Why Deficit Thinking Persists and What No One Is Talking About

Deficit thinking is one of the most persistent problems in education. It is a direct outcome of centuries of structural and institutional racism. As school psychologists, how might we break through to the groundwater to address the underlying issues that allow deficit thinking to persist?

I am often asked to speak on deficit thinking and strength-based practices. I have been vocal about the need for a shift toward more strength-based practice. But if we are not careful, we lose the plot. We talk about shifting language. We talk about seeing assets. We talk about changing mindsets. What we do not talk about enough is why deficit thinking exists and, even deeper, why it remains so persistent.

It is time to have an honest discussion about why deficit thinking persists. But first, we have to understand what deficit thinking is and how it shows up.

Deficit thinking is rooted in the groundwater.

What Is Deficit Thinking?

Deficit thinking is defined in Hacking Deficit Thinking as a distorted lens, focused on student weaknesses, that blames students and their families for student difficulties rather than acknowledging the impact of our practices and broader structural inequities.

To be clear, this is a lens through which adults and systems view students, not a characteristic of the students themselves.

For this discussion, when I use the word educators, I mean adults within the educational ecosystem. That includes teachers, administrators, support staff, school support staff, and even school psychologists.

When educators use a deficit thinking lens instead of a strength-based lens, it’is students who pay the price. It shows up when adults assume certain students are less capable before fully understanding their context, strengths, or needs.

Deficit Thinking shows up in policy solutions that focus on fixing a student rather than addressing the structures shaping the concern. It shows up through both implicit and explicit bias. And for school psychologists, it shows up in how we interpret referrals, what we choose to assess, how we frame our findings, and the recommendations or placements we support.

Instead of students being challenged and supported, they may be disengaged, tracked into less rigorous settings, denied access to meaningful opportunities, and viewed through labels that limit how others see their potential.

Deficit thinking reinforces inequitable outcomes, and those outcomes often reproduce themselves through self-sustaining feedback loops. Consider a student who struggles academically early in the year. If that difficulty is viewed through a deficit lens, attention quickly shifts to what is wrong rather than what support, instruction, or opportunity may be missing. The student may be described as low, referred with concern-heavy language, and given fewer chances to access rigorous work or demonstrate strengths.

Over time, lowered expectations shape how that student is taught, supported, and perceived. Then the limited opportunity becomes treated as proof that the original label was accurate. Over and over, the label is reinforced by the very conditions it helped create.

This article focuses on how that lens impacts Black students because the data on disproportionality in discipline, special education, and gifted identification is undeniable. The adults and systems producing those outcomes are looking through a deficit lens, whether they name it or not.

The Roots of Deficit Thinking

Deficit thinking did not appear out of nowhere. It was constructed, and it has a documented history.

Richard Valencia traced its roots to racist ideologies dating back centuries. In the mid-1700s, the belief that enslaved Africans were mentally deficient helped justify laws that made it illegal to teach them to read. Later, school segregation rested on the same premise: that Black people were intellectually inferior and did not belong.

These beliefs were not left in the past. In fact, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution in October of 2021 apologizing for its role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy. 

Just because you apologize does not undo the decades of systemic racism built into the groundwater. Those beliefs, practices, ideologies, and policies were built into the tools and policies educators still use today.

Lewis Terman, the Stanford psychologist who helped revise the Stanford-Binet IQ test and later served as president of the American Psychological Association, was also a leading advocate of eugenics.

Terman argued that intelligence was largely inherited and wrote that “dullness” among Black, Mexican, and Indigenous groups was “racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come.”

He said these children should be placed in separate classes because they “cannot master abstractions” but “can often be made efficient workers,” and he framed their reproduction as a eugenic concern.

His tests were adapted to classify 1.7 million soldiers during World War I, within a military already segregated by race. After the war, intelligence testing expanded rapidly in schools and helped reinforce sorting and tracking practices. Terman was also affiliated with the Human Betterment Foundation, a California eugenics organization that promoted sterilization. That means the history behind intelligence testing is not separate from eugenics. It is part of it.

Lewis Terman did not appear in a vacuum. As APA’s historical chronology makes clear, psychology had already been entangled with scientific racism, eugenics, and efforts to classify people by supposed human value.

Raymond Cattell, whose work helped shape the Cattell-Horn and later Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of cognitive abilities, is the same Raymond Cattell identified in APA’s historical timeline for promoting racist and eugenic views. This creates a difficult but necessary tension for school psychology.

CHC theory remains widely used in modern psychoeducational assessment, yet the field has not fully reckoned with the racist history attached to one of its foundational contributors.

To me, what this means is we have to be honest about its intellectual inheritance. If the field claims a commitment to equity, culturally responsive practice, and strength-based assessment, then it cannot ignore the histories embedded in some of its most familiar tools, theories, and assessment practices.

Zero-tolerance policies followed a similar pattern. Developed in the wake of racial integration and unsupported by evidence that they made schools safer, they instead helped build a school-to-prison pipeline that pushed Black students out of classrooms at disproportionate rates.

