Faculty and Institutional Mindsets

Confusing Opportunity with Ability

This topic is connected to issues of individual biases, but it addresses broader - often institutional - mindsets. Beyond the individual classroom, there are pervasive attitudes in higher education about students who are historically underrepresented. It is easy to confuse opportunity with ability.  L. Nunn's 33 Simple Strategies for Faulty book leads with this concept:

“From where we stand at the front of the classroom, excellent K-12 education can look like intellectual talent in our students. Some students just seem to already have the hang of the kind of thinking our discipline requires and can recognize the kinds of evidence that matter. These students make a good impression on us. Indeed, they are smart. It’s important to remember that what looks like intellectual talent is likely the product of excellent academic preparation from school and earlier." (Nunn 2 - 3)

Two of the more persistent mindsets are the deficit mindset and assumption of achievement gaps; this section addresses both of these topics and provides alternate ways of conceptualizing how students interact with higher ed. 

 

Deficit vs. Asset Mindsets

Even if you have not reviewed SCC student demographics lately, one look in most of our college classrooms reminds us that students arrive at the college with a variety of lived experiences and academic preparations. When faculty and staff assume that students are deficient, teachers essential blame students for the educational circumstances that produced the deficiencies: "Deficit thinking ... situates school failure in the minds, bodies, communities and culture of students" (Curt Dudley-Marling, "The Resilience of Deficit Thinking Links to an external site.," Journal of Teaching and Learning, 10 (2015). 

Of course, adult students are at least partially responsible for their own success. But we often don't know anything about the academic background of students when we make judgements about their potential. When a student is struggling, deficit approaches assume that students are "lazy," "unprepared," or "incapable." 

A good resource for faculty thinking through asset/deficit mindsets (as well as blind/aware and equality/equity mindsets) is "A Framework for Educator Mindsets and Consequences Links to an external site." by Filback and Green. It identifies some of the natural consequences that happen when faculty assume that students "can't." Students are treated as incapable of performing rigorous work and are not provided challenging coursework that encourages them to learn, faculty don't put in the time and effort to help students over learning barriers, and faculty assumed the worst when problems arise. 

Switching to an asset mindset replaces "can't" with "not yet" and "not without high expectations and high support." It requires changing faculty attitudes and assumptions, but most of all, it requires changing classroom approaches. Many of the classroom approaches listed here are covered elsewhere in this PD course, but the following resources cover those more in detail:

 

Achievement vs. Opportunity Gaps

Another pervasive mindset is the conviction of the so-called "achievement gap." Much of the research around educational equity centers on this gap: the name often given to the differences in successful completion, grades and/or other academic performance between students of color and white and Asian students. It is a fact that - as a group - students of color don't graduate or continue in college at the same rates as their white peers. This is a significant issue. 

Calling this an achievement gap, however, is problematic. It places the responsibility and blame on the students. Phrased this way, it is the students who have failed to achieve the standard of white students. Student success is an extremely complex issue, and attributing all the responsibility to students is simplistic and, ultimately, wrong. Adjusting the mindsets of institutions, departments, and individual faculty mindsets are all important in changing the narrative about the possibilities for students in historically underrepresented groups.

To avoiding a mindset based in deficit thinking and stereotypes, it is important to reframe the issue from a lack of achievement to a fuller understanding. There are many ways to look at the data, but this section focuses on the work of one educational researcher, Richard Milner. 

 

Milner's Opportunity Gaps

H. Richard Milner's "Beyond a Test Score: Explaining Opportunity Gaps in Educational Practice" provides a way to think about the gap through an antiracist lens. A summary of key points from the article follows.

Milner begins by reminding educators that the very notion of an "achievement gap" requires an assumption that “All students live and operate in homogeneous environments with equality and equity of opportunity afforded to them” (694). Achievement relies on a level playing field at the start. Of course, that is simply not the case. The variety of experiences that students have - from where they live, the kinds of teachers that they have, the kind of family support they have at home, the types of resources they have in the classroom, and even the financial status of their districts - vary greatly. Those variations have impacts on how students learn.

