Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking

Educational Thought and Practice

Richard R. Valencia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136988080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Deficit thinking is a pseudoscience founded on racial and class bias. It "blames the victim" for school failure instead of examining how schools are structured to prevent poor students and students of color from learning. Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking provides comprehensive critiques and anti-deficit thinking alternatives to this oppressive theory by framing the linkages between prevailing theoretical perspectives and contemporary practices within the complex historical development of deficit thinking.

Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking examines the ongoing social construction of deficit thinking in three aspects of current discourse – the genetic pathology model, the culture of poverty model, and the "at-risk" model in which poor students, students of color, and their families are pathologized and marginalized. Richard R. Valencia challenges these three contemporary components of the deficit thinking theory by providing incisive critiques and discussing competing explanations for the pervasive school failure of many students in the nation's public schools. Valencia also discusses a number of proactive, anti-deficit thinking suggestions from the fields of teacher education, educational leadership, and educational ethnography that are intended to provide a more equitable and democratic schooling for all students.

1
The Construct of Deficit Thinking

School Failure

Widespread and intractable school failure among millions of students in kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) education in the U.S. is deplorable. Unfortunately, many African Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, some other Latinos, and American Indians—especially those students of color from economically poor and working-class backgrounds—experience such failure (e.g., disproportionately high dropout rates from secondary school). School failure is the persistently, pervasively, and disproportionately low academic achievement among a substantial proportion of low-SES students of color (Valencia, 2002). Indeed, this pattern of low academic achievement of many students of color is long-standing. As a case in point, let us examine the 1927 master’s thesis by Rollen Drake.¹

A Comparative Study of the Mentality and Achievement of Mexican and White Children reports one of the earliest comparative investigations of academic achievement of Mexican American and White students. Seventh- and eighth-grade students attending a public school in Tucson, Arizona, participated in Drake’s (1927) study. Table 1.1 presents comparative descriptive statistics for this investigation undertaken more than eight decades ago. For the Mexican American sample, I present, on the bottom half of Table 1.1, characteristics that describe the group’s performance on the Stanford Achievement Test. As the data show, the Mexican American students, compared to their White peers, as a group demonstrated a depressed mean, restriction in variability, and a positively skewed distribution.

I must underscore that the Mexican American group also demonstrated overlap, meaning that some Mexican American students in Drake’s study performed higher in achievement than some of their White peers (i.e., 15.4% of the Mexican American students exceeded the median score for the White students). It is important to emphasize that these four characteristics of Mexican American achievement test performance seen in this 1927 study became a recurring pattern for Mexican American students, as well as other Latino and African American students, for decades to come (Valencia, 2002). In addition to the features of a depressed mean, restricted variability, and positive skew in test scores—which signal trouble—we also need to be mindful of the overlap feature. To disregard or ignore overlap demeans students

Table 1.1 Descriptive Statistics for Stanford Achievement Test (Form A) for Mexican and White Students

of color as it may lead to a stereotype that all such students are low achievers.

School failure among numerous low-SES students of color manifests in various ways. Once again, let us take Mexican American students as a case in point—who share much in common with K–12 Puerto Rican and African American students regarding school failure. In a previous publication (Valencia, 2002), I discuss nine schooling conditions that play a significant role in shaping and reproducing school failure among numerous Mexican American students (i.e., school segregation, language/cultural exclusion, school financing, teacher–student interactions, teacher certification, curriculum differentiation, special education, gifted/talented education, and the Mexican American teaching force). For example, school segregation continues as a ubiquitous contemporary schooling reality for these students. Historically, the school failure of Mexican American students in the Southwest region of the U.S. originated and intensified in the crucible of forced segregation (Valencia, 2008, chapter 1; Valencia, Menchaca, & Donato, 2002). Segregated schooling of Mexican Americans and other students of color frequently led, and still leads, to inferior schooling, hence school failure (San Miguel & Valencia, 1998; Valencia, 2005; Valencia, 2008, chapter 1; Valencia et al., 2002). Another influential schooling condition, inequities in public school financing, also contributes to the school failure of students of color, particularly Mexican Americans and African Americans. For example, historically in Texas property-rich White school districts, in comparison to property-poor Mexican American school districts, regularly provided considerably broader and superior educational experiences for their students (e.g., better equipped libraries; lower teacher–pupil ratios; higher paid teachers; see Valencia, 2008, chapter 2).

In Valencia (2002), I also discuss six schooling outcomes (i.e., school failure) that characterize the educational reality of a substantial segment of the K–12 Mexican American public school enrollment. Mexican American students—in comparison to their White peers—perform, on average, at lower levels on various academic achievement tests, have higher rates of grade retention, and drop out of high school at higher rates (the three other schooling outcomes concern college enrollment, high-stakes testing, and school stress). In summary, the structural inequality perspective contends that strong and predictable linkages exist between schooling conditions and schooling outcomes: Racialized opportunity structures lead to racialized academic achievement patterns.

Theoretical Perspectives Proffered to Explain School Failure

What accounts for school failure experienced by a sizeable proportion of low-SES students of color?² To be sure, scholars have not kept silent on this issue. They have offered many contrasting explanations, and we should best think of them as “families” of explanatory paradigms. In brief, these models focus on:

Communication Process

The earliest variant of this family of models is the “cultural difference” framework, which has its roots in the early 1970s (Baratz & Baratz, 1970; Labov, 1970; Valentine, 1971). This perspective, launched as a reactive, but serious critique of the 1960s deficit thinking models (see Pearl, 1997b), asserted that one should view the alleged deficits among children and families of color (particularly of low-SES background) more accurately as differences. Proponents of the cultural difference framework contended that the basis of the discontinuity between student and school often lay in a mismatch between the home culture and the school culture (e.g., regarding children’s mother tongue; children’s learning styles) that leads to learning problems for culturally diverse students (e.g., Hale-Benson, 1986; Ramírez & Castañeda, 1974). Regarding the early culturally shaped learning styles viewpoint, scholars have critiqued this viewpoint for its unsupported generalizations, and even stereotypes (see Irvine & York, 1995).

As scholarly discourse of the cultural difference model evolved, one variant focused on possible misunderstandings between student and teacher in verbal and nonverbal communication styles (Erickson, 1987). Such misunderstandings from these marked boundaries often result in teachers labeling students as unmotivated to learn. In short, such linguistic differences may lead to trouble, conflict, and school failure. An insightful analysis of this communication process perspective is seen in Lisa Delpit’s 1995 book, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. Drawing from her experiences as a school teacher, graduate student, and a professor of teacher education (i.e., preprofessional teacher training), Delpit delves deeply into communication blocks between students of color and teachers (predominantly White). One of the major themes Delpit focuses on is what she refers to as “the culture of power” (p. 24). She proposes that five premises need to be considered in regard to understanding how teachers have power over students. To wit:

1. Issues of power are enacted in the classroom.

2. There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power.”

3. The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.

4. If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.

5. Those with power are frequently least aware of—or least willing to acknowledge—its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence. (pp. 24–26)

With these premises in mind, Delpit contends that instructional methodology, centering on different perspectives concerning the disagreements over “skill” versus “process” methods of teaching, can lead to an awareness of student detachment and miscommunication, and thus to a comprehension of what she refers to as the “silenced dialogue” (p. 24). Rather than a “skill” versus “process” instructional pedagogy, Delpit contends that “the actual practice of good teachers of all colors typically incorporates a range of pedagogical orientations” (p. 24). In summary, Delpit (p. 45) suggests that in order to optimize the teaching/learning of children of color and of low-SES background, these students

must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own “expertness” as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent.

The communication process framework certainly has theoretical import in advancing our understanding of school failure, as well as success, for low-SES students of color. Researchers in this area, however, have raised issues about the dearth of empirical inquiry that has been advanced to demonstrate the nature, presence, and academic effects of cultural discontinuity between home and schools. Such concerns have existed for at least two decades (see Kagan, 1990; Tyler et al., 2008), and have led researchers to design methodological approaches to investigate, quantitatively, cultural discontinuity (e.g., Tyler et al., 2008). Notwithstanding that scholars have conducted extremely little empirical research in this area, the communication process family of models has considerable potential to further our understanding of academic performance variability among students of color.

Caste

Another explanation of school failure lay in “caste theory,” a model advanced by the late educational anthropologist John Ogbu (see, e.g., Ogbu, 1978, 1986, 1987, 1991, 1994). In his numerous writings, Ogbu classifies racial/ ethnic minority groups in the United States as either “immigrant minorities” (e.g., some Latinos from Central America; Koreans; Japanese) or nonimmigrant or “involuntary minorities” whose current societal status is rooted in slavery (e.g., African Americans), conquest (e.g., American Indians), or conquest and colonization (e.g., Mexican Americans; Puerto Ricans). Sometimes referring to these involuntary minorities as “caste-like,” Ogbu (1991) asserts that members of these groups “resent the loss of their former freedom, and they perceive the social, political, and economic barriers against them as part of their undeserved oppression” (p. 9). Ogbu (1991) also argues that involuntary minorities experience frequent discriminatory treatment with respect to being “confronted with social and political barriers, given inferior education, and derogated intellectually and culturally, and they may be excluded from true assimilation into the mainstream society” (p. 9). Obgu’s caste theory is not without its critics (see, e.g., Foley, 1991, 2004, 2005; Trueba, 1991). For example, Ogbu’s framework tends to assert that caste-like students’ school failure is endogenously based. Once overwhelmed, such minority students

develop a dysfunctional oppositional culture that leads them to believe that they cannot be both academically successful and ethnically different. In short, caste theory makes a powerful case that involuntary minorities are not likely to succeed in school and life.

(Foley, 1991, p. 67)

Social Reproduction and Resistance

Numerous scholars have advanced this family of theories (e.g., Aronowitz & Giroux, 1993; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; De Jesús, 2005; Oakes, 1985; Pearl, 1991, 2002). This cluster is also referred to as “structural inequality” or “systemic inequalities” models. When one analyzes the poor academic achievement of many students of color in the widest cultural, economic, and political contexts, macrolevel elements pertaining to (a) vicissitudes of the national economy, (b) political influence over school policy and practice (macropolitics), and (c) the top-down, authoritarian nature of schooling are all factors theorists deem to contribute to school failure (Pearl, 1991, 1997a, 2002). In his discussion of systemic inequities, Pearl (2002) comments on the vital role of history in understanding school failure of students of color:

Systemic refers to established processes whereby values, traditions, hierarchies, styles, and attitudes are deeply embedded into the political, economic, and cultural structures of any society. The systems that have emerged are the consequences of historical influences modified by current political pressures. History establishes in various, often subtle or disguised forms, the means by which people are included or excluded from positions of power and influence. Unless we fully understand the consequences of a particular history we fail to appreciate how Chicano school failure [for example] is the logical consequence of a once conquered people paying a continuous price for being displaced by victors leading to systematic exclusion from positions of authority and influence (see Moreno, 1999; San Miguel & Valencia, 1998). The legacy of that history finds current expression in denial of language, particular forms of miscarriages of justice, as well as ever-recurring stereotypes that influence decisions at every juncture and at every level of an individual’s life. History establishes the basis for inclusion and exclusion in various societal institutions. Most powerfully, that historical legacy of inclusion and exclusion is increasingly infused throughout education. (p. 336)

Furthermore, De Jesús (2005) remarks that according to social reproduction and resistance theories,

The role of schools is to sort individuals and groups according to the hierarchical division of labor in society. Following in this vein, schools must shape the attitudinal and ideological dispositions and values necessary for the maintenance of asymmetrical power relations between dominant and subordinate groups. Resistance theories seek to integrate the idea of individual agency with understanding the complexity of social reproduction processes.

(De Jesús, p. 345)

Deficit Thinking

Of the several theories that scholars, educators, and policymakers have advanced to explicate school failure among low-SES students of color, the deficit model, the subject of this book, has held the longest currency—spanning well over a century, with roots going back even further as evidenced by the early racist discourses from the early 1600s to the late 1800s (Menchaca, 1997). The deficit thinking model, at its core, is an endogenous theory—positing that the...