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What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of Conceptualizations of Deficit Thinking and Implications for Scholarly Research

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Although deficit thinking has existed for well over a century (Menchaca, 1997), scholarly analyses of it have become increasingly common over the last two decades. In general, deficit thinking [1] holds students from historically oppressed populations responsible for the challenges and inequalities that they face (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009; Haggis, 2006; McKay & Devlin, 2016; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001; Valencia, 1997, 2010; Weiner, 2003). Overall, these perspectives serve as tools that maintain hegemonic systems and, in doing so, fail to place accountability with oppressive structures, policies, and practices within educational settings.

Over the last decade, scholars have utilized the concept of deficit thinking in at least three different ways, contributing to growing confusion and misinterpretation within this literature. First, the vast majority of scholars engaging deficit thinking in their work define it as a blame the victim way of thinking that attribute students’ failures to their individual, family, or community traits, and utilize this definition throughout their analyses (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009; McKay & Devlin, 2016; Haggis, 2006; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001; Valencia, 1997, 2010; Weiner, 2003). Second, a handful of researchers cite similar definitions of deficit thinking and highlight the ways in which these views blame the victim but then go on to suggest that deficit thinking might be sufficiently characterized by discussion of “unfavorable conditions,” the existence of “environmental” challenges, or racial disparities in educational outcomes (Banks, 2014; Poon et al., 2016). Finally, several researchers apply the concept of deficit thinking in their analyses without explicitly defining it (Cooper, Cooper, & Baker, 2016; Corcoran, 2015; Hardy & Woodcock, 2015; Humphries, 2013).

Given these disparate applications, it might be difficult to ascertain what actually constitutes deficit thinking in scholarly circles. For example, we have heard stories about emerging scholars’ research being rejected from journals because it represents deficit thinking, even when their work appears to be anti-deficit in nature. We have also mentored emerging scholars who experience angst from fear that their work might be perceived as promoting deficit thinking. Moreover, we have mentored doctoral students who were, in fact, engaging in deficit thinking and ultimately worked to shift their dissertation to be anti-deficit. In any of these examples, scholars might experience confusion about what represents deficit thinking and the best way to move their research forward using anti-deficit approaches.

Much remains to be learned about deficit thinking, and it is likely that analyses in this area will increase in the coming decades as scholars aspire to produce more critical research. For these reasons, scholars should be able to identify key elements of deficit thinking and know how to analyze, critique, and apply anti-deficit framing accurately and constructively. Doing so would not only maximize appropriate application of anti-deficit frames but also help readers understand the difference between using deficit lenses and critiquing deficit thinking for the purposes of producing critical research. Furthermore, learning about and challenging deficit thinking to inform critical research can minimize the likelihood that such concepts would be misunderstood in ways that devalue equity-oriented research. This research brief is designed to clarify key elements of and offer implications for future scholarly research on deficit thinking.

Purpose and Method

We conducted a review of literature that focuses analysis primarily on the concept of deficit thinking. Our focus was not on the larger body of literature that mentions deficit thinking. Rather, our intent was to understand how scholars who are fully engaging these concepts in their work conceptualize and define them. Although scholars have previously outlined characteristics of deficit thinking (Valencia, 1997), our primary concern was the key elements of deficit thinking that manifest in critiques of it. These include, but are not limited to, critiques of how discourses related to achievement gaps, students of color, people in poverty, and students in special education perpetuate deficit ways of thinking (Banks, 2014; Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009; Chambers & Spikes, 2016; Gorski, 2016).

We utilized Google Scholar to gather literature for our analysis. We limited the inclusion of literature to papers that mentioned “deficit,” as well as key terms related to educational outcomes (i.e., education, success, achievement, attainment, or academic performance), in their titles. The search generated 44 publications that had been published over the last 20 years. It is important to note that, although much of this literature was produced in the field of education, the concept of deficit thinking and its impact transcend the boundaries of education systems, and the current discussion may be relevant and applicable to understanding other systems within public and private spheres of society.

Critical Elements of Deficit Thinking

Before presenting the findings of our analysis, it is important to note that existing literature utilizes various terms to describe deficit thinking (e.g., deficit framing, deficit paradigm, deficit perspective) and often appears to use these concepts interchangeably. We include research using this diverse range of terms in our analysis.

Our analysis resulted in four central themes that illustrate how deficit thinking is conceptualized and defined in existing research: a blame the victim orientation, a grounding in larger complex systems of oppression, a pervasive and often implicit nature, and effects that reinforce hegemonic systems. Research suggests that these four interdependent themes represent critical aspects of the conceptualization of deficit thinking. None of these elements alone are comprehensive enough to constitute deficit thinking; rather, all four aspects of deficit thinking are important for understanding its nature and impact.

A Blame the Victim Orientation

Scholars consistently agree that deficit thinking perpetuates a blame the victim orientation toward communities that face inequalities in society (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009; Ford, 2014; McKay & Devlin, 2016; Haggis, 2006; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001; Valencia, 1997, 2010; Weiner, 2003). Scholars have noted that deficit thinking has evolved from primarily perpetuating perspectives that individuals’ traits are the source of their own failures to implying that the cultures (e.g., communities and families) from which people come are responsible for the challenges that they face (Knight, 2002). However, deficit thinking can manifest in either or both of these assumptions (Aikman et al., 2016; Ford, 2014; Sleeter, 2004; Valencia, 1997, 2010). Although literature indicates that deficit thinking perpetuates beliefs that students’ environments are responsible for their failures, it is important to acknowledge that most of this research refers to the environment within students’ communities and families, which should not be confused or conflated with environments that are primarily perpetuated within dominant power systems (e.g., schools and college campuses). Perspectives that highlight deficiencies or problems in institutional environments, for example, can be instrumental in shifting the blame from individuals to systemic forces and are often anti-deficit in nature.

Deficit thinking ignores systemic influences that shape disparities in social and educational outcomes (Chambers & Spikes, 2016; Ford, 2014; Valencia, 1997, 2010). In doing so, it leaves the focus on individual and cultural “deficiencies” intact while simultaneously disregarding the powerful forces that produce and perpetuate challenges for historically oppressed populations. In some cases, deficit thinking even suggests and reinforces the notion that dominant structures are the primary solution to the aforementioned social inequalities. For example, deficit thinking perpetuates dominant narratives that education lifts people out of poverty and is the solution to addressing inequalities (Aikman et al., 2016) while ignoring the role that educational systems also play in reinforcing social inequities.

A Symptom of Larger Systemic Oppression

Scholars who write about deficit thinking generally agree that these perspectives are a symptom of larger historical and sociopolitical contexts and ideologies (Gorski, 2011). Deficit thinking is historically grounded in dominant classist and racist ideologies that frame oppressed people as deficient (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009; Menchaca, 1997). Indeed, evidence of deficit thinking can be traced back centuries. In the mid-1700s, misbeliefs that enslaved Africans were mentally deficient and unable to learn fueled compulsory ignorance laws that imposed heavy fines on anyone caught teaching them to write or using them as scribes (Ryan, 1971). In addition, school segregation policies that existed until the mid-1900s were founded on the misconceptions that racially minoritized populations were intellectually inferior and that racial mixing would contaminate White education (Menchaca & Valencia, 1990).

In addition to having roots in classist and racist ideologies, deficit thinking is anchored in meritocracy and colorblindness. Indeed, deficit thinking is inextricably intertwined with meritocratic ideologies, which suggest that everyone has an equal chance to succeed within existing sociopolitical structures. Moreover, deficit frames intersect with colorblind ideologies, which misleadingly imply that systemic racism is not a major cause of racial inequities and does not shape the experiences and outcomes of racial groups throughout society. It is important to note that, since the 1980s, deficit thinking has converged with meritocracy and colorblindness to fuel the proliferation of high-stakes testing cultures in education, which intensify the focus on students’ deficiencies and fixing them at the expense of addressing larger structural inequities (Valencia & Guadarrama, 1996).

A Pervasive and Implicit Nature

Scholars highlight at least two commonalities across the ways in which deficit thinking manifests: it is pervasive and often implicit. Regarding the former, scholarship suggests that deficit thinking permeates social and educational systems, including culture and language, policies and practices, and individual cognitive structures and worldviews. For example, scholars highlight how deficit views are infused into policy debates (Aikman et al., 2016; Knight, 2002; Smit, 2012) and deeply embedded in educational institutions (Sleeter, 2004; Weiner, 2003).

Scholars also describe how deficit thinking becomes implicit in taken-for-granted cultural values, assumptions, and language that shape social and educational discourse, policy, and practice. Scholars have argued that deficit thinking can be reinforced by labels that imply individual deficiencies (Aikman et al., 2016). For example, conversations about students who are at risk imply that they are likely to fail (Aikman et al., 2016), and discourse around grit suggests that students’ individual deficiency (i.e., lack of grit) is responsible for the challenges that they experience in education (Gorski, 2016; Kundu, 2014). However, it is also important to note that such terms can be couched in larger anti-deficit narratives (e.g., discussions of how minoritized students develop grit as a result of navigating systemic racism). Thus, the use of a single word does not automatically make discourse inherently and completely grounded in deficit thinking.

