Ruby Payne and her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty are standard fare in multicultural education classes, school staff development workshops, and the general educational milieu. But an analysis of her work, particularly from an equity and social justice perspective, reveals a steady stream of assumptions, stereotypes, and misperceptions which may actually contribute to classist policy and practice instead of creating an equitable learning environment for students in poverty. The purpose of this essay is to uncover these assumptions, stereotypes, and misperceptions by exploring three themes in Payne’s work: (1) a failure to consider systemic class inequities in schools, (2) a reliance on the cultural deficit perspective; and (3) fundamentally conservative underlying values.

A response to Payne's response. The author states that Ruby Payne’s identification of economic pragmatism as her theoretical lens and her connecting argument that this lens instructs her to focus squarely on the “practical” are telling indicators that largely support his critique of her work.

Since its popularization in the 1990’s, the term “white privilege” has become, perhaps, the central focus of “diversity” and “multicultural” education discourses. Although the concept can be a critical component of understanding and undermining racial hierarchies in schools, it has been co-opted (largely by white scholars and from scholars and activists of color) and often used in overly-simplistic ways. I discuss, for instance, the enforcement of dialogic controls in conversations about white privilege, and particularly in white educator caucus dialogues, that disallow consideration for intersecting oppressions, including economic injustice, thereby ignoring tremendous differences in access to privilege, even among white anti-racist educators. As a result, the popular “white privilege” discourse in education appears to be stuck in a state of arrested development that actually further privileges white keynoters and consultants who have built economically solvent careers by writing and speaking about it, sometimes without acknowledging how their privilege operates differently from that of white people who do not enjoy the leisure time or resources to write essays about white privilege. I argue that these complexities must be explored more earnestly, especially by white people in the education milieu, including me, who have strengthened our privilege through an increasingly profitable white privilege “industry.”