The Promise of Payne: How Overlapping Contexts Support One Superintendent’s Adherence to Ruby Payne’s Framework for Understanding Poverty

This article contributes to conversations of the widespread interest in Ruby Payne’s understandings of poverty and K-12 schooling in the United States. The author apply a conceptual framework of overlapping contexts to an in analysis of one superintendent’s perspectives on Payne’s work. In so doing, the author illustrates how leaders come to enact Payne’s ideas as part of their understandings of equity-focused reforms, even as these reforms negatively affect opportunities for educational equity through the perpetuation of deficit perspectives. The use of the conceptual framework of overlapping contexts offers a possibility for future leaders to complicate their understandings of class inequities.