Friends,
As we look toward program planning, student retention, and instructional strategies, I often hear comments framed around the concept of a culture of poverty. I'd like to challenge this idea by exploring some of the myths we associate with poverty. Paul Gorski, the Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, and the founder of EdChange discusses these myths and works debunks some common misconceptions about the 'culture of poverty', moving educators and policy makers away from deficiet thinking models to models of student equity.
As we look toward designing programs and instruction that meet the needs of our students who often struggle with the systemic and institutional issues of poverty, Groski has a suggested list of stategies. The list includes the following:
- Educate ourselves about class and poverty. This includes stepping away from stereotypical and commonly accepted ideas of a 'culture of poverty.'
- Reject deficit theory and help students and colleagues unlearn misperceptions about poverty.
- Make school involvement accessible to all families.
- Do not assume that all students have equitable access to learning resources as computers and the Internet.
- Ensure that learning materials do not stereotype poor people.
Do you agree? How would this list help retain adult learners? Would you change your teaching practices based on a different framework for working with students?
Sincerely,
Kathy Tracey
Comments
Hello Kathy, and others,
It would be useful to distinguish between myths about "culture of poverty" and a culture of poverty. I agree with Paul Gorski that the examples he has described in his article are myths, and that we need to attack and dispel them. However, for several years I worked with young Boston school dropouts who were raised in second, third or fourth generation homes in which no adult had worked, and in which literally everything they had learned about what is expected at work was from TV. Try looking at a TV sitcom or soap opera sometime to see what you can learn about what jobs require and you'll probably find that even when they take place at work, for obvious reasons you don't learn that you need to show up every day on time and work all day, come back from breaks on time, and that a lot of work is dull and hard. After all, television sitcoms, soap operas and many films are entertainment. The young people I worked with hadn't learned from their adult family members what employers expected and, at that time at least, didn't learn about what employers expect from what high school had required of them. They learned from high school that there were few or no consequences for skipping classes, for coming to class late, or for not taking the work of learning seriously. At my youth education and work readiness program, we had to be explicit in teaching what jobs required of a young person without a high school diploma, and sometimes the only way they could learn these things -- despite our employment counselors' best efforts -- was through failure on the job and processing with their employment counselor what went wrong. Fortunately, many of them were motivated to learn, and did learn how to succeed at jobs that they didn't necessarily like, that didn't pay well. They also learned -- what was largely true then -- that the ticket to better jobs with better pay and benefits was a high school diploma or equivalency certificate AND good preparation for success in a vocationally-oriented community college degree or certificate program. Those who followed a community college career path moved out of poverty, and created a new culture or work for their own young families.
That isn't to say that all people who are living in poverty live in a culture of poverty. Many are new to poverty, know all about what work requires of them, have been successful at work, and have not been poor. They want to work, have strong work values, but cannot find jobs where they live with skills that used to serve them well. A compelling account of this is the book Janesville, an account of what happened to families in this Wisconsin town where nearly everyone was successfully working class or middle class, when the main employer -- General Motors -- without notice, closed its plant, not to re-open. The town of Janesville is very far from an example of a culture of poverty. It is experiencing poverty created by factors outside individuals', families', and the town's control, outside of the town's culture of work. Successful working class people overnight became poor, with few opportunities for family-sustaining work unless they wanted to uproot their families and move to another state, or to become work "gypsies" living in substandard housing during the work week in a nearby state and carpooling late on Friday night to be home in Janesville with their families for part of the weekend. Janesville isn't the only example of American new poverty created by a plant closing. Consider Flint Michigan and the large working class city where I grew up, Detroit. These are examples of business economics creating structural poverty, combined of course with structural racism, gender discrimination, and some bad leadership by corporate executives and city and state politicians that made things worse.
Massachusetts, where I have lived most of my life, is no stranger to poverty created by business economics. Mill towns like Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, and many more, well before I moved to New England experienced the desperate poverty created by clothing and shoe manufacturers moving south for cheaper labor costs, leaving their employees behind in poverty. Of course, those mills have now moved to even cheaper labor markets overseas, leaving many workers in the southern states behind and with fewer work opportunities.
Although for some this new poverty can be addressed by education and skills re-training, this is a small part of the solution. If you are not convinced, read the study that author Amy Goldstein included in the appendix of Janesville, that follows the work outcomes of those who entered the community college re-training programs.
There are structural problems that even in our current "full employment" economy have been leading to increased poverty for people who are working. Full-time employment no longer necessarily means a family-sustaining wage, and in the so-called "gig economy" and may not include benefits like health care, vacations, holidays, or even the eight-hour work day for which organized labor fought hard and won.
We need solutions that value education, training and working, but that also value family-sustaining wages and salaries, high quality, affordable health care, and high-quality, affordable childcare. We need solutions for cities, towns and rural areas that are facing sudden new poverty, where there aren't enough family-sustaining jobs anymore. Without these solutions, we may see even more and deeper poverty and, if we aren't able to change that, new cultures of poverty in places where they hadn't existed before.
David J. Rosen