A Reinforcement of Hegemonic Systems

Finally, scholars who study deficit thinking highlight its negative effects. Ultimately, they underscore that deficit thinking fuels a wide array of negative consequences that reinforce oppressive systems and inequities in society and education. For example, they contribute to educators having lower expectations of students from historically oppressed social identity groups (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009) and can predispose these students to disengagement (Shields, Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005) while masking how this deficit thinking undermines success (Pérez, Ashlee, Do, Karikari, & Sim, 2017).

It is also important to note that the emphasis on individual and cultural deficiencies perpetuates assumptions that our system should seek a quick fix to remedy disparate experiences and outcomes (Altman & Fogarty, 2010; Vass, 2012) rather than focus on addressing core systems of oppression and systemic inequities that permeate social and educational institutions. In doing so, deficit thinking prevents policy makers, educators, and communities from focusing on the actual root causes of the challenges that people of color, low-income populations, and other minoritized groups face.

Implications for Scholarly Research

Our analysis of literature has several implications for future scholarly research. In this final section, we discuss implications of this review for researchers who aim to critique the deficit nature of the existing research, discourses, policies, and practices. We also provide recommendations for scholars who are conducting research that is designed to advance anti-deficit thinking.

First, when critiquing deficit thinking, we encourage scholars to define the key elements of their conceptualization for clarity. Researchers might engage the key elements that we outline herein to frame their analysis. Regardless of which definition and conceptualization scholars employ, we encourage them to clarify how and why they have framed deficit thinking in this way. Providing a clear definition can minimize the likelihood that they misapply this concept or readers interpret their analysis in ways that cause confusion.
Second, we encourage scholars to consistently consider all of the key elements of deficit thinking in their analysis. All four elements outlined herein are critical in efforts to accurately evaluate whether research, policies, or practices are deficit oriented. However, it is important to note that although systemic origins, pervasive and implicit traits, and negative effects are characteristic of many ideologies, the blaming the victim component of deficit thinking is what makes it distinct. Therefore, we encourage researchers to pay special attention to this element in their analysis. Doing so will ensure that researchers do not label scholarship deficit-oriented because it examines the systemic, institutional, and environmental challenges that historically oppressed populations face. Such research can be considered to be in direct opposition to the perpetuation of deficit ideologies and discourses.
Third, we encourage researchers who seek to critique the deficit nature of language to consider the larger sociopolitical and discursive contexts within which it is generated and used. This recommendation is especially important because scholars and advocates often strategically utilize language that can sometimes be used to reinforce deficit thinking in their efforts to advance anti-deficit agendas, and it is therefore important for critical analyses to take this complexity into account. For example, racial disparities can be utilized to reinforce deficit thinking when they are embedded in larger discourses that are deficit oriented (e.g., when individual or cultural factors are framed as the cause of these disparities), but scholars also highlight racial inequalities to justify and elevate work that critiques larger structural inequities, centers the voices of communities of color, and advances anti-deficit perspectives. In such cases, concluding that the use of language or tools (e.g., discussion of disparities) is deficit- oriented ignores the larger overall impact of these efforts, obscures the lines between harmful deficit narratives and those that are counterhegemonic, and may unintentionally hinder important anti-deficit scholarship and advocacy.
Finally, it is important to underscore the diverse ways in which scholars and activists can and often do advance anti-deficit perspectives and discourses, as doing so can help minimize confusion about whether work is reinforcing or challenging deficit thinking. One way that scholars challenge deficit ideologies is by critiquing deficit thinking that is embedded within existing discourses, systems, institutions, and environments. Researchers can advance anti-deficit thinking by centering the voices of historically oppressed communities in research, policy, and practice to humanize these populations. The power of such research to challenge deficit thinking lies in its ability to excavate systemic forces that shape the conditions that these populations face, the ways in which they navigate these contexts, and the complexity of their realities (e.g., revealing both the challenges they face and their successes). Scholars also utilize knowledge from historically oppressed populations to generate new frameworks and ways of understanding core social and educational processes. This work has the potential to generate new discourses that better account for structural inequities and advance anti-deficit paradigms and discourses.
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Altman, J., & Fogarty, B. (2010). Indigenous Australians as “no gaps” subjects: Education and development in remote Australia. In I. Snyder & J. Nieuwenhuysen (Eds.), Closing the gap in education? Improving outcomes in southern world societies (pp. 109–128). Clayton, Australia: Monash University Press.
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Home » Teaching Strategies » Combatting Deficit Thinking In The Classroom

deficit thinking in education definition

Combatting Deficit Thinking In The Classroom

The lowest common denominator in your classroom is not the ‘norm’. It’s the students themselves. They are all individuals who bring a load of experience, knowledge and value. In a lesson, they belong to only one group: the class.

Deficit thinking, however, means looking at a class in terms of who fits into what mainstream or minority group. Different groups mean different abilities. And that leads to discrimination in teaching.

In this post, you’ll learn what deficit thinking is, the problems associated with it and how it can cause harm to students. I’ll also take you through some ideas on how to begin to change the mindset of deficit thinking and begin to combat it in your classroom.

Understanding deficit thinking, the problems with deficit thinking, the effect of deficit thinking on cultural perceptions, the harm deficit thinking holds for students, correcting the deficit in critical thinking, examples of deficit thinking, ideas to combat deficit thinking, use questions to ascertain students’ prior knowledge., deficit thinking faqs, make the effort to decenter your classroom.

Deficit thinking is the assumption that marginalized populations are different from the established ‘norm’. As such, they have an inherent weakness, which makes them struggle in academic exercises.

It is about looking at a particular context and judging people according to a perceived weakness. One of the manifestations is the idea that students with disabilities possess problems they should remedy.

One of the problems with deficit thinking is that there is a gap in public education systems between privileged white students and those (predominantly ) students who come from less privileged backgrounds (Garcia, 2003).

Teachers see racially diverse students from lower-income backgrounds underachieving academically. They tend to ascribe it to their contexts, including families and communities. This view of students and their families is an indication of an ingrained deficit thinking in teachers’ mindsets. This can particularly indicate negatively prejudiced attitudes towards their abilities.

A further problem with deficit thinking is that it leads to placing responsibility on the less privileged students. If they work to overcome their perceived disadvantages, they will achieve better. However, “ building resilience to structural inequality should never be a requirement for children to access learning.” Class 13: Deficit thinking

I am sure that you are like most people who go into teaching: the wellbeing and achievement of the students is paramount. Teachers genuinely want their students to learn. However, underlying all education is the cultural construct that influences us unawares. Society tends to see the ‘other’ as inferior, which leads to an ingrained form of deficit thinking.

When students are treated as though they are inferior and less capable simply because of where they come from, they can begin to develop a negative impression of themselves. Eventually, they will buy into that image and not bother even trying. This seems to prove that they, as representative of a certain minority, are in fact less capable than the ‘norm’. By extension, the whole community or racial group is thus incapable of high achievement. This legitimizes deficit thinking.

Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds develop negative ideas of their competencies. Unknowingly, they buy into the deficit thinking, because of the way they perceive the expectations of their inherent under-achievement.

The students may very well have bad living conditions, or they can’t afford the necessary equipment. Deficit thinking takes that as an indication that the students’ homes or communities don’t give them what they need. They obviously cannot develop a good attitude towards education or towards responsibility.

In education, it’s important to find the correct level of challenge for students. Deficit thinking doesn’t allow a teacher to set that level, because of the ingrained perceptions of abilities based on context. The same thing applies when designing assessments and the criteria for achievement.

These processes can actually result in learning being held back, rather than allowing them to move ahead with their learning. Effectively, deficit thinking becomes a barrier to learning .

Teacher-training is beginning to focus more on addressing the ideas that lead to deficit thinking (and ways to redress the balance).

The opposite of deficit thinking is the ability to work on the student’s strengths and work with those to help them improve in their studies. We need to stop seeing what is missing but look at what students do have.

We need to develop different ways of looking at minority groups and dismantling the idea of the ‘other’. It is a problem in the education system. However, at least individual schools can begin to find ways to address this.

Deficit thinking lays the blame for not doing what must be done to make a change in the individuals. For example, women are taught self-defence to save themselves from assault, which doesn’t address the outside problems causing the possible threat.

Schools often offer programs giving students ways to build confidence. Why must it come from them, though? Why not look at the dominant system?

It is often ‘understood’ that males are inherently better at math. This is erroneous, as gender bears no direct relationship to the logic and approaches suited to understanding the principles of mathematics. However, because of this way of thinking, girls are forced to work harder to match up with to male peers.

Deficit thinking is clear in the attitude that teachers may have towards an individual pupil who is an underachiever. The perception maybe something like: He can’t do this subject very well because he doesn’t have the background. There is no guarantee that a more privileged student has the relevant background.

