system unwilling to challenge society’s educational norms? It means that our duty is to challenge the norms and not the people who suffer the consequences of those norms—as an act of raising humanity to the heights, not to raze anyone or anything to the ground. For the poet and the educator, subversion is the highest form of respect for humanity. But our critical view must be turned inward as well as outward. Once, I observed a student teacher discussing Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘‘The Lottery.’’ This commonly taught story recounts a society willing to participate in a lottery that determines who lives and who dies; for most readers, the situation seems outlandish, shocking. But the story suggests that all cultures behave in ways that parallel the story—practicing norms that are made right only by the acceptance of that society. To those not trapped in the norm, the behavior is exposed as corrupt, immoral, dehumanizing. As I watched this teacher explore the story with her class, I was struck for the first time by what that story implies for teachers— forging ahead as we do with traditional practices and assumptions to the detriment of the humanity of our students. The people of ‘‘The Lottery’’ accept the death inherent in their lottery tradition because of the mere weight and momentum of tradition. Without subversion, we all fall prey to that weight, to that momentum. Nowhere is the seed of subversion more likely to sprout than in classrooms. To me, teachers have a calling that includes passing on to students the most complex abilities of language and the most thoughtful abilities of poets and of artists who see and feel with a depth and precision that escapes those who are overwhelmed by oppressors, by prescriptions, of many kinds. So how does this look in the classroom? Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 279 Laura Bolf Beliveau, writing about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, argues that in evaluating Morrison’s work, ‘‘students should be challenged to locate a more immediate history, perhaps one hidden in their community.’’41 This discussion of Morrison’s novel reveals a way to shift our traditional classrooms toward a commitment that places the student in the center of their own learning. For all students, then, we must commit to classrooms where students are offered the conditions of their own empowerment, classrooms where they seek and unpack art, history, and, most important, the complexities of their own lives. This is vital for students regardless of race, class, or gender. It is not our duty to privilege wealthy or white students as needing an objective classroom and the less affluent and children of color as needing a radical classroom (or vice versa). All children deserve the critical classroom that Laura Bolf Beliveau envisions: Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 By connecting African American literature to history, students are better able to hear silenced voices that rarely ‘‘come into full cultural consciousness, because mainstream American history is so relentlessly optimistic and teleological that it has become painfully difficult to articulate counter histories that do not share these values’’ . . . . Literary texts can be used as ‘‘unofficial histories’’ that could ‘‘address issues and events that are marginalized or ignored by the rules of safe politics and clear evidence that underlie official historical accounts’’ . . . . Praxis, a curricular design that calls for action and reflection, can be used to engage students in a process that helps them connect to these counterhistories . . . . Action-reflection allows students to discover their personal community histories in order to discover the unnamed, unmentioned events that not only help them understand the works of Toni Morrison but also reflect upon their own place in history.42 Freire acknowledged the oppressive weight of bureaucracy on the power of education to transform, and he also recognized the futility of utopian expectations for education: ‘‘If education cannot do everything, there is something fundamental that it can do. In other words, if education is not the key to social transformation, neither is it simply meant to reproduce the dominant ideology.’’43 He remained committed to the value of the teacher and the difference a critical teacher can make. That difference was a commitment to the student’s voice and an awareness of the silencing power of poverty and illiteracy: ‘‘One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it.’’44 Critical classrooms committed to students, to the voices of students, to students reading and rereading their worlds, to students writing and rewriting their worlds, ultimately allow us to address directly the two greatest detriments to learning in our classrooms that are 280 ^ Souls July^September 2010 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 within our ability to address: passive learners and silent students, regardless of class or race. By subverting the assumptions that both teachers and students bring to our classroom, we can empower our students through language. But students in classrooms driven by Payne’s worksheet or by commitments to the new paternalism will not be offered that voice. One of the most destructive assumptions of American classrooms is what Freire calls ‘‘the ‘banking’ concept of education’’45 In this traditional mode of teaching, we view students as empty vessels to be filled—and teachers are to do the filling as students passively accept whatever their teachers choose to offer. This assumption is reinforced by our classroom management practices; as Kohn notes,46 we have some fairly negative attitudes about the nature of children (especially the categories of children who are targeted by frameworks such as Payne’s and proponents of paternalistic schools)—children must be controlled. The deficit perspective implies that minority children by their nature resist learning and that they are the root problem with all failures to learn. Traditional approaches to education that are grounded in these dehumanizing deficit assumptions are the greatest deterrents to authentic student learning and empowerment, and they lead to the phenomenon of the silent classroom: In school, a high value is placed on quiet: ‘‘Is everything quiet?’’ the superintendent asks the principal, and the principal the teacher, and the teacher the child. If everything is quiet, it is assumed that all is well. This is why many normal children—considering what kind of intelligence is expected and what will be rewarded here—become passive, quiet, obedient, dull. The environment practically demands it.47 Compliance, as Kohn notes, is what students equate with being a good student. That requires passivity and silence. And our deficit assumptions contribute to classrooms that value student compliance over student empowerment. Language is at the nexus of the humanity of people and it is the avenue to learning, as well as the cornerstone of empowerment. Dispensing facts as if children were empty vessels and encouraging blind obedience are not the makings of an effective education. Our moral obligation, it seems, is to create the critical classrooms our students need, for ‘‘[e]ducation will unfit anyone to be a slave’’—if that education is one that allows students and their teachers to ‘‘[t]alk back, speak up, be heard.’’48 Epilogue: Diversity in the Wake of Objectivity’sTyranny As I drafted this piece, a building debate across the United States concerned the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The Politics of Public Education ^ 281 Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 This woman of color fulfills a popular view of ‘‘diversity,’’ but she is unable to be objective—is the claim voiced again and again by those calling themselves ‘‘conservative.’’49 And, of course, those conservatives are able to be objective, right? The judges that have come before Sonia Sotomayor have been objective, right? That is what a judge must be, impartial as a brick thrown blindly off an overpass into oncoming traffic. And that is the problem. Those clinging to impartiality believe in the objectivity of a brick, but willingly ignore that it has been thrown. For those championing objectivity, Clarence Thomas was able to ‘‘rise above his race’’ (admirable and necessary for objectivity) and meet their standard of impartiality because he appears to be conservative just as his supporters are. But no such concessions have been made for Sonia Sotomayor. That her view of the world somehow matches the views of those Others just doesn’t meet the objectivity standard. That is the personification of the tyranny of objectivity that plagues our schools and creates inequities in the school system that parallel the inequities of the world we live in; it is a perverse irony that schools are preparing students well for the ‘‘real world,’’ where the status quo is a soft oppression only subtly supported by the rule of law. But school must not be a place that gets children ready for the ‘‘real world,’’ or at least that for which Payne would have us train them. School is rightly transformative, revolutionary, and empowering. The quest for objectivity is a quest for that which is not human; it is a tyranny cloaked in cold rationality. Notes 1. Adrienne Rich, ‘‘Arts of the Possible,’’ in Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: Norton, 2001), 150. 2. Christopher B. Swanson, Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation (Bethesda, Md.: Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, 2008). According to the America’s Promise Alliance’s website (http://www.americaspromise.org/About-the-Alliance.aspx), ‘‘Founded in 1997 with General Colin Powell as Chairman and chaired today by Alma Powell, America’s Promise Alliance is a cross-sector partnership of more than 300 corporations, nonprofits, faith-based organizations and advocacy groups that are passionate about improving lives and changing outcomes for children. We have made a top priority of ensuring that all young people graduate from high school ready for college, work and life. Our work involves raising awareness, encouraging action and engaging in advocacy to provide children the key supports we call the Five Promises: Caring adults, Safe Places, A Healthy Start, An Effective Education and Opportunities to Help Others.’’ 3. Paul Thomas, ‘‘Crisis Rhetoric, Utopian Thinking and School ‘Reform,’ ’’ The State, August 22, 2008: http://www.thestate.com/editorial-columns/v-print/story/498361.html (accessed June 29, 2009). 4. ‘‘Cities cited for low high school graduation rates,’’ MSNBC, April 1, 2008: http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/23889321 (accessed June 29, 2009). 5. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (New York: Little, Brown, 2008). 282 ^ Souls July^September 2010 6. David C. Berliner, ‘‘Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success,’’ Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit, 2009: http://epicpolicy.org/publication/ poverty-and-potential (accessed August 25, 2009). 7. See Sharon E. Paulson and Gregory J. Marchant, ‘‘Background Variables, Levels of Aggregation, and Standardized Test Scores,’’ Education Policy Analysis Archives 17, no. 22 (November 20, 2009): http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v17n22 (accessed December 13, 2009). Paulson and Marchant summarize NCLB as follows: ‘‘The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002) created a dramatic movement towards standardizing accountability systems across the nation. Under NCLB, every state is required to develop a set of learning standards and a statewide test to assess whether or not students meet the standards. By 2014, every school must demonstrate that 100% of its students have reached proficiency on the standardized state test (where each state determines its own cutoff for proficiency). This system requires also that each school show adequate yearly progress (AYP) in meeting its goals, by demonstrating that there are improvements in the percentage of students meeting proficiency each academic year. Schools that fail to meet AYP two years in a row are deemed failures, and parents can move their children to a school that has met AYP. Inherent within the system are similar high-stakes consequences for students and for teachers. Students who do not reach proficiency may be held back or not allowed to graduate; teachers who do not show improvements in their students’ scores from year to year may receive no pay raise or be let go. These are indeed high-stakes tests.’’ 8. Ibid. For example, many problems exist for calculating AYP and holding schools accountable by that process. ‘‘However, when AYP is calculated as the change in students’ aggregate scores from one year to the next, a new layer of validity problems are added. Similar to current status accountability systems, growth models also are based on a number of assumptions. Most egregious is that growth models are based on the inference that changes in students’ scores within a classroom or school are caused by the quality of instruction or education provided by teachers or schools; an assumption that is not valid on a number of counts . . . . Comparing the percentage of students reaching proficiency on a state’s standardized achievement test from one year to the next to determine AYP is equivalent to a quasi-experimental research design that tests the effects of an intervention by comparing the scores of groups that have not been randomly assigned. Consequently, there are numerous threats to the validity of accountability systems based on growth.’’ 9. See Paul Gorski, ‘‘The Classist Underpinnings of Ruby Payne’s Framework,’’ Teachers College Record, February 9, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 24, 2007); Mark Robert Rank, One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 10. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 91. 11. See Ruby Payne’s products and services at her website, http://www.ahaprocess.com. 12. Philippe Bourgois, ‘‘Culture of Poverty,’’ International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 17:11,904–11,907 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001); Oscar Lewis, ‘‘The Culture of Poverty,’’ Scientific American 215, no. 4 (October 1966): 19–25; Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Eleanor B. Leacock, ed., The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). 13. Jennifer C. Ng and John L. Rury, ‘‘Problematizing Payne and Understanding Poverty: An Analysis with Data from the 2000 Census,’’ Journal of Educational Controversy 4, no. 1 (Winter 2009): http:// www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v004n001/a001.shtml (accessed June 29, 2009). 14. See Randy Bomer, Joel E. Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semingson, ‘‘Miseducating Teachers About the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne’s Claims About Poverty,’’ Teachers College Record 110, no. 11 (2008), http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=14591; Joel E. Dworin and Randy Bomer, ‘‘What We All (Supposedly) Know about the Poor: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ruby Payne’s ‘Framework,’ ’’ English Education 40, no. 2 (January 2008): 101–121; Curt Dudley-Marling, ‘‘Return of the Deficit,’’ Journal of Educational Controversy 2, no. 1 (2007): http://www.wce.wwu.edu/ Resources/CEP/eJournal/v002n001/a004.shtml (accessed June 29, 2009); Gorski, ‘‘Classist Underpinnings’’; Paul Gorski, ‘‘The Myth of the ‘Culture of Poverty,’ ’’ Educational Leadership 65, no. 7 (April 2008): 32–36; Jennifer C. Ng and John L. Rury, ‘‘Poverty and Education: A Critical Analysis of the Ruby Payne Phenomenon,’’ Teachers College Record, July 18, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 24, 2007). 15. See Ruby Payne, ‘‘Using the Lens of Economic Class to Help Teachers Understand and Teach Students from Poverty: A Response,’’ Teachers College Record, May 17, 2009: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 29, 2009); Randy Bomer, Joel E. Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semingson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with a Deficit Perspective?’’ Teachers College Record, June 3, 2009: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 12, 2009); Paul Gorski, ‘‘Responding to Payne’s Response,’’ Teachers College Record, July 19, 2006: http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed June 12, 2009). Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010 The Politics of Public Education ^ 283 16. See her research link: http://www.ahaprocess.com/School_Programs/ResearchResults. 17. Bomer et al., ‘‘What’s Wrong with a Deficit Perspective?’’; Gorski, ‘‘Responding to Payne’s Response.’’ 18. See Mitchell Landsberg, ‘‘Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2009; David Whitman, ‘‘An Appeal to Authority,’’ Education Next 8, no. 4 (Fall 2008): http:// educationnext.org/an-appeal-to-authority/ (accessed June 29, 2009). 19. Whitman, ‘‘An Appeal to Authority.’’ 20. Renita Schmidt and P. L. Thomas, 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted, Are We Literate? (Berlin: Springer, 2009). 21. Bomer et al., ‘‘Miseducating.’’ 22. See Gladwell, Outliers. Gladwell argues that our practices are driven by nearly instant decisions made based on unconscious biases, notably exemplified by Gladwell’s own admission that as a man of color he exhibited negative views of people of color in a test of racism. 23. Curt Dudley-Marling and Krista Lucas, ‘‘Pathologizing the Language and Culture of Poor Children,’’ Language Arts 86, no. 5 (May 2009): 362–370. 24. Bourgois, Culture of Poverty; Lewis, ‘‘Culture of Poverty’’; Valentine, Culture and Poverty; Leacock, Culture of Poverty. 25. Ibid. 26. Ralph Ellison, ‘‘What These Children Are Like,’’ in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 546. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 547. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 548. 31. Ibid., 550. 32. Ibid., 551. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 553. 35. Ibid., 555. 36. Payne, ‘‘Using the Lens of Economic Class.’’ 37. Ellison, ‘‘What These Children Are Like,’’ 555. 38. Gorski, ‘‘The Myth.’’ 39. Rich, ‘‘Arts of the Possible,’’ 162. 40. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993), 28–29. 41. Laura Bolf Beliveau, ‘‘Challenging Students to Critically Connect Literature and History,’’ English Journal 99, no. 1 (September 2009): 107. 42. Ibid. 43. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 110. 44. Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2005), 2. 45. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53, 57. 46. Alfie Kohn, Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996). 47. William Ayers, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 51. 48. Ibid., 132, xv. 49. Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny, ‘‘Obama Hails Judge as ‘Inspiring,’ ’’ New York Times, May 26, 2009. Downloaded By: [Thomas, P. L.] At: 13:34 20 August 2010