I wish that I had read this book sooner in my teacher career. It explains so many things that I’ve noticed, but didn’t make the connections. This will definitely change the way I teach.

This framework informs me every day as an educator and as someone who works with Not-for-Profit Organisations. It helps professionals answer all of those niggling questions on why those who live in poverty or come from poverty behave the way they do without judgement, opinions or discrimination. Working with children from a range of backgrounds, this framework informs me in so many different ways from planning lessons, to interacting and conversing to talking deeply with them about issues at home, school or in the playground. I now have a great knowledge now where my middle-class background had given me a blind spot, even in a socially conscious household like mine.

I cannot recommend this enough for those who truly want to make a difference and sometimes feel as though they are missing something undefinable. This may be the thing to answer those questions.

Reread this recently. P. 54 chart, Hidden rules among classes, helps me understand the differences in class cultures. Understanding is a start...

My work for today. This book was a revelation! Ruby Payne Ph.D masterfully explores the dimensions of poverty beyond money and analyses the different mindsets from poverty to middle-class to wealthy. Payne explores the realities of poverty in a very honest and relatable way and offers actionable strategies for preparing children of poverty to navigate successfully through the hidden roles of this middle-class rigged society. The barriers are real, the matrix is set up against you. It's only through understanding that one can overcome! #AlaaseX #Rubypayne #understandingpoverty #growthmindset #keystothematrix #unlearnandrelearn

So the two stars is because there is minimal value in this book. That minimal value is in the checklists which help us to look at the support systems available to students/families in poverty. But even the checklist is flawed (see below) using the term 'spiritual' rather than a more religiously neutral term like 'community.'

This book is based on a false prima facie case. It is obviously written from the viewpoint of a white, academic female whose actual depth experience with impoverished populations is at best clinical and detatched, at worse rife with racist trope, stereotyped assumptions, and anecdotal.

Starting with the cited statistics and working towards the more egregious problems with this book. The statistics cited are demographically large, relating to parental presence, education, income, etc. While they may look nice in the addenda of the book, they are in no way causally linked to the premises advanced by the author, nor are they directly correlated with the individual stories related in the book. They are everything that is wrong with educational researchers who purport to use 'data' but actually do not know what they are doing. There are no coefficients of correlation, no rigor of statistical analysis, none of that. This is less than bachelor's degree freshmen year research and presents no data of worth for educators trying to solve actual problems and impact real lives.

The next major problem with this book (and its accompanying module workshop) is stereotyping. I threw up in my mouth a bit when words to the effect that ... most of these families have absent fathers who come in and out of their lives... was presented as a cultural fact. The created conversations are blatantly racist in nature, failing to respect the people involved and presenting their interactions as less than desirable nor meriting serious consideration. They are presented as an example of how cultural communication in poverty works according to the author, attempting to lead us to a conclusion of how we should interact with our students to effect the outcomes we want to see. (that these outcomes themselves are objectionable is covered in my next paragraph).

Assumptions of cultural primacy of one over the other are the most objectionable bases of this book and its approach to poverty and education. The white, privileged female author of the book is undisguised in their assumption that the goal is to be 'successful.' In this case 'successful' is explicitly presented as middle class and monetarily affluent. This goal is apparent in the tables and graphic organizers where the views of people in poverty, middle class people, and wealthy people are presented, with the obvious conclusion that middle class is the desired outcome. This is flawed on two levels I can immediately cite, and probably many more than that.

Finding no value in the cultural norms of people in poverty, and presenting them as needing to change this culture to achieve what the author defines as success, a success related strictly to the dominant culture and its view of human goals, its view of the superiority of individualism over collectivism, its views of selfishness over community presents a skewed and non-equitable world view. This is objectionable in and of itself, but the author compounds this error further, whether through a willful ignorance or repeated macroaggressions (see next paragraph).

Teaching children and parents that they must 'code switch' sends the message that their cultural and values are lesser and do not count. This book assumes that people in poverty must assimilate to the dominant culture and subsume their cultural values. This book and supporting module explicitly teach that to be successful students must act in a manner contrary to their cultural beliefs and mores to prosper in school and reach 'middle class' (read white/caucasian/dominant culture) success. In teaching these students and their parents that their culture is not sufficient for them to self-actualize, to reach goals, to escape what the book terms as 'generational poverty.'

My overwhelming impression of this book is that it a work by an academic dilettante whose experience in impoverished schools was devoid of meaningful observation, and lacking empathy. It is the view of a dethatched observer who gets to vicariously experience poverty, uses their observations to confirm their biases and prejudices, uses anecdotal evidence as it suits them, supporting them with non-rigorous and statistically irrelevant graphs and charts.