As teachers, we should challenge our own ways of behaviour that may be informed, even subconsciously, by deficit thinking.

It’s easy to say, ‘You need to see all students as equally capable.’ It’s not always easy to do this, though. Sometimes, you need to make a shift in your mindset.

Let’s say, for example, that you are teaching poetry , specifically Blake’s The Tyger. As a teacher, you need to come to this with an open mind.

Think about it: Teaching a poem written in 1794 to students in 2022 seems to pose an immense challenge. I mean, what teenager knows anything about the 18 th century, William Blake or even the Industrial Revolution?

Teenagers today are immersed in technology, which is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Some of them may have studied the First Industrial Revolution or read about it. Some students may never have seen even a picture of a tiger, while others may have seen a tiger at the zoo. Others may have seen or read The Jungle Book and see the tiger as the ‘bad guy.’

This knowledge can help the students unpack the poem in class by acknowledging that every learner brings some existing knowledge to class.

Then, of course, there is the whole idea of poetry . I would doubt that teenagers in 2022 will have been exposed to any of Blake’s poetry. They are exposed to modern poetry, even if only in the form of the lyrics of songs.

You can begin with this understanding of rhythm, rhyme and meaning. After all, the principles of poetry haven’t really changed since Blake’s time.

By doing all of this, you can begin to combat deficit thinking in your classroom.

Basically, people from certain groups are seen as having weaknesses inherent to their context means they can’t learn as well as those from the majority. There is the assumption that children from ‘other’ groups can’t cope so well academically because of something in their circumstances or context.

The effects of deficit thinking become harmful for students from ‘bad’ backgrounds. They expect teachers will assume they will do badly, just because of their context or identity. They no longer see a reason to try and end up doing badly in school.

Deficit thinking tends to place the responsibility for academic achievement on the students, not the system. This avoids addressing the core problem with discrimination in the education system itself.

Deficit thinking manifests in many different aspects of society, even education. It’s not something you need to take into the classroom, though. By understanding what deficit thinking is and how it can harm your students, you can begin to combat it.

The role of the teacher means we are ultimately responsible for the focus and outcomes of a lesson. It doesn’t mean, though, that we have the only voice and the learners have nothing to give. A good teacher will learn as much as their students do.

The idea of decentering your classroom is not about giving up control. A teacher must always keep the role of leader and guide. Decentering isn’t putting the class into your students’ hands. It’s about approaching a learning situation from the position of seeing yourself as a facilitator. Your role is to guide all your learners to acquire knowledge and apply it to tasks.

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Jane B has been in education for 37 years, teaching at all levels of school and at university, with extensive experience in developing educational resources.

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Deficit Mindset

What is deficit mindset in education.

In education, a deficit mindset is when teachers or school leaders focus on problems rather than potential.

It’s when we say “can’t” instead of “not yet.” It leads us to ask “what’s wrong?” with a student, class, or school rather than asking “what can I do to build on existing strengths?”

Deficit thinking limits student outcomes.

Deficit thinking causes educators to lower their expectations based on what their students and schools lack, which leads to lower outcomes. For example, a teacher might assign easier work to a student who’s behind and excuse them from grade-level instruction rather than taking strategic action to accelerate their learning.

In contrast, asset-based thinking asks “what’s right?” The asset-based mindset (also known as growth mindset ) assumes all students have potential, and seeks to understand their strengths. Focusing on strengths allows teachers to provide powerful instruction that enables students to progress as fast as possible. It leads to higher motivation and better outcomes for all students.

Deficit thinking is an equity issue.

Students of color, students experiencing poverty, and students with learning and attention differences are disproportionately harmed when educators adopt a deficit mindset. A school leader might think, “Our school can’t achieve high test scores because we aren’t well funded”; or a teacher might think, “Kids who don’t speak English at home can’t handle complex texts.” This deficit thinking blames already marginalized students for the fact that the system fails them, further perpetuating inequities.

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Deficit Thinking in Education

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Is the glass half empty or half full?

When we think about children entering classrooms each day, what thoughts about them go through an educator's mind. Are children viewed walking into the classroom fully equipped with the ability to learn or are they viewed as lacking the ability to learn?

The thoughts educators have about the students in their classroom can be highly beneficial or they can be extremely damaging to a child.

When educators begin to see the glass as half empty, they are demonstrating deficit thinking. Deficit thinking is the belief that some students have internal deficiencies, such as cognitive or motivational limitations that lead to school failure. Valencia (1997) believes that US educators use deficit thinking as an excuse to explain increased school failures occurring with low-income families and children of color. Deficit thinking has led to the belief that children in poverty are uneducable. This leads to tracking students into remedial courses, special education or negative school environments (Valenzuela, 1999). Once students are tracked into these systems, it is almost impossible to climb out. They become defined by a label that represents how others see them and how they begin to see themselves.

National assessments, grades, and other assessment tools have supported deficit thinking by showing that children of poverty and children of color often score the lowest on these assessments. Valencia (1997) believes that educators produce a cycle of failure by describing deficits, explaining deficits, predicting deficits, and then prescribing interventions to remediate the deficits. The focus is always on the deficiencies in these children. Once schools focus on deficiencies, they stay in a cycle of lack and destruction. Deficiency cycles destroy motivation, beliefs about ability, and desire to advance.

Cultural deficit thinking takes responsibility away from schools and places blame on the students, their parents, and their environment (Ford, 2003) The theory around deficit thinking posits that poverty causes students to be cognitively deprived and ignorant with low aspirations (Riojas-Cortez, 2000). However, other research has found that teachers tend to set lower expectations for students from low-income homes. Most teachers are unaware of the lower expectations they set for students and the beliefs they hold about them and their situation. There is an accepted belief that students from lower socio-economic communities are deprived or lacking socially, culturally, and economically (Marx, 2004).

Hollins and Guzman (2005) found that negative and stereotypical views of children in urban areas begin before teachers enter the classroom. Predominantly white pre-service teachers enter preparation programs with previously formed beliefs and values about children and learning in urban areas. Pre-service teachers may have good intentions; however, their unfamiliarity with the experiences and cultures of the students presents a challenge (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). Studies found that many white pre-service teachers found underachievement in students in urban areas to be normal and expected (Sleeter, 1995). Schultz, Neyhart and Reck (1996) found that pre-service teachers believe the urban children interfere with their own education through the attitudes they bring to the classroom. Teachers contribute to the shaping of racial self-concept. Teachers are the heart of the school. They set the tone through instruction, room arrangement and verbal and non-verbal cues of acceptance or rejection (Smith, Atkins, & Connell, 2003).

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It's Not a Deficit. And You Don't Need to "Fix" It.

In a new book, UNLV librarians explore “deficit thinking” and encourage new approaches that better support student learning.

(Josh Hawkins/UNLV Photo Services)

September 20, 2021
By Sean Kennedy

College students are confronted daily with a variety of pre-existing expectations and biases: You should behave this way in classrooms. You should already know this material before enrolling in a class and understand this process to navigate the labyrinth of university life.

As higher educational professionals, our first instinct may be to focus on everything we want students to learn from us. But focusing too squarely on skills and knowledge that students may not yet have, even unintentionally, can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and stifle student engagement.

This concept of deficit thinking — a ubiquitous and harmful mindset that views individuals outside the “norm” as being individually responsible for any perceived shortcomings — is the topic of a new book by UNLV librarians Chelsea Heinbach and Rosan Mitola, and co-author Erin Rinto. " Dismantling Deficit Thinking in Academic Libraries: Theory, Reflection, and Action " explores the concept in higher education and academic libraries, analyzes the ways it negatively impacts student learning, and proposes a new way of approaching students.

“Deficit thinking ignores students' cultural strengths, diminishes the value of their lived experiences, and falsely validates negative perceptions of students' families or their communities,” says Mitola.

Heinbach concurs, adding, “In the library classroom, one common way deficit thinking manifests is by assuming that students don't know how to do research or find credible sources. However, students research every day to make decisions, find employment, learn about politics, navigate higher education, and more. We find that when we engage students’ interests through things like creative research projects and personal research topics while building bridges between academic research and everyday research, students find more meaning in the work.”

In this interview, Heinbach and Mitola discuss how deficit thinking negatively impacts students – especially those from historically marginalized groups — and how educators can reframe their thinking about the value students from different backgrounds and experiences bring to the classroom.

Can you start off by walking us through what deficit thinking is? Where does it come from?

Heinbach: Deficit thinking is the belief that there is a prescribed “correct” way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit. They are perceived to be lacking something and therefore need to be “fixed'' and brought into the norm in order to be successful. Unfortunately, the burden of the prescribed “fix” usually falls entirely on the individual by suggesting that they “try harder” and ultimately conform to the practices of the dominant culture. Historically, if there is support available, it is entirely focused on bringing others into the norm, rather than changing the norm to accommodate others. This can be a painful, even violent experience.

Mitola: This thinking doesn’t exist only in education — this mindset permeates our society — influencing our social programs, community organizing, businesses. And it can pervade many people’s worldview without them even realizing it.

In education, deficit thinking can discourage teachers and administrators from recognizing and acknowledging the positive values, traits, and dispositions of certain students. Deficit thinking focuses entirely on what these students may not have access to. This results in educators ignoring the lived experiences and knowledge students already have that they bring with them into the classroom and could enrich the space.

How has deficit thinking been especially harmful to students at a Minority-Serving Institution like UNLV?

Heinbach: Unfortunately, deficit thinking often focuses on groups of students who are discussed as being “nontraditional” in educational spaces. This includes students of color, first-generation, international, disabled, neurodivergent, and transfer students, along with really anyone who doesn’t fit in the “traditional” student category. For example, students who work, have caretaking responsibilities, are veterans, and many others also don’t align with the so-called “traditional” student experience as it was originally envisioned. Deficit thinking perpetuates the idea that the students who belong to these groups are the exception to the rule and that they don’t truly belong.

Mitola: This is especially true for students of color who face structural, systemic barriers throughout their educational experience. By the time they reach the university, they’ve likely experienced harmful constructs such as being labeled “at-risk.” And now in college, students of color may also have to overcome structural and social inequities like learning the hidden curriculum — the unwritten rules that impact how a student navigates and succeeds in higher education.

Heinbach: And even though sometimes educational interventions like addressing the achievement gap come from the well-intentioned place of wanting to help students succeed, we need to ensure we are not telling only one story about these students. Moreso, we should be doing just as much to change the inequitable systems of the university as we are to teach students critical thinking skills and subject content.

How do we move away from a deficit-based approach to working with students to something more productive?

Mitola: We’ve found in our own work that dismantling deficit thinking requires a great deal of reflection. It requires that as individuals we recognize the dominant narrative, take time to identify where we have accepted it in our teaching and work, and ultimately identify how to disrupt it and let it go. As educators, we have to commit to continuously questioning and reflecting on the deficit mindset and how we encounter it in ourselves, our classrooms, and our institutions. This internal reflection will help transition to a strengths-oriented mindset. The next step is then enacting equitable principles through practices that we can employ in our research, teaching, and actions.

Heinbach: Which is really what our book is all about. In our research, we set out to determine what liberatory pedagogies had in common. As a result, we believe that in order to dismantle deficit thinking, educators must commit to:

Honor students prior knowledge
Create opportunities for genuine engagement for students
Center social interaction and community knowledge
De-center classroom learning
Work against systems of educational oppression

You’ve presented on deficit thinking with the Flora and Stuart Mason Undergraduate Peer Research Coaches. How has your interaction with these students shaped your research?

Mitola: Working with the Mason Peer Research Coaches has shaped my research throughout my entire career at UNLV. When Chelsea, our colleague Brittany Paloma Fiedler, and I worked together on a research project on the lived experiences of transfer students at UNLV, we shared that project with the current cohort of Mason Peer Coaches. They were really inspired by the project and it piqued their interest in research in academic libraries. One of those students then reached out to see if they could participate in a future research project.

In thinking about how to best support their academic goals and provide professional development opportunities, instead of having them participate in maybe the less desirable tasks of a project (citations, transcription, data collection), we decided to have them take the lead. When they learned more about deficit thinking, they immediately shared memories both as student employees and as students at UNLV where they had experienced the harm of this mindset. Hearing their stories firsthand provided incredible insight into how important it is to deviate from a deficit approach in my work. Working with them on their research project “ #NotYourDeficit: Honoring the unique strengths of first-gen students through community-based participatory research ” was the most rewarding experience. It solidified my commitment to challenging and dismantling deficit thinking and systems of oppression in my day-to-day work at UNLV.

Heinbach: I completely agree. Working with the Peer Coaches confirmed what we believed about how the deficit mindset can negatively impact students. Rosan and I were both first-generation students as well, so it was incredibly meaningful to work with the Peer Coaches and discuss the ways this approach had affected us all. They improved the work we were doing every step of the way with their unique perspectives and insight. I learned so much from working closely with them on that project and encourage others working with students to create space for them to take the lead more often.

What do you hope readers of your book will take with them?

Heinbach: I hope readers who find upon reflection that they have absorbed the deficit mindset about themselves or others will feel energized, informed, and emboldened to shift their thinking and practice. I hope those who have been impacted by deficit thinking recognize what a disservice it was to them, and I hope everyone creates space for a broader, more hopeful perspective of what is possible in education and in our communities.

Mitola: I have similar hopes to Chelsea. I hope that readers will feel inspired to share these liberatory methods for countering deficit thinking with others so that together we can create a supportive and empowering learning environment for all students.

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deficit model

Quick reference.

A perspective which attributes failures such as lack of achievement, learning, or success in gaining employment to a personal lack of effort or deficiency in the individual, rather than to failures or limitations of the education and training system or to prevalent socio‐economic trends. For example, the argument for the introduction of youth and adult training schemes in the 1981 White Paper A New Training Initiative included the suggestion that because people lacked skills there were no jobs for them, and that therefore this deficit must be addressed by appropriate training. The implication here was that unemployment arose from a deficiency in the unemployed themselves, rather than from economic trends. The deficit model of teaching, in which the teacher provides the learning to make good a deficit, stands in direct contrast to the belief that the teacher's role is to draw out learners' tacit knowledge and understanding through questioning and facilitation.

The deficit model perspective is also apparent in the view expressed in some discourses about learner attainment and behaviour which suggest that it is a deficit of some kind in the teacher's performance which leads to such problems, and that learner attainment and behaviour can therefore be improved simply by changing the teacher's behaviour or by enhancing their skills through professional development. An application of the deficit model, as can be seen from these examples, is often indicative of an oversimplified view of the issue in question.

From: deficit model in A Dictionary of Education »

Subjects: Social sciences — Education

Social Justice Pedagogies

Antiracist Pedagogy
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Dismantling Deficit Thinking
Critical Pedagogy
Disability Justice
Feminist Pedagogy

Introduction to Dismantling Deficit Thinking

Dismantling deficit thinking works to challenge the normative practices of assuming that students who do not fit the stereotype of a traditional student are lackin. In the tradition of other asset-based pedagogies, dismantling deficit thinking works to honor prior knowledge and experiences that students already have, but also acknowledges the need to create opportunities for genuine engagement, center social interaction and community knowledge, decenter classroom learning, and work against systems of educational oppression. Rooted in critical theories that recognize the need for self-reflection, Heinbach, Ritola, and Rinto (2021) emphasize the need for educators who are commiteed to dismantling deficit thinking to address both their mindsets and practices according to their five principles.

This table is replicated from this guide that was created by Chelsea Heinbach, Rosan Mitola, and Erin Rinto and is an excerpt from Dismantling Deficit Thinking in Academic Libraries Theory, Reflection, and Action .

Suggested Practices for Dismantling Deficit Thinking

Reflective practices.

As you explore these resources, ask yourself the following questions:

What are your assumptions about learning? Is there always one correct way to learn something?
Does your institution or department classify "at risk" students? Why might transfer students, first generation students, and international students often be labeled as "at risk?"
What are some ways we perpetuate deficit thinking in the ways we talk about "at risk" students? About students in general?

Teaching Practices

After you work through some of the reflective practices, here are some starting teaching practices you might adopt.

Avoid relying on generational stereotypes when talking about students, e.g. all older students are less adept at using technology.
Avoid describing students as kids which infantilizes students who have a wealth of knowledge and experiences
Build in room for critical reflection in assignments.
Find ways to decenter classroom learning and make learning more applicable to students' cultural contexts and/or life after university.

What is Deficit Thinking?

Deficit thinking is the idea that young people from various “at risk” groups fail in school due to their own “internal deficiencies”.

The perfect crime

These “deficiencies” are not only applied to young people, but to their families and communities too. It’s an intersectional issue crossing race, gender, class, economic status and family structure. And once we understand and recognise it, we can place it at the root of most challenges currently facing the education system.

Because of how it operates, deficit thinking often remains an unseen issue in the education system. But its impact is far-reaching and harmful to the young people it affects. Dr Tomas Arciniega referred to deficit thinking as “the perfect crime” as far back as 1977 because it blames the victim (in this case, the young person) and holds them responsible for change.

The problem with resilience

The education system is full of youth mentoring programmes and interventions that want to support young people to build confidence, resilience and self-esteem to succeed (or survive) in school. Does Aspire Youth seem familiar?

When we talk about building a young person's resilience and/or confidence, what are we actually asking of them? What are we asking them to be resilient against? What are we asking them to build confidence for? Are we saying young people need resilience to navigate an education system that is structurally stacked against them?

We don’t believe that building resilience to structural inequity should ever be a requirement for young people to access education.

The strengths-based myth

Although it might feel intuitive, the opposite of deficit thinking is not a strengths-based one. That's because it's possible to embrace a strengths-based view while still bypassing the institutional racism and other inequities that deficit ideology masks.

