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Plenary Session

Poverty’s effects on education go beyond money

Kentucky School Advocate

March 2018

By Madelynn Coldiron
Staff writer

If you thought that monetary resources are the only thing keeping people from moving out of poverty, Bethanie Tucker suggests that you think again.

“It’s not necessarily true” that anyone can make it out of poverty, she said during the plenary session at KSBA’s March 2–4 annual conference. “We need more than just money. If we have other resources, we can succeed.”

Tucker, an education consultant and author, described for school board members, superintendents and others the ways in which their students can be held back in life by a lack of many kinds of resources. Tucker works with Ruby Payne’s aha! Process, Inc.; Payne is considered a national authority in the relationship between poverty and education.

Tucker listed nearly a dozen types of resources that can influence poverty (see chart), zeroing in on several of them to illustrate the gap in achievement between resourced and under-resourced students – and how having some of those resources can offset the effects of a lack of money that may hold them back.

Under-resourced students may not know how to plan or organize or focus, placing them at a disadvantage. “We have students who fail projects because they can’t find their notes,” she said. “These are the reasons we have students who are struggling. It has nothing to do with intelligence. And typically, it’s your student whose parents are overwhelmed by poverty, who might have fewer opportunities to learn these skills.”

Raised in poverty, Tucker frequently used her own experiences to illustrate her points, to sometimes hilarious effect, and sometimes poignant effect. She said she made it out of poverty because she had some of those other, nonmonetary resources. “Money is one resource, but we need more than just money. And if we have other resources we can still succeed,” she said.

“If you know a student who is struggling, we might think, ‘I can’t give them money’ – that’s OK, we don’t have to. We can develop one of the other resources for that student.”

Hidden rules
Among those resources is a knowledge of what Tucker calls “hidden rules,” which are the unspoken cues and habits of a group. If a person does not know these rules, relationships can be broken, Tucker said.

“There are hidden rules that stem from poverty and middle class,” she said. “Are the hidden rules of middle class sometimes different from the hidden rules of poverty? If I grow up in poverty and I walk into a middle class environment I might not know what the rules are. There are hidden rules about most everything we do every day.”

Those rules can revolve around food, humor, strength, possessions, noise level, physical contact, time and education, among others. For example, a child raised around off-color humor may not realize in a different setting that the joke is in poor taste. A student whose circumstances define strength as physical prowess may not understand that fighting in school is not an appropriate way to demonstrate that. Similarly, some students are loud in class because they have to be loud at home to get attention.

“Who is to say that one environment is of more value than the other?” Tucker asked. “I’m not saying one set of rules is better than another – they’re just different.” She added that we need to understand the “whys” behind people’s behavior to help us build relationships with them.

But an important takeaway about this for schools, she said, is “We cannot equate a knowledge of hidden rules with intelligence.”

Other resources
Support systems are a resource. “Do you know that we have some students in your schools and schools in Virginia where students do not have a support system? Would you be here if you didn’t have some kind of support system?” Tucker asked.

Motivation and persistence are resources. “We were all born motivated,” Tucker said. Some students have been raised in environments that enhance their motivation to achieve, but some spent early years in environments that thwarted this. “The good news is we can do something about it – it is malleable,” she said.

Language also can be a resource, with language styles that include frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate. Students communicate in a casual register and teachers can demonstrate how the same message would sound in a formal register, which may help them in the real world. “They don’t know it is inappropriate until someone tells them,” Tucker said.

Similarly, a student whose parents don’t have much time for them will relate a story telling the most important element first – which could be confusing – instead of chronologically. And they sometimes “talk back” as a way of showing they are listening without meaning to be disrespectful.

Tucker issued a caveat to her outline, however, noting that her work is not meant to stereotype people. It is based on patterns, she said, “and all patterns have an exception.”