week in which we discussed the many ways that poverty effects education and ways that we can work to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty and how education provides one of the avenues that individuals can really move toward as far as and the school environment and moving people out of poverty well what schools really do is they give you two two things that particular in addition to relationships they give you language and they give you the ability to live in a representational world let me explain what i mean what happens is i'll give you this story one of the women in this neighborhood pi poverty i studied she got a checking account she writes started writing checks they were bouncing everywhere i said no whoa you can't write checks like that she said ruby they gave them to be some use them i said no they represent money but they're not cash and so what happens when you get educated you live in this rule that represents things on paper and on computers ok ok so you don't have that very much in poverty because everything is a concrete reality when it's an extreme poverty ok there's very little paper in the home with writing on it except for groceries ok the whole concept that you would see checking accounts thirty percent of adults in poverty do not have a checking account so there's just lots of things you don't know and you don't have that paper to represent it and you can sit around the world it's true around the world one of the interesting things about iran when they had their  big earthquake people wouldn't leave the rebels of their homes because that was the only proof they had that was there was right so one of the things that happens is you live in this world and you learn that at school and we have language the helps  negotiate that world and that's not the specificity of language isn't there one study they did in the university of missouri kansas city they were tape recorders in homes by economic class and what they found children between the ages of one and three they did not in three years they heard thirteen million words told in a in a working class household they had twenty six million words now these are not different words these are total ok but in a professional household that some level of education beyond high school they heard forty five million words and they found that a three year old in a professional household has more vocabulary dulled in a welfare household so one of the things is you have you when you go in for a job interview if you go into science that none jancis really you don't have a job but you don't get that you don't get the job either but if you're not poverty neighborhood and you speak that kind of language you'll be left out of the room ok so you have to be able to move back and forth and the language you have to have for school is not there so what we say when i work with schools is this to survive in poverty you have to be able to be very sensory very reactive because it's a crisis driven environment ok and nonverbal you pay a lot of attention and nonverbal because they tell you a person's intent  him trouble you let me know and i'll take care of him for you because they're going to protect you because they have decided that your intent is good right and that they will like you and they'll work for you ok but to survive in school and computers and you have to be able to play em it's a very abstract world as opposed to very concrete world and you have to plan as opposed to react well what we do is we take students who are really really just for example the test if environment is such a big factor right if we took a student from you know a family that has the resources versus a student who's coming straight out of poverty switched their vibrant at the earliest ages ok growing up in different households what would the effect of the research is this the research is that it would depend on the child in this way there is actually a genetic marker they call the arc and then the line marker yes but if you have that marker you're like an orchid in your environment the environment really severely significantly shapes you like orchids have to have a certain environment to thrive but if you don't have that marker then you're like a da briefly briefly you know where you know come from there are some yeah standardized test questions tend to be looked at for racial bias but not for economic bias in their unbelievably biased for example this was a question i was on the texas state assessment looking for a third graders describe your closet in detail describe because it detail number one that assumes you have a closet right there you're not homeless they you know  and a tire ok make a swing well that assumes number one that you've seen a tire swing it assumes number two that you've seen tools seumas number three you actually saw somebody put something together with tools one of things you don't have in poverty generational poverty is tools because they're so expensive you know a few tools to fix the car but that's it ok and you use great duct tape a lot ok just like we all do but you use a more because it's a tool but the bottom line is communities how can we improve achievement at low income school communities you know what can we do but we do that just as a you know school district or as a state but nationally what can we do you know powers he was what can we do to prove things well policy was first of all we need to get rid of this cocky cookie cutter of diploma ok ok i like what george is doing georges got last year of the year before they went to a program now where they  have a choice for twenty one different diplomas ok so that you can really develop your talent and your expertise in things you're really interested in in addition george is doing this if you graduate from high school in georgia they have set up twenty different centers around the state and they will give you one free year of technical training in anything that you'd like to learn and free college it's a pre college slot they're putting in there so any kind of technical trade or any kind of technical training that you want to do in other words their thinking is you can get the advanced education you'll have a skill with which to choir the money to do that ok another thing we need