September 1, 2001

GIVING POOR CHILDREN TOOLS FOR SCHOOL SUCCESS

If we could clone Ruby Payne, she could lend her insight on education reform to twice as many schools looking for effective ways to help at-risk students succeed.

That's how Colorado Gov. Bill Owens introduced Payne Wednesday to a group of educators and officials from around the state. Her topic was how poverty affects children's cognitive development, and what that implies for their prospects in school.

Sounds pretty abstract? Her point exactly.

Middle-class parents, often without conscious deliberation, teach their children their own ways of understanding reality, of organizing the world into abstract categories. Poor parents (though not invariably or exclusively) typically do not. And since school is a middle-class sort of place, poor children often struggle to fit in without understanding why they don't. They don't know the ``hidden rules'' of their new environment, the expectations of dress and language and behavior that affect how people perceive them. Hidden rules, by definition, are the ones nobody talks about.

Payne told a story on herself to illustrate the point. She was once asked to a very chichi luncheon with a lot of very rich women, and -- not knowing the hidden rules of their class -- brought a casserole (and even bought a pretty pottery bowl especially to transport it).

The hostess looked at her as if she were something glimpsed crawling in a wastebasket. ``Put that in the kitchen,'' she said with distaste.

The language middle-class parents use with their children is typically richer in context and more elaborated than the language poor parents use with theirs (whether the terms refer to education or income, or simply reflect that the two tend to go together, is not germane to the discussion).

A poor child might be told bluntly ``No hitting!'' -- a clear directive, but not particularly illuminating, especially if delivered with a slap.

A middle-class child commonly gets a lecture.

``No, no, darling, in this family we don't hit. We don't resort to violence, because that's never a good solution. Let's think of other ways to solve your problem.''

God, I can almost hear myself.

Look at all the messages encoded in that miniature lesson. A hidden rule: Our kind of people don't hit, so people who do aren't our kind.

The concrete action of hitting is a member of an abstract category called violence. Judgments about concrete actions are based on the categories they belong to. When you need to solve problems, you don't just react; you think and plan and consider alternatives and their likely consequences.

Is it stereotyping poor children to say they don't always learn at home what they need to succeed in school?

Perhaps, but that can't be an excuse for failing to provide what they need. If children come to school hungry because they don't get enough to eat at home we don't sit around agonizing over whether signing up for the free lunch program will stigmatize them; we feed them.

If they don't get enough teaching at home, we teach them.

And it's not necessary to separate children by class to teach this way; if children already have these intellectual frameworks in place, they suffer no harm from having them reinforced.

Payne was particularly harsh on constructivism, the dominant ideology in schools of education. That's the idea that people learn things by constructing mental models of them -- so far, so good -- but furthermore that teachers shouldn't explain to children how the mental models ought to look, that it is somehow damaging to their development.

Sometimes children get the models wrong. Sometimes they don't even realize forminh models is what they're supposed to do, and nobody tells them explicitly. This doctrine is particularly cruel to children who arrive at school without adequate preparation.

That's why highly scripted pedagogies such as direct instruction -- which are anathema in most teacher preparation programs -- are more effective in narrowing achievement gaps than the highly regarded progressive, child-centered methods.

Payne raises issues that many educators would rather not confront. She's worth listening to, even if there's only one of her.

(681 words)