Teachers Learning Sucky Framework for Understanding Poverty

Lone Star Pa has been spending the year earning his teaching certification and, while the program he is in is well-recognized for its quality and is, I am sure, very good on the whole, he and his fellow teachers-in-training are learning about poverty from this horrible book called A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne. I first realized how bad it was when he was telling me how it helped them understand the cultural differences of people in poverty, like how they place a high value on entertainment and might therefore have a big screen TV even when they don't have enough money for school supplies. Oh-My-God. I kind of went off on such a skewed and ridiculous viewpoint right away, but Lone Star Pa didn't really like me calling what he was learning a load of crap, which I suppose is understandable. I have since paged through the book some more, though, and it is a load of crap. It basically teaches that poor people have different values than the-rest-of-us and that you can understand them if you understand these differing value systems. While it coats this message in the language of multicultural understanding, what it basically gets across is that poor people are different from the-rest-of-us; they make different choices, choices that make them poor and that explain these weird things about them. Such crap! Nowhere does it explain the societal causes of poverty, or even hint that it could strike people with values-like-yours. It explains a whole lot about the cruel and condescending attitudes that my agency often encounters in teachers dealing with students who are too poor to afford school supplies, school uniforms, proper sanitation, etc. It is just a lovely attitude to instill in the people with whom poor children will be spending most of their days. Grf.