Ruby Payne Poverty Essay

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The middle school where I currently teach at has been putting a lot of effort and resources into a program to understand and alleviate poverty’s negative impact on education. Like many schools around the country my school has embraced Ruby Payne’s poverty training program. Ruby Payne is known in the world of education as being an expert on the mindsets of poverty, the middle class and wealthy. Ruby Payne has written many books for educators and conducts training seminars internationally that discuss the hidden languages, rules and assumed knowledge that she feels is present in each of the three social classes and how these things shape our interaction with the world. My school district has taken on a citizenship approach towards eradicating…show more content…
The spirit of this could be summed up by someone looking at their child and saying, “You are a Smith. That is not the way a Smith behaves.” Family structures are easy to trace; power lies with whoever controls the fortune or assets. If a child of an upper class member was arrested, the response would be, “How could you do this to us and the company? We have a reputation.” (Payne, R) My training taught me that all three classes in the above examples are acting in a way that maximizes resolution and minimizes emotional conflict based upon their own personal opportunity cost. The point of realizing all of this is to understand the hidden scripts at work in any organization’s requests, statements, and behaviors that may seem entirely reasonable to one class of people may be insulting to someone in a different class. Payne argues that no class “rules” should be judged but that we should seek to understand them so that we have the option of making different choices that wouldn’t occur to us if we remained relegated to our own economic stratosphere. Consequently, my organization hopes that the poverty program not only helps in student, teacher and peer relations but, ultimately, has a lasting, positive societal impact as well.
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