Cultural and Linguistic Deficit Explanations of School Failure

Early writings on “disadvantaged” young people in the 1960s focused on their alleged cultural and educational “deprivation” or deficits. Middle-class education writers and policy advocates created harmful myths of cultural and linguistic deprivation to explain the school failure of some children (Labov, 1970). The cultural- and linguistic-deprivation theses were then incorporated into teacher folk knowledge and curriculum plans (Gorski, 2008; Payne, 2001).

Compensatory education services based on the culture of poverty thesis continue as an important element in the school curriculum through the federal program known as Chapter 1. But three decades of this program have resulted in only marginal improvements in the achievement gap between middle-class students and students living in poverty. The program has never been adequately funded, but an additional problem is conceptual. Compensatory education programs and the culture of poverty thesis—as interpreted by a generation of mainly European American, mainly middle-class education researchers—often worked from the unexamined assumption that there must be something wrong with poor people or they wouldn’t be poor.

In the view of William Julius Wilson, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the government policies that followed resulted mainly in the strengthening of the Black middle class. Wilson’s emphasis on the importance of economics in race relations followed the lead of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early on, King recognized the need for a broad, inclusive movement to promote economic justice as well as racial equality. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), along with others, promoted a multiracial struggle for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign of 1967–1968 (Dyson, 2000). According to King: “We’re going to take this movement and ... reach out to poor people in all directions in this country ... into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West after the Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the ghettos after the Negroes and the Puerto Ricans. And we are going to bring them together into something bigger than just a civil rights movement for Negroes” (quoted in Guinier & Torres, 2002).

King united the struggle for civil rights with union struggles and other efforts to end class oppression. Unfortunately, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, before the Poor People’s Campaign could organize a sustainable movement for economic justice.

Since the 1980s, the economic problems of the poor have increased significantly. Major corporations closed their plants in the industrialized and unionized northeastern United States, depriving hundreds of thousands of working-class African Americans and Latinos of good jobs and steady income. Plants moved to nonunion areas of the South and the Southwest and to Third World nations, devastating the economic base of the African American and Latino communities and the lives of many in the working class. In 1977, General Motors Corporation had 77,000 jobs for hourly workers in Flint, Michigan. By 1998, it only had 33,000. Working-class union families lost their jobs or were pushed into marginal employment in low-paying service industries. The economic crisis in urban industrial areas has devastated many African American families since the 1980s. Sociologist Wilson describes the consequences of this economic shift in urban areas in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) and The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (1999). Jean Anyon, in Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement (2005), describes how race, class, and the lack of a government policy on economic growth continue to work together to reinforce school failure. Both authors recommend government policies to promote economic growth and change for the entire lower class. In this view, general programs for the poor, such as jobs, housing, and health, are needed to go along with school reform.

Reading about the schools and the very poor in areas like Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles does not tell teachers much about the life experiences of children in midsize cities like Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, and Denver. Nor does the concept of an urban underclass adequately describe their experiences in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and the other large cities of the South.

Even in large northern urban ghettos where the economic crisis is most severe and social institutions have often failed and where some communities are dominated by gangs and the drug culture, not all of the families have lost the battle for their children. Most parents love their children and want the best for them. They work long, hard hours, often at demeaning jobs, to feed and clothe their children. It is important that teachers avoid stereotypes about poor and working-class students.

Some ultra-conservative foundations, such as the Ollin Foundation, have generously funded a branch of advocacy writing that purports to demonstrate genetic differences by class and by race. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, is an example of these works. The authors have sought to revalidate the discredited theories of genetic and cultural deprivation from the 1960s. Charles Murray’s previous book, Losing Ground (1984), helped to set the agenda for the current attacks on the welfare system. A wide range of social scientists have demonstrated the flaws in argument and psychological measurement found in The Bell Curve. In spite of the numerous errors, a series of policy organizations continue to promote the ideas of genetic and cultural deprivation.

More recently, the culture of poverty arguments from the 1960s have reemerged in the popularly written teachers’ manuals and workshops of Ruby Payne (2001). Although her writings have encouraged teachers think about issues of poverty and family disruption, the reintroduction of the cultural deficit framework has all of the problems of earlier deficit thinking.

Payne has described some of the interactive manners in which poverty and family disruption contribute to school problems. Indeed, the middle class, to which author Payne claims to belong, has many examples of family disruption, lack of order, and living in the moment—maladies that Payne describes as representative of poverty.

Certainly, the school killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas (on March 24, 1998); Littleton, Colorado (on April 20, 1999); Santee, California (on March 5, 2001); and Blacksburg, Virginia (on April 16, 2007, when 32 were killed at Virginia Tech)—as well as the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and incidents of extreme violence in middle-class schools—indicate that dysfunctional lives and lack of preparation of children also occur within the middle class.