This book reminds me of the flaws in how police currently train in America. Police are bombarded in training by the idea that they are constantly under threat, targeted, leading to the conclusion that the public - especially the public of color - is the enemy. This attitude is perpetuated by attitudes within police forces themselves, creating an echo chamber which leads to the outcomes we see on the streets. This book reinforces the attitude that all people who live in poverty are under constant stress and danger, it further perpetuates the idea that their lives are meaningless and there culture has no value. Educators reading this book are led to believe that these children are unloved, unwanted, somehow different than other children, that the lives of every child in poverty are fraught with such perils constantaly and unremittingly. I think the author would be interested in what one of the previous head principals at my Title I elemenetray school told us once in a faculty meeting, that their parents '... may have been poor, but they loved them and gave them a safe and welcoming home environment...' while this is anecdotal, like much of the evidence in this book, you would not recognize my former principal's family in this book.

You can find more useful resources elsewhere in my opinion.

The author does follow through on her promise to help you understand poverty better. She provides a lot of insights into how people in poverty make decisions that were quite eye opening to me. They helped make sense of a lot of behavior that I had currently found inexplicable. However, when it comes to "what to do about it," how do you help a child learn the behaviors that will take her out of poverty, the book was lacking. The chapters on application were nothing more than over-generalized, high-level lists of strategies, without out any explanatory details. There wasn't enough information there for me to understand the techniques she was talking about, let alone apply them. That was frustrating, since once I understood a little bit more about poverty, I wanted to be able to help.

updated review: WAIT!!!!! STOP!!!!!! IF YOU PURCHASED OR ARE CONSIDERING PURCHASING THIS BOOK YOU NEEDN'T DO IT. SAVE YOURSELF SOME TIME AND GOOGLE "MISEDUCATING TEACHERS ABOUT THE POOR: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RUBY PAYNE'S CLAIMS ABOUT POVERTY"

do you believe that ascribing to a middle class aesthetic is the pinnacle of existence? Do you believe that education is the best, most acceptable, most desired way to gain prominence in our society? Do you believe we should continue down this path?
then hurray - here is a book for you!!!
if you think people lacking financial resources automatically lack social awareness, couth, or skills that are worth noting
then hurray - you will love this book!!!!
if you feel good when you understand a group of people based on a checklist of criteria and if you believe you can understand a person based on their place in this group
then hurray - i have a "must read" for you!!!

Generalizations and simplifications galore, homogenizes those in poverty.

Payne's profound yet concise presentation of information is powerful and helpful. Even though I earned a BA in Psychology, I never knew much of this information. I appreciate her respect for people in poverty and her objective perspective on what to expect from them. In addition, the background and strategies that she discusses are useful for working with people in general, not just those in poverty; for instance, she teaches how to recognize someone's thought process through eye movements. I have already started using her insight to connect with my low-income students, and I notice a relieving improvement.

Dr. Payne offers outstanding discourse on variations in socioeconomic outlooks and perspectives. I used this quite a bit when dealing with offenders in my work as a probation-parole officer.

Payne has an uncanny ability to vet out subtle cultural nuances and how they relate to one's world-view. I highly recommend this book as a quick study for understanding the things people do - things which might otherwise leave you bewildered.

Now, I understand that there are some folks who dismiss this book as soft on research and even damning of poor people I don't see it that way and I think such detractors are really missing the Dr. Payne's point.

There is a reason for everything people do. From a sociological perspective, outward appearances don't fully explain why people behave as they do if we fail to take social context into account. Dr. Payne does an exemplary job of providing insights to meet people on a plane where they define the terms of their existence rather than attempting to make them 'fit' neatly into 'ours'.

That is where people are missing the mark; they are invoking their particular world view to make sense out of worlds that have nothing in common with their own. Yet others are put off owing to feelings of being marginalized by what they consider being labeled since they are a member of the group being described. My response is that we have to start somewhere and it is easy to criticize any body of work when we act to dismiss whatever tends to make us feel uncomfortable. My suggestion is to lay our prejudices (both for or against) the topic of study and try to see if any of it makes sense when personal bias is filtered out of the scheme.

The book is slightly academic in nature - Dr. Payne is an educator after all - but, by no means is this book a difficult read. It is quite short and could easily be completely read in one sitting. It is the kind of book that makes you think so, you will most likely be re-reading and using it as a reference book.

What you will find most intriguing about the book is its ability to accurately depict the intricacies of social systems - both within their own context - and, moreover what happens when socioeconomic worlds collide.

This was required reading last year at one of my buildings. I would retitle it "Reinforcing Poverty, making stereotypes stick." I found it to be extremely troubling.

The only reason I gave the book two stars is because it forced me to examine my own experience with poverty, but only to effectively articulate why the book is wrong. Poverty is not an easy place to begin life. I know firsthand. This author does a poor job of creating a framework to understand what’s happening within the lives and minds of those of us who have lived in poverty. Frankly, this book is appalling; centering the author’s mindset, debasing the poor, categorizing all of the American people into three classes, and then suggesting she has a deep and working interpretation of the culture within the poor. This is swill peddling.