Deficit-Based Education Theory

As explained by Richard Valencia, deficit-based thinking (or deficit-based pedagogy) offers a theoretical basis to account for the individual, cultural, ethnic, language, and social conditions perceived to be responsible for low academic performance in African American, Native American, Latino, Appalachian, and other underprivileged children. According to this deficit-based view, when individual students from cultural, racial, and ethnic-minority backgrounds enter school, they lack the self-determination, genuine interest, and knowledge-building skills to achieve academic [Page 219]success. The major assumption, in this view, is that children of minority ethnic or racial or of White low socioeconomic backgrounds bring into the classroom what are believed to be limited oral, social, interactional, and cognitive skills. The lack of these instrumental skills for academic success places students in an asymmetrical or unequal relationship to what Basil Bernstein considers as the more intellectually and linguistically equipped children of the middle and upper classes.

Norbert Dittmar, Jeff MacSwan, and Kellie Rolstad indicate that theories of low personal and academic achievement in impoverished children are often developed based on a stark contrast with the successful striving for academic achievement of affluent children. Based on this assertion, children who are brought up in financially insecure environments lack the necessary critical social skills, linguistic competency, and cognitive abilities. In their immediate social or family environments, they do not engage in intellectual conversations with highly educated and career-oriented adults who can pass on the necessary zeal for learning. The parents or community, through everyday socialization and labor-intensive practices, immerse students into a culture that lacks the linguistic and financial resources as well as the solid knowledge to stimulate these children intellectually and to instill in them the motivation for their academic success. Hence, so the theory holds, students are raised and socialized in deficit-based communities that allegedly hinder learning experiences, and later form a strong barrier in the school setting by not equipping students with the necessary linguistic, sociocognitive, and knowledge-building skills to succeed in school (see Valencia's work for a review of these theoretical frameworks).

Other scholars, such as William Ryan, Daniel G. Solórzano, Octavio Villalpando, Leticia Oseguera, and Valencia disagree with these views. These scholars contend that the failure of these children to succeed in school has to do with the design of school programs aimed at English-speaking middle-class students, whose parents are also educated and pass on these financial advantages, secure lifestyle, and knowledge to their children. Impoverished parents have less to pass on to their children; in school, however, their children encounter a curriculum and a school culture that has not been designed to meet their academic needs. As Ryan postulates, the deficit-based theory is sometimes regarded as an attempt to “blame the victim” of inequality, rather than to assign responsibility more broadly, especially to the designers and implementers of education policies. In this entry, the pros and cons of these arguments are reviewed in greater detail.