to do as we look across nationally you know we need to look at how we actually educate as opposed to test children i don't know about i say i'm in almost every rate and i can tell you that many states spend forty days a year testing their children well i only have one thing to say about that you don't make a big fat by way of life ok but the bottom line is if you're testing all the time you're not teaching the the next thing we need to do is we need to their needs to be mutual respect there needs to be discipline you have to teach the students the hidden rules school so they can serve live there so they can survive in the work world they'll tell you i don't like those rules  and then we do a lot of tools to help them bridge that gap between the concrete in the abstract there's a lot of very specific tools to use to get them there is there a need to have greater also  earlier last week the great emphasis of literacy skills but also an effort you know to bolster early childhood because everything that really happens happens in the primary years right that's a key issue in early childhood in the other thing we're doing more and more as we work across united states we're working with whole communities ok one of the things we're finding is that schools are reflection of the community you have an educated community you have a school that is very very a school district that's very driven to educate their children ok and we are finding that the stability of the community has a lot to do with disability of the school i'll just tell you and i sat here sure one of the things you'll see in schools in communities that are unstable i did school accreditation for a while and i can tell you point blank i can tell you just about everything about a school by reading their board minutes for thirty minutes ok and here's what you look for you're looking for stability indicators and here's what you look for how long were there meetings and how frequent the longer the meetings the more frequent the more dissension on the board for a second look how many split votes they had four three three four the third thing we look at how much time they spend in executive session closed doors ok right means are cussen at each other be on the doors and then i can tell you what typically happens within one year they have discipline problems because the ministers won't take things to the board because they don't know if they're going to be backed within two years they have financial problems or three finding is that as the community understands social economic class issues in the biases one of the reasons communities don't function very well as they believe that people in poverty are needy deficient and we have to tell what to do etc but there are a lot of school districts and communities where you see you know see parents there back to school nights you know it's a big interest in the schools you see but it's failing every year how do we take an interest i we do two things ok the first thing we do is i get a program called give me head to get my world it's a twelve lessons that we ask that adults in poverty we go to and it's about them it's not about their children w problems we teach them about we tell them they're a problem solver they have to be so we give them information we just don't think they have the same information other people have so we keep talk about budgets we talk about the resources the community we there c hidden roles what i say language issues this is why you don't get to here's what happened on this job we talk about resources they analyze other people's resources they analyze their own resources then they analyze community they we took we have a whole chapter on predators exploitation how that happens and then they make a future story for themselves what is have we fifteen thousand adults in the united states have done that and what we find over and over again it totally changes how they interact with schools they'll say i was talking to a grandmother in memphis she said ruby avarice my two sons i had no idea they talk to each other about college the chairman future story with them that you ask them about their homework and i just didn't even know you did that but she said now i'm raising my two grandsons and says i'm doing all that and she said i'm fifty i'm going back to college myself stickin to community college class so the second thing we do is we work with institutions and adults and community who are resourced and we say here's the reality of poverty right now what are the barriers in your community ok and how does it work so far he's given examples of success where you've had y we've one community in south bend indiana they had their college and the hospital got together they wanted to train women from poverty how to be nurses in the hospital  they said if you go to school we'll hire you they did that except that after they are them eighty percent of them quit within two months or that they didn't know they had rules a work ok you travel the rules so they added that component about get ahead here they had roles here is the language you use here's how this person is thinking you know here's this doctors and wealth this cell he's thinking about this you know and because what he rules and wealth is details make or break you but in poverty you don't pay attention to details you're into survival but that means well they get a nursing student inch that's just that doctor right he's about to have a heart attack because those details were followed know you can't give capacity if you don't have the understanding yourself so what we do is we teach adults about themselves and then they in turn give that capacity to their children it's good so in then as the communities work together and we start having dialogues in the second thing we say for communities if you want to have really good community policy you know you need to have people from poverty at the table you make decisions about them all the time but you never include that was part of the this is not a process right and then you wonder why your policies don't work we had one farm in mississippi after hurricane katrina they went they got a government grant to build housing low income housing and they wanted us to come to get they had with people moved