The only way to dismantle inequity is to name it. In the case of racism, this means the opposite of deficit ideology is anti-racist, anti-oppressive ideology and action: an unbending commitment to become a threat to all forms of inequity.

Unlearn your deficit thinking

Our training supports schools and teachers to engage in critical reflection to recognise, understand and dismantle deficit thinking and build a more equitable practice for all young people.

Deficit thinking in action

Black caribbean boys exclusions.

Statistics about the disproportionate exclusion of Black boys have been a mainstay in our education system since Bernard Coard first published his pamphlet, How the West Indian Child is made educationally subnormal in the British School System , in 1971.

Some may argue that statistics like this raise awareness. But they also encourage us to think there may be a problem with the Caribbean culture, family structure, or something else associated with being from the Caribbean. As a result, we end up attempting to solve disproportionate exclusion rates through direct work with Black Caribbean boys, instead of grasping the problem of racism in education at its root.

The attainment gap

A key priority in education at the moment is closing the attainment gap for young people eligible for Pupil Premium. This concept relies on deficit thinking because it asks young people to “catch up” to a target that we as professionals have set. If we want all young people to succeed, it's crucial that we acknowledge our history in the UK of denying some young people access to the quality education they deserve.

In 2006 Gloria Ladson-Billings wrote a paper called From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt . She questions the focus on catching young people up, and refocused professionals on the debt we owe to young people from groups we have historically excluded from learning.

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Home » Final Policy project » Thinking Beyond the Deficit Model: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and the Achievement Gap

Thinking Beyond the Deficit Model: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and the Achievement Gap

Executive Summary

Despite the passage of numerous federal education reforms, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the racial achievement gap has narrowed at an extremely slow rate since 2001. In fact, federal accountability schema have exacerbated persistent racial inequalities, as manifested through punitive discipline and high dropout rates. This is because policymakers have failed to move beyond a deficit model of student achievement, where difference is considered a hindrance to educational equality. In this policy brief, we advocate for the opposite approach: policies that promote culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), which elevates cultural difference as a source of academic excellence. After explaining the theoretical foundations of CRP, we present policy proposals for the integration of CRP in two major domains, (1) professional development (including curriculum construction) and (2) pre-service/new teacher training and induction. Finally, we address challenges of implementation and make a case for the urgency of culturally responsive pedagogy.

Introduction: The Need for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Although the racial “achievement gap,” or disparity in academic performance between students of color and their white counterparts, is a well-documented area of concern, nationalized policy efforts to close the gap have been largely unsuccessful. With the 2001 passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), federal education policy invested significant resources in closing the achievement gap. In a pivotal address on improving the education system, former President George W. Bush said: “Now some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less — the soft bigotry of low expectations” (New York Times, 1999). With Bush came a new rhetoric of high expectations, no excuses, and increased accountability. Rather than critically engage with and account for racial and socioeconomic disparities through the creation of locally and culturally responsive policies, Bush’s reforms sought to bring every student to the same level of educational achievement by standardizing curricula irrespective of background, race, and class.

To this end, NCLB required schools and districts to disaggregate student achievement data by race and class to facilitate increased accountability and effective comparisons between student groups (Ansell, 2011). This disaggregated data revealed a wide gap in student achievement across lines of race and class. As of 2011, black and Hispanic students scored over 20 points lower on NAEP math and reading assessments at 4th and 8th grade levels, putting them almost two grade levels behind their white peers (Ansell, 2011). Though recent NAEP data shows that the achievement gap has narrowed slightly in recent years (see Figure 1), neither NCLB nor Obama’s more recent Race to the Top initiative have made a sizable impact on the gap. Despite reform efforts, the rate of improvement remains unacceptably slow.

Figure 1: NAEP reading scores for black and white students from 1992 -2013 showing a slight but inconsistent narrowing of the racial achievement gap. Source: Chen 2014, Public School Review

While the color-blind logic of Bush’s high expectations rhetoric ostensibly levels the playing field, in reality the policy’s disregard for legacies of institutionalized inequality has done precisely the reverse. Au (2009) argues that, despite the “high-minded rhetoric” around high-stakes testing as means to ensure equity, achievement data suggests that systems of high-stakes, standardized testing are exacerbating rather than alleviating the inequalities they purportedly measure (p. 5). The Advancement Project (2010) echoes Au’s assessment: not only has high-stakes testing failed to close the achievement gap, this “test and punish approach” has had devastating effects on communities of color and low-income students. Since the passage of NCLB, racial disparities in school discipline have become more extreme, with more students of color being suspended or expelled relative to their white peers. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of black students expelled nationwide rose thirty-three percent from 2002-2003 school-year (the year following the passage of NCLB) to the 2006-2007 school year (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Nationwide Change in Expulsions per student broken down by race, showing a dramatic uptick in the expulsion of students of color since the passage of NCLB (Data from U.S. Department of Education, Graph from Advancement Project 2010)

The no-excuses logic of high expectations has translated into zero-tolerance policies and stricter—often racially coded—discipline practices. According to the Civil Rights Project survey of national discipline practices in 2012, one in every six black students enrolled in a K-12 public school was suspended at least once compared to one out of every twenty white students. For black students with disabilities, the numbers are even more sobering, with one of every four black students with disabilities experiencing suspension at least once in the 2009-2010 school year (Losen and Gillespie, 2012). With this increase in high-stakes, punitive testing and racially disproportionate discipline has come an increase in high school dropout rates as more students of color are failing to graduate (see Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3: Changes in graduation rates from 1996-2002 broken down by number of districts. (Data from U.S. Department of Education, Graph from Advancement Project 2010)

Figures 4: Changes in graduation rates from 2002-2006 broken down by number of districts. (Data from U.S. Department of Education, Graph from Advancement Project 2010)

The Deficit Model

Many critics and policymakers blame the persistence of the achievement gap not on these harsh discipline practices or grueling testing regimes, but rather on the continued low expectations of educators—that “soft bigotry” that President Bush condemned back in 1999. The suggestion that teachers’ implicit racial biases results in them making excuses for students of color and holding them to lower expectations than their white counterparts has been the subject of considerable debate and scholarship. Educational scholar and author Lisa Delpit opens her book, Other People’s Children , with a series of anecdotes capturing this phenomenon. Delpit recounts one African American mother’s frustrations advocating on behalf of her son. Though she had checked in with her son’s teachers repeatedly over the course of the semester to ensure that he was keeping up in school, his end of term grades were shockingly low—something none of the teachers had brought to her attention. Delpit writes that when the mother asked teachers “how they could have said he was doing fine when his grades were so low, each of them gave her some version of the same answer: ‘Why are you so upset? For him, Cs are great. You shouldn’t try to push him so much’” (Delpit 1995, p. xiii). These low-expectations are grounded in the belief that communities of color are deficient in some way and that students, being the product of these deficient communities, cannot be held to the same standards as their white peers because of how much they have to overcome. Case studies and anecdotal evidence of this “deficit model” in practice are abundant in educational literature, but there is considerable disagreement about what policy initiatives most effectively counteract these low-expectations.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: The Case Against Standardization

While advocates of high-stakes testing and increased standardization often point to accountability measures as an effective response to the deficit model, we suggest precisely the reverse. Rather than pursue standardization, educators should recognize that histories of racial and socioeconomic exclusion continue to shape opportunities for access in today’s society, and they should structure curricula and accountability practices to reflect that reality. As Au notes, standardized testing regimes ignore the realities of local conditions and historical contexts that critically impact student performance. In this way, “systems of high-stakes testing effectively mask the existence of social relations and structural inequalities… that persist in [students’] lives, resulting in what some have called the ‘new eugenics’” (Au, 2009, p. 43). Delpit echoes Au’s critique, arguing that the proliferation of new reforms and accountability standards can only do so much. Delpit believes that national reforms that seek to erase differences between students will never close the achievement gap. Instead, she argues that schools should facilitate “basic understandings of who we are and how we are connected to and disconnected from one another” (Delpit, 1995, p. xv). To this end, we advocate for the incorporation of culturally-responsive pedagogical practices in professional development, curriculum construction, and new teacher induction and training.

Theoretical Background of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Ladson-Billings (1995) achieved a major breakthrough in teacher education when she proposed a theory of “culturally relevant pedagogy” with three major goals.

CRP should support students in attaining higher levels of academic achievement , as measured by standardized testing. Although the value of standardized tests is controversial, Ladson-Billings affirms that because students and teachers are evaluated by those standards, any pedagogical technique must allow students to do well on them.
CRP should develop students’ cultural competence. Noting research that academically successful African-American students tended to be socially isolated from their peers of all races, Ladson-Billings argued that CRP should allow students to “maintain their cultural integrity” and social connections to their community.
CRP should equip students with sociopolitical consciousness to critique injustice; as a teacher educator, Ladson-Billings had noticed prospective teachers’ unwillingness to bring social inequities into the classroom and sought to reverse that trend.

In a close observation of eight highly successful teachers of African-American students, Ladson-Billings found that three distinct attitudes marked a successful culturally responsive pedagogy. First, teachers conceived of themselves and their students as highly valuable. They saw their profession as both an art and a way to serve the community, where they chose to live and/or spend leisure time. These teachers never used the “language of lacking” (or an emphasis on the student’s disadvantages) to describe their students. Second, teachers structured collaborative social relations between students and presented themselves as learners in partnership with students rather than figures of authority. Finally, although these teachers’ students did well on standardized tests, teachers focused on higher-level conceptions of knowledge. Teachers encouraged their students to adopt a “critical stance” toward the school’s curriculum, asking why they were exploring each new topic and collectively choosing to reject district-approved textbooks for higher quality sources.

Gay (2000) defines CRP as a pedagogy that uses students’ experiences, cultural knowledge, and performance styles to affirm students’ strengths. For Gay, CRP is politically emancipatory because it “releases the intellect of students of color from the constraining manacles of mainstream canons of knowledge and ways of knowing” (p. 35). While Ladson-Billings initially focused on the way teachers delivered content, one of Gay’s major interventions was to assert that all students should learn about the contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx people, and Asian Americans in all subjects. Gay documents the severe absence of curricular materials that appropriately recognize the achievements of people of color. As a solution, she suggests that teachers and students should consider themselves researchers who expose the flaws of existing curricular materials and generate their own materials through archival research, oral histories, cultural exchanges, and visits to multicultural communities and institutions.

Finally, a recent novel approach to CRP is Christopher Emdin’s “reality pedagogy” (Emdin, 2016). “Reality pedagogy” is focused on understanding how each student, as an individual, is influenced by their cultural heritage. Moreover, Emdin proposes several ways of giving students large amounts of control in the classroom. He urges teachers to have cogenerative dialogues, or discussions with a small group of students about how the classroom environment can be improved (p. 65). He takes Ladson-Billings’s idea of “teacher as learner” even further: he urges teachers to invite students to teach the class, offering them resources but allowing students to create and execute their own lesson plan related to classroom content (Emdin, p. 95). In Emdin’s view, such radical restructurings of power in the classroom are necessary if teachers are to create a school environment that meets students’ needs and validates their identities.

Policy Initiatives

Although there is a rich theoretical literature about culturally responsive pedagogy, there are few tools that equip pre-service and in-service teachers how to implement CRP in their day-to-day teaching activities (Young, 2010). Even more importantly, there is little research on how teacher professional development can successfully empower teachers to use CRP (Sleeter, 2011). This policy memo suggests district and state level reforms specifically focusing on bringing CRP to professional development and pre-service training.

Professional Development

Morrison et. al. (2008) point out that even though most teacher education programs include readings on CRP, teachers are still unprepared to implement it and consider successful, culturally relevant teaching a “herculean” feat. This is in part because, as described by Ladson-Billings, Gay, and Emdin, CRP calls for a fairly radical and counterintuitive reimagination of the relationship between students and teachers. Young (2010) led a culturally relevant lesson-planning seminar with elementary school teachers, finding that teachers were especially resistant to the “sociopolitical consciousness” element of CRP that Ladson-Billings identifies as crucial. This was in part because teachers deemed their students too young to understand political inequities, but also because teachers themselves did not want to embrace a “critical stance” toward the material they taught. They prioritized getting through the material — especially material that would be on standardized tests — and frequently pointed to limited class time as a barrier to bringing culturally relevant knowledge into their lessons.

Los Angeles implemented the Culturally Relevant and Responsive Education (CRRE) program, one of the largest district-wide initiatives to implement culturally responsive professional development, in the 2005-2006 school year. The program focused on helping teachers move past the deficit model: by the end of the trainings, teachers were expected to hold all students to high standards, provide equitable access to learning resources, embrace social-emotional learning, and center students’ knowledge in lessons (Patton, 2011). However, Los Angeles’s program omitted sociopolitical consciousness: teachers did not, for example, discuss the history of racism and segregation in Los Angeles.

Given this research, professional development for teachers should focus on two significant obstacles to culturally relevant teaching.

Teachers must develop their own sociopolitical consciousness before they can impart it to their students. This might take place through anti-racist/anti-bias training, guided conversations where teachers explore their own cultural identity, study of the history of racial politics in their city or neighborhood, or critical investigation of textbooks and other standard class materials.
Teachers should receive concrete strategies for balancing CRP with the demands of standardized testing. Ladson-Billings (1995) observed that excellent, culturally relevant teachers and their students “viewed the tests as necessary irritations, took them, scored better than their age-grade mates at their school, and quickly returned to the rhythm of learning” (p. 482). A successful professional development program should codify and articulate successful teachers’ strategies for centering multicultural material while also equipping students to do well on standardized tests; this would provide a concrete model for other teachers to emulate.

Although the Los Angeles CRRE program was far from perfect, it provides a precedent for large-scale, district-wide CRP professional development. Our primary recommendation is that more districts invest in district-wide CRP professional development. Based on their particular educational needs, districts may choose to allow individual schools more flexibility, or they may choose to implement the same approach in all public schools. Different ways of implementing this program might include:

Mandating a specific CRP program or activity in each school’s professional development
Creating a bank of resources and activities related to CRP and encouraging/requiring principals to use some of these materials during professional development
Incentivizing principals and other school leaders to develop their own CRP professional development programs that respond to their particular school environment through competitive grants. State education agencies could help fund these grant programs.

Curriculum Development

A key challenge for professional development programs to address is the lack of culturally relevant curricular materials. Teachers may simply not know very much about the contributions people of color have made to their field, or they may lack the books, activities, and resources to make those contributions a central part of the curriculum. Gay (2010) notes that many textbooks recount material in the most bland, safe way possible, omitting controversial topics and usually describing the material from only one perspective, which is usually white and male. Similarly, Patton (2011) found that in Los Angeles’s CRRE initiative, the pedagogical component of the program (twenty-nine percent of overall time), which dealt with subject-matter content, could not be considered culturally responsive. Instead, culturally relevant techniques (fifty-nine percent of overall time) included topics like “relating to students’ experiences” and “social-emotional learning,” but was wholly separate from curricular material.

Instead, Gay recommends that teachers bring multiple perspectives to bear on each issue, and center disagreement. She suggests that teachers use materials from mass media (like news materials or pop culture images) to supplement textbooks. For example, Young (2010) documented an elementary science lesson that focused on the chemical composition and properties of water; while the original lesson stopped there, the teacher encouraged students to apply what they had learned to news articles about water shortages and inequitable water access. Another exemplary model is the Social Justice Education Project (SJEP), which leads social studies classes geared toward Latinx students in three public high schools in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to covering the state history curriculum, these classes included advanced readings in Chicano/a studies, critical theory, and critical race theory. Although the students in these classes were historically underperforming, the program encouraged students’ to write their own histories as a bridge into such advanced academic material (Romero et. al., 2009).

State and district education agencies can play a key role in supporting culturally relevant teachers by researching, making accessible, and/or mandating culturally relevant materials in schools. For example, state agencies can research and develop free online resource banks of culturally relevant reading materials, data, posters, and ideas for activities in English, math, social studies, science, and the arts. States may either mandate or encourage the use of textbooks that center the contributions of people of color. Even if states do not cooperate, districts may create supplemental curricula and/or resource banks modeled after the successes of SJEP. If districts choose to do so, we recommend that they invite parents and community leaders to be on the committee that selects culturally relevant supplemental material. This is to ensure that local expertise and history is reflected in students’ classrooms.

Pre-service and New-teacher Training

Sutcher et. al. (2016) underscores the importance of mentoring and induction support for new and student teachers as critical to teacher retention and efficacy. We suggest that this induction support specifically target ways of implementing CRP in the classroom.

Establish strong mentoring and induction programs that specifically emphasize CRP. Federal or state matching grants could ensure that districts are able to provide all student-teachers and new teachers with the induction support they need. We suggest that districts tailor their induction programs to promote community engagement and facilitate the development of networks between teachers and community leaders. Emdin (2016) stresses the importance of spending time in students’ communities by attending church services, talking to community leaders and figureheads—including pastors and barbershop owners—and becoming conversant in local codes and styles of communication. Since mentorship between veteran teachers and new teachers is a key part of a successful induction program, we suggest that veteran teachers develop walking tours of the community and lead repeated visits to community institutions as part of their mentorship.
Include CRP in principal training programs. Sutcher et. al. (2016) demonstrates that the practices of new teachers are enhanced when their mentors also receive formal training and support. Maloney (2012) documents the enormous effect that a school’s principal can have on new teachers’ success in the classroom, because principals have an enormous impact on school-wide culture and values. It is essential that principals commit to enacting CRP through professional development, individual mentorship, and school culture. In order to ensure that pre-service and new-teacher CRP trainings function effectively, principal training programs should be strengthened to give principals greater support in the integration of CRP into school curriculum and culture.
Districts should require teacher certification procedures and/or hiring portfolios to include a project relating to CRP . Some potential projects might include:
A unit that centers on the contributions of people of color to the field in question.
A self-reflective autobiography in which teachers interrogate their own racial and socioeconomic background and how that influences their teaching practice. Emdin (2016) stresses this kind of self-reflective work as particularly crucial, arguing: “The teacher must work to ensure that the institution does not absolve them of the responsibility to acknowledge the baggage they bring to the classroom and analyze how that might affect student achievement” (p. 43). Incorporating an autobiographical activity like this into pre-teacher and pre-service training and making it available to principals would also give principals greater insight into the backgrounds, potential biases, and strengths of their incoming teachers.
A community history project in which incoming teachers immerse themselves in the local community, developing relationships with key community leaders and institutions in the process.

Challenges of Implementation

Though we maintain that CRP is necessary for closing the achievement gap and facilitating educational parity among students of color and their white counterparts, we foresee several challenges to our proposed reforms.

The culture of high-stakes testing that currently drives educational policy would make implementing CRP nation-wide challenging. The fact that funding and government grants are tied to testing performance incentivizes schools to prioritize teaching to the test over incorporating CRP techniques into the classroom (Morrison et. al., 2008).
Teachers may resist CRP because it requires them to fundamentally alter the power dynamic between themselves and students. They may also be unwilling to confront their own biases or to acknowledge their prior reliance on the deficit model. Finally, teachers may be unwilling to adopt a critical sociopolitical consciousness because of their own personal political beliefs. (Sleeter, 2011; Young, 2010)
The dearth of data demonstrating the correlation between CRP and improved student outcomes will likely make securing federal and state funding for CRP difficult (Sleeter, 2011).

One means of overcoming these obstacles might be to pilot policies promoting CRP in a few schools before implementing them district-wide. Districts could select schools where principals and teachers are excited about CRP; if the program were a success, that might generate enthusiasm among skeptical teachers and policymakers throughout the district. Moreover, teachers who participated in pilot programs could help develop lesson-planning and time-management strategies that minimize the conflict between CRP and standardized tests, which could then be incorporated into more far-reaching professional development programs.

Ultimately, our proposals seek to respond to the deficit model by better integrating teachers into the communities in which they teach, ensuring that teachers view the cultural diversity of their students as a strength rather than as something to be overcome. As Emdin notes, teachers should not go into communities of color with the presumption that those communities are a barrier to student success. The supposition “that students are in need of ‘cleaning up’ presumes that they are dirty” and the notion that a “school can give students ‘a life’ emanates from a problematic savior complex that results in making students, their varied experiences, their emotions, and the good in their communities invisible” (Emdin, 2016, p. 20). To eliminate the devastating effects of low-expectations and close the achievement gap, we must create policies that combat the trivialization and dismissal of communities of color by counteracting teacher bias and valorizing the cultural and intellectual contributions of communities of color.

Many different kinds of professional development exist. Policymakers and principals may wonder why culturally responsive pedagogy is the most urgent, the most cost-effective, and the most impactful program for their time and resources. We contend that CRP strikes at the root cause of the achievement gap. Where two decades of massive federal reforms have failed, CRP can succeed. Accountability, with its emphasis on sameness in content and pedagogical approaches, fails to move beyond the deficit model, where difference is a problem to be overcome. CRP treats cultural difference as an asset which can propel students to academic success, and creates a school climate where students of color can succeed. If policymakers are determined to substantially narrow the achievement gap, they should invest in CRP.

Works Cited

Advancement Project (Community Partners). (2010). Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance” and High-stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School-to-prison Pipeline. Advancement Project.

Au, W. (2010). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. Routledge.

Ansell, S. Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. (2011, July 7). Issues A-Z: Achievement Gap. Education Week. Retrieved April 25, 2017 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/

Chen, G. (2014, December 16). ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ Seeks to Give African-American Boys a Boost. Retrieved from https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/my-brothers-keeper-seeks-to-give-african-american-boys-a-boost.

Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.

Emdin, C. (2016). For white folks who teach in the hood—and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.

Excerpts From Bush’s Speech on Improving Education. (1999, September 3). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/03/us/excerpts-from-bush-s-speech-on-improving-education.html

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3) , 465-491.

Losen, D. J., & Gillespie, J. (2012). Opportunities suspended: The disparate impact of disciplinary exclusion from school. The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at The Civil Rights Project, University of California, Los Angeles.

Maloney, P. (2012). Schools Make Teachers: The Case of Teach For America and Teacher Training. PhD diss., Yale University Department of Sociology.

Morrison, K. A., Robbins, H. H., & Rose, D. G. (2008). Operationalizing culturally relevant pedagogy: A synthesis of classroom-based research. Equity & Excellence in Education, 41(4) , 433-452.

Patton, D. (2011). Evaluating the Culturally Relevant and Responsive Education Professional Development Program at the Elementary School Level in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 9(1), 71-107.

Romero, A., Arce, S., & Cammarota, J. (2009). A Barrio pedagogy: identity, intellectualism, activism, and academic achievement through the evolution of critically compassionate intellectualism. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2) , 217–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320902995483

Sleeter, C. E. (Ed.). (2011). Professional development for culturally responsive and relationship-based pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang.

Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D. (2016). A coming crisis in teaching? Teacher supply, demand, and shortages in the US. Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute.

Young, E. (2010). Challenges to conceptualizing and actualizing culturally relevant pedagogy: How viable is the theory in classroom practice?. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(3) , 248-260.

Our Mission

The Deficit Model Is Harming Your Students

Raise your underserved students’ expectations by raising your own, and create a series of reachable, data-based goals, scaffolding your instruction and mitigating their fear of failure.

A closeup of a teenage girl sitting at her desk, smiling. One hand is resting on an opened notebook, and her other hand is holding a pencil above a sheet of paper she's writing on. Other students are sitting throughout the classroom.

Believe That Your Students Can Learn

Students know their shortcomings, and so many -- especially minority males -- act up, act out, or drop out to rebel against the prevailing, unsubstantiated notion that all one has to do is work harder .

An article from The Atlantic related a study where white college students were surveyed about their perceptions of their non-white peers. Their perceptions of Hispanic and black urban students: They "do not work hard enough to improve their life circumstances." This belief isn't limited to students; it impacts teachers as well.

Unfortunately, some educators work from this deficit model, which means they believe that if underserved students worked harder, they would achieve. This is a problem. According to a National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) study, teachers' expectations impact student success more than a student's own motivation. Stated in their study, tenth-grade students whose teachers had high expectations of them -- compared to poor expectations -- were three times more likely to graduate from college .

Students of color and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are at a disadvantage when it comes to teachers' expectations. According to a 2014 Center for American Progress report , high school teachers believe that high-poverty, black, and Hispanic students are 53, 47, and 42 percent less likely to graduate from college compared to their white peers.

The educators' expectations are nuanced to exclude students who may not have the advantages of the middle class. These intangible middle class advantages include such things as a computer with internet access at home, a quiet place to study and complete homework, working parent(s) above the poverty line, no pressure to get a low-level job in high school to help pay the rent or support the family, and no fear of the streets upon which they live.

Carlos Nava, a Trinidad Garza alumnus , almost didn't graduate. We set high expectations and believed that he could achieve them. Now he's applying for graduate school. He wants to become a history professor, and he will.

Convince Your Students That High Expectations Are Attainable

Trinidad Garza Early College High School (ECHS) exemplifies the adage that "all students can learn." This is true for underserved urban youth who may be the first in their family to attend college or to graduate from high school. Garza ECHS is an exemplar of the oft-stated and sometimes overused buzzwords high expectations . Everyone in education claims to have high expectations, but not everyone strategizes to convince the students that those expectations are attainable.

Create Reachable, Intermediate Acceleration Goals With Your Students

Simply placing a high standard for students is not adequate. Those standards and expectations must have reachable, intermediate acceleration goals for students. The expectations must be realistic and recognized by the students. This is the connection between high expectations, optimism, realistic hope, and student achievement.

Help Your Students Mitigate Their Fear of Failure

Garza ECHS doesn't throw students in the deep end of the pool and expect them to swim. First, we mitigate their fear of failure, and then gradually plan for short-term successes. By building faculty-student relationships through knowing students' names, strengths, and challenges, the faculty can begin building the trust that makes it OK to fail forward .

Instead of focusing on our students' perceived deficits, we focus on what they can do. The Garza Intervention Team (GIT) -- a solutions-focused faculty committee that meets weekly to provide individualized interventions -- assigns mentors (sometimes teachers, sometimes upperclassmen) to encourage our students toward success. We set up mandatory tutoring with teachers during study hall and after school to bridge any gaps. One student with home circumstances that might limit most has been tutored in Algebra 1 for almost the entire year. He's persevered and, in his words, is finally "getting it."

We recognize that there may be numerous short-term plans -- some successful and some perhaps not. The setbacks aren't losses; they're learning events. We go back to the overall plan and strategize alternate ways. The main point is that we never give up on creating short-term wins. We teach that failure is not the ending -- it's the beginning.

