I read this book and attended training in my first few years of teaching in a high poverty area in the 2000's. One part that is still helpful to me is understanding how what I value can be different from my students and those values cause us to make different choices. For example, many of my students have MUCH more expensive phones than me. It's not because I can't afford a nicer phone but because I value financial security more than entertainment. I'm cheap :) The book has its flaws but it helped this white middle/upper class teacher to not judge my students and their families or expect them to make choices that align with MY values.

This book probably has good intentions, but the privilege of the author is staggering and I found the assumptions/not so subtle ties to race offensive. I've worked with children in transitional housing or from very poor situations. They do not all go finding unlocked garbage cans. The book is also fairly dated and assumes most teachers are coming from a strong middle class background. There are a few good ideas but they are obscured by the offensive assumptions and lack of non anecdotal evidence.

This book was eye opening in helping me understand the influence of class on world view and values. For example, entertainment being valued in poverty and exclusivity being valued in wealth.
I am a little bewildered by some of the negative reviews on this book. Ok, the author generalizes -- so there are some stereotypical situations at play. But generalizing and categorizing are how we make sense of things and gain the tools to influence them.
OF COURSE, the generalities and stereotypes do not explain everything and everyone. But they do help open ones eyes to such things as that middle class values are not universal or even objectively "right".
I think the author is not judgmental at all. I found her a champion of coming to understand the validity of the values and skills each of us learns in the context of our family.

Required reading for educators and local leaders looking to better understand their neighbors.

Second time I've read this book. First time was about 15 years ago when it first came out & I was working for an inner city school district. The book was paid for by the district & presented to all employees. This time I've read it as part of a study group at the local community college I work for. The community college is a little slow in jumping on the band wagon but better late than not.

Wow. After hearing reference to this book so many times within the realm of education, I finally sat down to read it myself. Let me save you some time - don't bother reading this book! It's misguided and is based on Payne's personal perspectives, not on research. I now understand why I've heard such strong critiques of Payne; ultimately I think not only that is the book ill-informed, but also that Payne's "case studies" and conclusions are more harmful then helpful. It perpetuates stereotypes and assumptions. I definitely would NOT recommend this book.

I have been recommending this book for a few years, based on a cursory look through and some studying of the various charts inside. I finally got the chance to read it, and stand behind my recommendation. It was a nice complement to reading JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of rising out of poverty, and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which, though explicitly about the Great Migration, gives a great perspective on the role of race and racism in the attempt to rise out of poverty.

Payne addresses poverty from a cognitive behavioral standpoint and provides cognitive behavioral solutions. Certainly, poverty has a structural aspect, and we can and should work to change the structures that keep people trapped in poverty. In the meantime, individuals and families in poverty can be helped tremendously by having advocates who help them learn how to navigate the culture of the middle class.

Payne does not advocate exchanging one culture for another—she rightly points out strengths and weaknesses of poverty, middle class, and wealthy cultures. She simply acknowledges the fact that all classes have unwritten rules, and that not knowing the unwritten rules of another culture keeps a person from succeeding in it. She advocates that people who want to move into more financial security need to become bi-cultural, able to move about in both poverty and middle class culture.

I also greatly appreciated that Payne included a chapter on the impact of poverty on brain development and another on trauma and poverty. Both issues are close to my heart, and it was refreshing to see how she acknowledged the correlations in a kind, non-judgmental, and ultimately hopeful way.

She provided many practical tips for educators, her primary audience, for working with children and parents of poverty. Overall, this is a book I would recommend to anyone who works with people, but especially educators, health workers, and clergy.

PS. I listened to the audiobook, which was delightfully low-budget. Payne reads it herself, and at times I could hear pages turning. This might bother some people, but I found listening to her clipped slightly raspy voice endearing.

Don't give this lady your money by reading this book.
It was... Troubling. For many reasons.
I work in a school with 99% free and reduced lunch. Aka poverty galore. And while some of what she says is true, a lot of it feels riddled in stereotypes and misguided ideas. Her ideas of the middle class are laughable... For example, I grew up middle class, and she said that an important aspect of being middle class is having brand name clothes. My family couldn't afford any brand name clothes, and I lived on hand-me-downs until I was 14!
My point is, it is way overgeneralized. Her academic methods she suggested should be used on every student, no matter their economic class. Like using rubics, teaching organization skills, forming relationships. Of course every kid needs that, even if they are rich!

The thing that bothered me most was a sentence where she basically said "middle and rich class people assume poor people would change if they have money. But not everyone would bc alcoholism and laziness and no motivation."
OKAY NO. First off, she dared used the word "lazy" to suggest this might be a reason people are in poverty?! Any person in the academia world should know it is much more complicated than that.

I did some research, and it seems a lot of people are up in arms about this book, such as the organization "Teaching For Tolerance."

Not to mention, she didn't even address race in this book! Black urban poverty has many different circumstances than white rural poverty, for example. Poverty is poverty, yes, but it affects different communities in different ways.

Okay rant over. Don't read this book.

As a snapshot, a framework, if you will, of poverty this works great, but there’s a lot of information and nuances missing as well as a multitude of effective strategies that can be applied to bridging the gaps between socioeconomic statuses. As a framework, literally a part of the title, it holds up well enough to provide a snapshot of how poverty affects the lives of many and in a myriad of different ways. What it lacks is proper bridging tools to fix or help narrow the gap.

Another thing to note is that although I am sure there is an updated version out there, this one is severely outdated when it comes to demographics information as it was based in the early 2000s.

This book is amazing! Who would benefit from reading this? Social workers, therapists, educators, and anyone transitioning from poverty to the middle class. People who likely would not benefit from reading this are people who have firm biases about poverty, such as thinking that people in poverty are less intelligent, less capable, or lazy, or poverty is exclusive to a specific race.

Read the appendices, too. She addresses why some people hate this book as well as giving additional resources.

At no point in this book does the author denigrate people in poverty. She does not suggest that they should be encouraged to take on the middle class culture, but there are some rules to learn to be able to break out of financial poverty (such as formal register). The entire book is about the lack of resources found in poverty and the difference in hidden rules between the classes that prevent middle class educators from reaching students in poverty.

Good for a primer read, but very deficit minded. Did not acknowledge that students in poverty have skills that can be capitalized on in education. Gave me useful pieces of information about hidden rules and values of students in poverty, but I'm unsure if I needed it (if I had genuine relationships with students, wouldn't I learn about that from them?)

Every day at KFAI, there is one high school-age intern from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in South Minneapolis. These students are required to work one day a week, which helps pay for their tuition and gives them workplace experience. Anyways, I attended a luncheon at Cristo Rey during which I was given a copy of the book A Framework For Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne.

It seemed like it could be relevant, since most Cristo Rey students (including the ones we have here at the station) come from high-poverty backgrounds, but unfortunately Payne's book is objectionable. Understanding Poverty is based on Payne's broad, unsupported generalizations, which she says she gathered from years working at schools, mostly in the Houston area. She occasionally alludes to studies, and there are many footnotes, but her main arguments are typically supported by only anecdotal evidence.

Most troubling, however, are the generalizations. There are a few borderline racist ones (in a book that claims that poverty is essentially the same regardless of race), and Payne is obsessed with non-nuclear African-American families. The whole book, in a different context, could be a terrible standup comedy routine--i.e. poor people laugh "about people and sex" whereas the wealthy joke "about social faux pas" (the book's worldview is really this simplistic). Poor people, in Payne's estimation, have no agency (a poor person "believes in fate [and] cannot do much to mitigate chance"). Her prescription is to teach low-income students the "hidden rules of the middle class"--and she seems to think the transmission of these secret rules, which are superior to the ones Payne imagines that poor people know, is itself enough to lift them out of poverty.

Thankfully, along with Understanding Poverty, Cristo Rey provided a copy of an essay by Paul C. Gorski, a professor at Hamline, entitled "Savage Unrealities: Uncovering Classism in Ruby Payne's Framework." Really, this essay is the only thing you need to read about Payne's book. I found myself agreeing with statements like the following

I never actually found a framework for authentically understanding poverty. Instead I found classism. (I also found racism and Christian-centrism--topics for another essay.)

[Payne] portrays people in poverty as morally deficient, needing the refinement of middle and upper class cultures. She helps institutionalize the stereotypes that teachers should be destroying.

"A Framework" consists, at the crudest level, of a stream of stereotypes and a suggestion that we address poverty and education by "fixing" poor people

So, to recap, Understanding Poverty is a poorly-contextualized, problematic book, in addition to being poorly written. Paul Gorski's paper will tell you everything you need to know about it.