Milner challenges the focus on achievement by developing this list of questions:

  1. “To what extent is achievement synonymous with learning?
  2. What does it mean for one group of students to learn and achieve in one school community in comparison to another?
  3. Who decides what it means to achieve, why, and how do we know?
  4. How do we address the kind of learning and knowledge acquisition that never show up on achievement measures -  including high-stakes tests?” (695)

By moving away from a limited focus on tests, grades, or outcomes as the only way to assess educational  effectiveness, the opportunity gap framework encourages educators to look inward and focus on the effectiveness of teachers and the educational system as well as students. The following video provides more context about Milner's arguments. 

To replace the emphasis on achievement, Milner's focus on opportunity aims to "assist researchers and theorists in naming, capturing, and transforming their explanations of educational practices related to issues of opportunity” as well as “explaining, problematizing, and perhaps more deeply understanding educational practices beyond an overreliance on an achievement gap” (698). 

Milner develops a framework to explain the opportunity gap based on five specific issues, and the following list provides a selection of quotes from the article that illustrates the concepts. 

1: Color Blindness

2: Cultural Conflicts

3: Myth of Meritocracy

4: Low Expectations and Deficit Mindsets

5: Context Neutral Mindsets

1. Color Blindness

“Research is clear that when educators adopt color-blind beliefs, ideologies, worldviews, and consequently, practices (Chapman, 2007; Howard, 2010; Johnson, 2002; Lewis, 2001; Milner, 2010), they can run the risk of consciously and subconsciously avoiding, missing, and overlooking an important identity characteristic of students: race. When educators pretend to be color-blind, they are, in effect, constructing and enacting curriculum and instructional practices for students they see as incomplete rather than the complete beings students are.” (699)

“Multicultural researcher James Banks (2001) explained that ‘a statement such as “I don’t see color“ reveals a privileged position that refuses to legitimize racial identifications that are very important to people of color and that are often used to justify inaction and perpetuation of the status quo’ (p. 12). Furthermore, educators who adopt and enact colorblind practices can lack the racial knowledge necessary to achieve pedagogical success with racially diverse students, especially for those who are relegated to the margins of teaching and learning in educational practices.” (699-700)

“I have learned from my research that educators who adopt color-blind approaches may not recognize how their own race and racialized experiences can shape what they are, how they teach it, and how they assess what has been taught.” (700)

 

2. Cultural Conflicts

“Researchers have found that conflicts, incongruence, and inconsistencies that educators and students encounter in the classroom can limit students’ learning opportunities (Delpit, 1995; Foster, 1997; Howard, 2001; Irvine, 2003). When educators operate primarily from their own cultural ways of knowing, the learning milieu can seem foreign to students whose cultural experiences are different from their teacher.” (701)

“Educators and students can work against each other which may leave the students feeling that their preferences, worldviews, beliefs systems, and actions are insignificant, disrespected, irrelevant, or subordinate to educators and to classroom and school life (Anyon, 1980; Milner, 2010). As a result students may refuse to engage in a classroom culture and refuse to learn.” (702)

“Even while students are told explicitly about the culture of power and are learning to survive and thrive within it, they should be empowered to challenge and question oppressive structures rather than conform to systems that make them feel like what urban educational research or Pedro Noguera (2003) called ‘prisoners’.” (702)

“Critical theorist Paulo Freire (1998) stressed that although students should be empowered to counter oppressive practices that place them in situations of prisonlike subordination, they must also be able to operate within the systems in order to change them. Knowing what the culture power actually is, how it works, and how power can be achieved are important aspects of consideration for student success.” (703)

 

3. Myth of Meritocracy

“However, while educators appear more comfortable addressing socioeconomic status and class, they sometimes misunderstand the socioeconomic status-education nexus. Their conceptions of what class is and how it affects their students, their student’s parents, and their own families can be grossly inaccurate and inadequate. In my research, I have learned that educators may embrace the idea that their own, their parents, and their students’ success and status have been earned (see e.g. Milner, 2010). They may believe that failure is solely a result of making bad choices and decisions - for example, an individual’s choice not to put forth effort in class. Unearned opportunities are sometimes passed down from one generation to the next. Yet many educators believe that their own success is merited because they have worked hard, followed the law, had the ability and skill, and made the right choices and decisions.” (704)

“At the center of the meritocracy argument for student success is opportunity. That is, U.S. society is philosophically and ideologically structured such that all people are supposedly created equally with the same opportunities for success.In reality, however, educational practices and opportunities are not equal or equitable.” (704)

“This philosophy can reject institutionalized and systemic issues and barriers that permeate policies and practices such as racism, sexism, classism, and discrimination both in the classroom and in society. The meritocracy argument does not appropriately take into consideration social reproduction and property: Wealthier students often inherit - materially, physically, socially, and culturally -- capital and property that have been and continues to be passed down from one generation to the next (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995).” (705)

 

4. Low Expectations and Deficit Mindsets

“Low expectations and deficit mindsets can make it difficult for educators to develop learning opportunities that challenge students cognitively. For instance, educators may believe that some students cannot master rigorous curriculum materials, and consequently, they may avoid designing important challenging learning opportunities for students (Ford, 2010; Gay, 2010). Educators may perceive what culturally diverse students possess in terms of knowledge and skills as liabilities rather than assets and resources from which to build.” (706)

“I have learned that educators’ conceptions and beliefs that lead to low expectations and deficit mindsets may materialize out of (a) conversations they have had among and between themselves about students perhaps in a teachers’ lounge, (b) their interpretations of student results on standardized tests - sometimes even before they have met the student, (c) historical perceptions they have developed from their families about particular groups of students, or (d) isolated negative experiences educators have had with particular groups of people (Milner, 2010).” (706-707)

“Due to a deficit mindset, educators sometime believe that they are actually doing students a favor by not developing challenging learning opportunities.” (707)

“Educators may believe their students are incapable of academic success and thus may expect and accept only mediocre performances from students. Students, in turn, meet the low expectations set because they do not find what the teacher is proposing to be relevant or important to them.” (707)

 

5. Context Neutral Mindsets

“Educators and students live in social contexts that have a huge bearing on their development, thinking, and behaviors. Social contexts of schools and communities can reinforce the status quo or in fact disrupt or interrupt it.” (707)

“It is no secret that urban and high-poverty schools face persistent challenges that may put student learning opportunities in jeopardy (Anyon, 1980; Kozol, 2055; Tate, 2008). Educators’ knowledge and ability to understand and disentangle how factors presented above [higher rates of inexperienced teachers and of absenteeism and substitutes, lack of long-term teacher commitment, higher rates of teachers instructing students in areas outside their fields of expertise, and low resources in urban and high-poverty schools] as well as similar ones can influence students’ opportunities is critical, as such understanding can allow us to think about how a social context shapes opportunity rather than focus primarily on the students themselves, on achievement gaps, or on an end result or outcome, such as a test score. Focusing on what happens when the contextual factors above are in place allows researchers and theorists to address opportunity structures and realities and to uncover some of the logical reasons why too many culturally diverse students are underserved in schools across the United States.” (708-709)

“There is also an added problem when educators believe that issues of race and diversity are insignificant in mostly White social contexts. Banks (1998) explained that diversity studies and multicultural education are ‘to help all students, including White mainstream students, to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they will need to survive and function effectively in a future U.S. society’ (p. 23; emphasis added). Centralizing notions of race, diversity, and multicultural education, then, are not only important for students of color, linguistically diverse learners, or students who have some type of learning need; to the contrary, students in the mainstream of learning, namely, White students and students who grew up with some degrees of wealth from any racial background in a range of social context, should also focus on these matters (Lewis, 2001; MIlner, 2005).” (709)

 

Solutions

All these opportunity gaps provide a way to shift from deficit thinking about student abilities into a more contextualized and complex approach. While there are no easy solutions, Milner suggests making efforts to include more people of color in color in educational research. Researchers who are more aware of the lived experiences of diverse learners can add complexities to the assumes about the students and classrooms studied. Engaging researchers in conversation about their assumptions and biases are key to understanding the problems more in detail. Additionally, Milner suggests teacher reflection on their own practices as well as the reasons behind those practices. Aware and reflective teaching may help interrupt some of the biased assumptions that are embedded in the achievement gap approach. While teachers cannot control many of the gaps that students experience, those that are in their control should be part of their teaching approaches.  

Again, here's a Download link

to the original article, and here's the publication information: Richard Milner, IV. “Beyond a Test Score: Explaining Opportunity Gaps in Educational Practice” