At its heart, the deficit model seems straight forward: students are lacking in knowledge or skill and they come to school in order to have that deficit removed or diminished. What I find interesting is that many of my peers, which include both teachers and administrators, responded negatively to this concept. But why?

Aren't many of our students lacking in the skills for which we as teachers have spent years of education learning to teach? Students in younger grades are obviously lacking in life skills as well as academic skills. In the colleges, these deficiencies still range from technical to academic.

What I find interesting is that this approach seems obvious and yet abhorrent: we must ask why not the deficit model?

In searching for the answer to this, I came across an essay "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work" by Jean Anyon in the anthology Justice, Ideology, and Education: An Introduction to the Social Foundations of Education with PowerWeb where she presented a brief summary of different types of schools that exist for different classes. The working-class school is identified by its procedural approach "involving rote behavior and very limited decision making or choice" (172). Middle-class schools, good work is identified as "getting the right answer" (176) while at affluent professional schools, work is creative and unique. Work "involves individual though and expressiveness, expansion, and illustration of ideas" (178). The last category she observes is the executive elite school where work is defined as "developing one's analytical intellectual powers" (181). What struck me while reading this essay is that, while it would be easy to apply the deficit model to any one of these schools, we face the disturbing issue that if you are going to define a deficit, you also need to draw a line to mark where the standard is.

Each of these schools draws the line somewhere that is valued by the surrounding community and would be wholly inappropriate in another environment. In other words, what is seen as the deficit is a function of society and class. In many ways, it is arbitrary, though organic, that is, seen by many as the way thing "just are" rather than an individual dictating the way things are. But the danger is that once you draw that line, create the standard expectation, students, teachers, and whole educational systems will rise, or lower, to those expectations. I think it telling that while we all chose to look at this as the negative model for this discussion, it is the one, I would argue, that is pervasive in the American educational system and is largely responsible for the emphasis on standards and testing that has overtaken real learning.

There is an excellent essay by Imani Perry on page 100 of Justice, Ideology, and Education: An Introduction to the Social Foundations of Education with PowerWeb. The author is 15 year old african-american girl who had experiences with both private and public schools. She talks about the difference between her private school where teachers encouraged creative problem solving and working out the process while in the public school, more emphasis was put on being precise and correct. She makes some of the same observations that Anyon does--that students are a reflection of the expectations of the teachers and that students will learn to fulfill those expectations. She includes race in her commentary saying that the school is often biased because the behavior valued by the middle class white instructors are different from the values and behavior of those student's other adult role models. I think this serves to illustrate the danger of the deficit model in that it is those with power that choose what is a deficit.

Though I have an argument with the simplicity of her argument, Dr. Ruby Payne in her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty provides an interesting quiz on poverty (which I suggest everyone take a look at) which illustrates very clearly that what we"know" and what we "see" is largely a function of our class. The same is true of teaching. It would be interesting to do a study where a group of teachers from impoverished schools, working class schools, middle-class schools, upper middle-class, and prep schools are interviewed about their beliefs in education and students. How do these attitudes and beliefs of what is important, of what is a deficit, affect teaching and student achievement?