Leaders Excusing Deficit Thinking in the Guise of Social Justice

• In Event: Interrogating Deficit Thinking/Theorizing in Multiple Contexts

Abstract

School leaders experience ongoing challenges working in complex and quickly changing environments in which discourses are too often dominated by topics of accountability, high-stakes testing, and an empirical, data-driven standard of “scientific” educational research. Increasingly, these discourses are also driven by political movements decrying certain text books or urging the elimination of topics related to cultural history, including colonization or slavery. Yet, at the same time, 160 nations have signed onto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, which calls for “inclusive, equitable, and high quality education.”
Thus, it becomes important for educational leaders to understand their own conceptions of equity and to examine their practices for evidence of negativity, including racism, homophobia, or deficit thinking.
Objectives: The first purpose of this paper is to consider how principals conceptualize social justice and equity and to determine the extent to which their ideas are riven by anti-racism (Kendi, ???) or by implicit deficit thinking. The second purpose of this paper is to interrogate the research itself and consider whether dialogue could have been taken further using different methods and definitions.
Theoretical Perspective: The paper comes from a critical transformative perspective in which the author is driven by a conception of socially just education in which school-wide transformation is possible, and in which all students both achieve well academically and participate in discourses and experiences of social justice (Bieneman, 2011; Pinto et al. 2012; Shields, 2017). Nevertheless, finding school leaders whose beliefs and actions are consistent with this belief is less frequent than might be desired.
Methods: This paper is based on a series of research projects in which both teachers and school leaders were interviewed using semi structured protocols. In all studies, participants were chosen because of their reputations for excellence and social justice.
Conclusions: The majority of school leaders in challenging urban or suburban environments tended to place blame of the students and their families, indicating that they were doing the “best they could given the make-up of the school.” One, for example, indicated that taking students away from their homes and placing them in boarding schools might improve their attitudes and outcomes. Unfortunately, the dominant story line from educators focuses on deficits as neither the principal or teachers expected high levels of student participation or achievement. Thus, providing a “caring environment” was seen as a focus on social justice. A second finding was that in some schools, there were individual attempts to practice inclusion equity, and emancipation, but no systematic, school-wide emphasis.
Significance: Asking principals about their beliefs and practices resulted in very different conceptions of equitable education, many of which still retained deficit undertones. One might ask whether specifically interrogating their efforts to identify and eradicate specific forms of historic racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. would have resulted in more in-depth conversations and understandings.

Author

• Carolyn M. Shields, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author