into those houses the deal was you paid ten years the house was yours but we said well we would like to work with you but we won't unless you bring people from poverty to the table and show  plans ok they said we won't do that we said then we won't work with you so they decided they wanted it so they brought these three women who had been through get ahead and knew they had roles of metaclass  welfare and the women said well you know this could be a problem for you because you need to think about this but what about this what will happen when this happens and you're right in the middle of the meeting they redid their whole business plan  you just if people are capable of it you can't expect them to do it right and so what happens is we don't ask because i give you one more example baytown texas they had us cool off high poverty school on toxic was losing into the playground ok yeah well the parents were livid as well they should have been ok with school board not knowing this in roles set up a board meeting and probably gave you five minutes to talk and it was televised what they didn't understand is that first of all big meetings are never trust in poverty there's a distrust of institutions right number two that there's going to be some entertainment there so here's what happened they did their speech they cussed out the board members and then when they were done they'd go wave to the t well the board members were livid ok and they said we're not working with them anymore we'll just decide what will happen and then the people in the high poverty neighborhood live it because they said they don't care about us they didn't listen a thing we had to say and i said why didn't you do coffee klatches in the neighborhood you could have gotten much better information or you could have built relationships you could have chosen one or two individuals to report to the board  and others about you know overcoming early obstacles for poverty those who are in poverty you know to have access to education well one i think you have to recognize the strengths that you get when you're raised in poverty you have unbelievable strength right and they help you survive things that other people dance well we had one young man in texas who the year is come he had been coming across from mexico without papers it survived a snakebite thirty days in the desert rough times no water and he had a teacher come up to him and out for some small insignificant thing ok he went ballistic he said i can survive think she can survive how dare she talk to me that way so the first thing i' say is there's a strength there the second thing is we look at how we build relationships of respect the third thing i'm a strong proponent of hold their feet to the fire give them high expectations insistence but give them support show them how to do it on paper shows in the tools they need to survive that paper environment ok and with the fourth thing then is give them a future story as you look at institutions how do you keep track of children how do you know their resource base because interventions won't work if they're based on a resource a student doesn't have so how do you make that how do you make your interventions actually the eighty twenty rule ok ok keep track of the twenty percent that are having the most difficulty and at the community level then we start looking at things like policies how do your policies work how do you like for example student failed high school algebra ok the only way that he or she can make up that credit is summer school where they have to drive in other words what if you don't have a vehicle how what are the opportunities to actually what are the barriers to actually then succeeding in making this happen what we know is a lot of dropouts occur the last half of the sophomore year because they realize that a they're good they're way behind their peers they can get caught up and b they don't have the resources to get caught up and we look at that and boys then i don't have time to talk about boys well we do really our approach to males is very very  now let me just say eighty five percent of educators are female fifty percent of the population of the student population just male but seventy five day two percent of the kids in special ed are male higher it one you rack up debt and number two you don't know how to negotiate the institution and number three you end up taking a lot of remedial courses typically ok so working with tyra on that number two we're looking at health care there's huge disparities the research is basically if you're an educated you have much much lower health outcomes right even when there's equal access we're looking  at business environments and then we're building these bridges communities how as a community there is a guy ali of california paul saffo is still for the human future he says this in the future communities will either be feral in other words they'll have been domesticated go back to the wild or they'll be thriving in what we say to communit and you allow yourself to be more and more fragmented the disparity girl you will become and the only way to keep that from happening is to build that social capital get those educational opportunities out there to build resort help people build build their own resource base well it's a good way to end the show  for those you haven't read dr payne primary book please go out there a framework for understanding poverty please go out there get it and her new book is out now it's from understanding poverty to developing human capacity it's in the bookstores right now it's in barnes and amazon dot com just go online go get it and it's a great read you'll enjoy it and for those of you in poverty or out of poverty please read this book you know will make it available in our office and in our libraries and you can just go to public library pick it up but i want to thank ruby for coming on and spending an hour with us talking about you know the great great need to try to bridge these gaps and try to really reach out to everyone so that and it's good know that you're doing good things and i wish you much success with a ha and you know personally and heard you got a gauge recently so congratulations and good luck in the days ahead it's very nice very nice