ABSTRACT
I have thought and written much the past several years about deficit ideology— about how we, as educators, often spurn and endorse it simultaneously. Deficit ideology refers to a set of beliefs (or ideology) that pegs people in poverty as morally, intellectually, and even spiritually deficient. Equally sinister, it attributes outcome inequalities, such as those related to high school graduation rates or standardized test scores, to that deficiency. In fact, the deficit ideologue generally believes that poverty itself is an outcome of an individual’s deficiencies. Everybody has an equal opportunity to succeed, the thinking goes, if people just work hard enough. So people who get good grades, graduate from college, or earn loads of money are assumed to have put in the effort and earned it. And those who don’t? Well, they just didn’t work hard enough.