The racist history matters and can not be ignored or forgotten because it helps explain the persistence. Deficit thinking is not a bad habit educators picked up somewhere. It is baked into the foundations of the systems, in the very groundwater we inherited. Then it becomes a lens through which people view the world.

The Persistence of Deficit Thinking

For context, I am writing from both lived and professional experience: as a Black man in America and as a Black male school psychologist with more than 15 years in the field, much of that time spent working with Black youth across the DMV.

As a practitioner, I saw Black male students referred to special education at disproportionate rates. I analyzed discipline data, calculated risk indices and ratios to measure and quantify disproportionality. I attended IEP meetings and read referral requests where Black students were quick to be referred, less likely to receive proactive support, and more likely to be identified with a disability. 

When I began working in DC, I noticed Black male students being identified disproportionately with Intellectual Disabilities. Conversely, Black students were less likely to be identified for gifted programs. Even the offerings of AP and honors classes were slim compared to other schools across the district.

Self-contained classes, one of the most restrictive placements, were often filled with Black boys. I saw this with my own eyes across every level I worked: elementary, middle, and high school.

These patterns have been documented for decades. What I saw and experienced substantiated the data.

Yet the patterns persist. Why? Because deficit thinking is persistent.

What We Carry Into Practice

We all carry implicit and explicit biases, and if they go unchecked, those biases shape how we refer, assess, interpret behavior, decide who gets support, and determine who receives the benefit of the doubt.

Bias does not need to be spoken to do damage.

Implicit bias shapes decisions in real time: who gets referred, who gets support, who gets the benefit of the doubt… and sadly, who does not.

When a Black student is sent to the office for “defiance or disrespect,” while a White student displaying the same behavior is redirected in the classroom, that is bias working through a deficit lens.

In February 2026, the current president shared a video on Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. The post drew bipartisan criticism, was later deleted, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially dismissed the backlash as “fake outrage.”

The current president refused to apologize. If you spent any time on social media, you saw that many people defended it. He gave people cover to say the quiet part out loud. 

The president often refers to Black women as “low-IQ” and recently called Rachel Scott, a Black woman reporter, a derogatory name. 

This is deficit thinking at its most explicit. The belief that Black people are inferior, are less than human, reduced to a racist stereotype that has been used to dehumanize Black people for centuries. Most deficit thinking in schools is not loud, it’s quiet and suttle. It sits in referral forms, assessment choices, placement decisions, and the assumptions we carry into every meeting. But the root is the same and it’s connected by the same thread: a lens that sees Black people as less than.

So How Do We Combat This Today?

Combating deficit thinking requires more than polished language about strength-based practice. This work has to go much deeper.

When people focus only on changing the words, they miss the point. Changing language without changing practice leaves deficit thinking intact. You can use the right terminology and still make the same harmful decisions.

Strength-based practice, done right, is rooted in identity, history, and how you see people before you ever begin to describe them.

Questions to Ask and the Work Beneath the Language

If we are serious about disrupting deficit thinking, then we have to go deeper than surface-level language shifts. We have to examine what we believe, how those beliefs shape practice, and what our daily decisions reveal.

Start with an honest examination of yourself. What beliefs do you hold about the students you work with? How does your worldview shape your practice? How does your identity influence the tools you choose and the students for whom you choose them?

Are you confronting injustice, or are you helping maintain systems of deficit thinking rooted in racism?

Do you believe every student has assets? How do you know? What tools do you use to identify them?

Do you believe some students are inherently less capable? Examine your practice. Which students do you typically qualify? Which ones receive certain disability classifications? Which ones are placed in more restrictive settings?

Then look at your caseload. Look at your referrals. Look at your recommendations. Notice which students you describe as “low” and which you describe as “capable.” Notice which families you call “uninvolved” and which you call “engaged.” Then trace those patterns back. Ask yourself where those beliefs came from, and be specific.

Look at what you measure. Look at the tools you choose, the questions you ask, the frameworks you pull from, and the language you use in your reports.

Are you documenting deficits because the system trained you to, or are you identifying strengths because you made that choice?

If you cannot answer those questions honestly and specifically, then you have work to do. We all have work to do.

Deficit thinking does not fade on its own. It is not just poor wording or limited training. It is a worldview with a long history, and that history still shows up in who we fear, who we doubt, who we over-identify, and who we deny access to opportunity.

If we are serious about ending deficit thinking, then we have to tell the truth about where it comes from. We have to examine our beliefs, not just our professional language. We have to question the systems, tools, and practices we inherited, especially the ones treated as neutral simply because they are familiar. And we have to stop mistaking surface-level change for progress while the same students keep paying the price.

This is not comfortable work. It should not be. Comfort has protected deficit thinking for generations, allowing it to persist.

Comfort helped Terman’s beliefs become policy, helped those policies become practice, and helped that practice become normal.

Cattell helped give deficit thinking a scientific language, helped that language shape assessment theory, and helped that theory become part of normal practice.

Comfort cannot be the goal. Disrupting deficit thinking must always be the goal.

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Byron M.L. McClure, D.Ed., NCSP is a school psychologist, Founder of School Psych AI, and author of Shift to What’s Strong: 6 Strength-Based Habits that Shape How You See Yourself, Your Students, and the World Around You.