Use Data to Foster Short-Term Wins

Like any high-performing educators, we strive to competently use data for short-term wins and next-goal planning. To accomplish those wins, we've become "data geeks." We triangulate the data from reading inventories, state accountability measures, and national college readiness exams. Our faculty has become knowledgeable with blueprints, curriculum documents, interim assessments, and formative assessments. However, first and foremost, we realize that each data point is a student -- a real person, not just a statistic. As we use the data to plan short-term goals, we work with students so that they also own their achievement.

The GIT and the instructional roundtables that follow are the most important ownership interventions. Each student, as well as his or her parents, is integral to the roundtable where solutions are decided with the student's input. They have to own the solution:

Will they attend tutoring?
Who would they like as a mentor?
What do they need from us to help them own their learning?
How does their time management impact their performance?

Their voice and participation in the planning for success have a huge impact on their motivation to participate.

Scaffold Instruction and Goals

The Jobs for the Future website states:

At Garza ECHS, we scaffold the accelerated learning experiences from the known to the unknown -- based on data. We ask:

What do you know now?
What do you need to know for our next goal?

These questions for students and teachers are the beginning point.

We can give hope to a student who may enter our Early College reading at the third-grade Lexile. We facilitate the pathway to achievement as we expect them to be college-ready. We communicate through our words and actions that we're there with him or her along the entire pathway on this journey of short-term wins. The faculty strategizes attainable, immediate goals until the student reaches the ultimate goal of college readiness. Garza counselors support students' socio-emotional fears about rigor. Scaffolding these goals helps to convince students that they can attain, that they can be college-ready. Short-term wins matter.

High expectations are not illusory. They are real in a culture of achievement and collaborative teamwork. After all, as John F. Kennedy said, "A rising tide raises all boats."

Trinidad Garza Early College High School

Per pupil expenditures, free / reduced lunch, demographics:.

This blog post is part of our Schools That Work series, which features key practices from Trinidad Garza Early College High School .

IMAGES

Shifting from Deficit Thinking to Asset-Based Feedback • TechNotes Blog
Combatting Deficit Thinking in the Classroom
ADHD: Signs, Symptoms, and Causes
Combatting Deficit Thinking In The Classroom
Challenging 'deficit thinking'
Asset vs. Deficit Model of Education by Jinah Park on Prezi

VIDEO

Deficit Thinking and Urban Education Indie Project
Language across the curriculum
Deficit
Creativity in Education Summit 2023: Learning Creatively and Critically About Digital Transformation
Learning Outcomes Of Critical Thinking
Deficit Thinking: What is it???

COMMENTS

What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of Conceptualizations of Deficit
Providing a clear definition can minimize the likelihood that they misapply this concept or readers interpret their analysis in ways that cause confusion. ... Equity in Victorian education and "deficit" thinking. Melbourne Studies in Education, 43 (1), 83-105. Kundu, A. (2014). Grit, overemphasized; Agency, overlooked. Phi Delta Kappan ...
The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice
'Deficit thinking' refers to the notion that students (particularly those of low income, racial/ethnic minority background) fail in school because such students and their families have internal defects (deficits) that thwart the learning process (for example, limited educability, unmotivated; inadequate family support). Deficit thinking, an endogenous theory, 'blames the victim' rather than ...
Combatting Deficit Thinking In The Classroom
Correcting the deficit in critical thinking. Teacher-training is beginning to focus more on addressing the ideas that lead to deficit thinking (and ways to redress the balance). The opposite of deficit thinking is the ability to work on the student's strengths and work with those to help them improve in their studies.
PDF Identifying and Disrupting Deficit Thinking
two ways. First, we encourage scholars to understand anti-deficit thinking, which requires. comprehending the impact of language and discourse on how people are situated in research, how questions and language are framed, and how findings are reported. Second, we encourage.
Deficit Mindset
Deficit thinking limits student outcomes. Deficit thinking causes educators to lower their expectations based on what their students and schools lack, which leads to lower outcomes. For example, a teacher might assign easier work to a student who's behind and excuse them from grade-level instruction rather than taking strategic action to ...
PDF Deficit Thinking and a Growth Mindset.
Deficit thinking can create a state of mind in students that can become an obstacle to their success. Embracing a growth mindset can help create a better state of mind for the student. Ideally the students, educators, and other supporter of the students will contribute to the growth mindset, but a student's embrace of a growth mindset is also ...
Reframing Educational Outcomes: Moving beyond Achievement Gaps
The term "achievement gap" has a negative and racialized history, and using the term reinforces a deficit mindset that is ingrained in U.S. educational systems. In this essay, we review the literature that demonstrates why "achievement gap" reflects deficit thinking. We explain why biology education researchers should avoid using the ...
Full article: The reproduction of deficit thinking in times of
Background. Deficit thinking is often seen as a major barrier to reduce long-lasting inequalities in Western education. It relates to a discourse of negativity and disempowerment (McCallum, Ryan, and Caffery Citation 2022).Deficit thinking is linked to narratives that blame underrepresented groups for their unequal position and deny the existence of structural or systemic factors causing and ...
What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of ...
Deficit thinking encourages "victim blaming;" it favors explanations that hold group members personally responsible for outcomes (e.g., "It's because of who they are"), as opposed to explanations ...
[PDF] What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of Conceptualizations of
This article examines the underrepresentation of African American and Hispanic students in gifted education, proposing that social inequality, deficit thinking, and microaggressions contribute to the …
Seeping Deficit Thinking Assumptions Maintain the Neoliberal Education
From a literature review conducted on deficit thinking and deficit practices in schools, I developed three different frameworks for understanding the roots of deficit thinking: (a) pseudo-scientific, (b) sociological-cultural, and (c) socioeconomic.
Digication ePortfolio :: Deficit Thinking in Education :: Deficit Thinking
Deficit thinking has led to the belief that children in poverty are uneducable. This leads to tracking students into remedial courses, special education or negative school environments (Valenzuela, 1999). Once students are tracked into these systems, it is almost impossible to climb out. They become defined by a label that represents how others ...
(PDF) The Resilience of Deficit Thinking
Abstract. Deficit thinking, which situates school failure in the minds, bodies, communities and culture of students, dominates schooling practices in the US and Canada. From this perspective, the ...
It's Not a Deficit. And You Don't Need to "Fix" It
In education, deficit thinking can discourage teachers and administrators from recognizing and acknowledging the positive values, traits, and dispositions of certain students. Deficit thinking focuses entirely on what these students may not have access to. This results in educators ignoring the lived experiences and knowledge students already ...
Identifying and Disrupting Deficit Thinking
Education scholars and researchers are often socialized into deficit thinking. In this article, we highlight a few common ways — among many — that deficit thinking emerges in educational research.
The Evolution of Deficit Thinking
Deficit thinking refers to the notion that students, particularly low income minority students, fail in school because they and their families experience deficiencies that obstruct the leaning process (e.g. limited intelligence, lack of motivation, inadequate home socialization). Tracing the evolution of deficit thinking, the authors debunk the ...
The Evolution of Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice
Conceptualizing The Notion Of Deficit Thinking, Richard R. Valencia Early racist discourses - roots of deficit thinking, Martha Menchaca genetic pathology model of deficit thinking, Richard R. Valencia deficit thinking models based on culture - the anthropological protest, Douglas E. Foley cultural and accumulated environmental deficit models, Arthur Pearl contemporary deficit thinking ...
Deficit model
The deficit model of teaching, in which the teacher provides the learning to make good a deficit, stands in direct contrast to the belief that the teacher's role is to draw out learners' tacit knowledge and understanding through questioning and facilitation. The deficit model perspective is also apparent in the view expressed in some discourses ...
Dismantling Deficit Thinking
Dismantling deficit thinking works to challenge the normative practices of assuming that students who do not fit the stereotype of a traditional student are lackin. In the tradition of other asset-based pedagogies, dismantling deficit thinking works to honor prior knowledge and experiences that students already have, but also acknowledges the ...
What is Deficit Thinking?
Article 13 of the guarantees all children and young people the right to express themselves freely. Deficit thinking is the idea that young people from "at risk" groups fail in school due to "internal deficiencies" is the root of most challenges facing the education system.
ERIC
This book includes eight chapters that explore the history and current status of educational "deficit thinking" and its effects on educational policies and practices. Educational deficit thinking is a form of blaming the victim that views the alleged deficiencies of poor and minority group students and their families as predominantly responsible for these students' school problems and academic ...
Thinking Beyond the Deficit Model: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and the
State and district education agencies can play a key role in supporting culturally relevant teachers by researching, making accessible, and/or mandating culturally relevant materials in schools. For example, state agencies can research and develop free online resource banks of culturally relevant reading materials, data, posters, and ideas for ...
The Deficit Model Is Harming Your Students
Yes, count me in. Unfortunately, some educators work from this deficit model, which means they believe that if underserved students worked harder, they would achieve. This is a problem. According to a National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) study, teachers' expectations impact student success more than a student's own motivation.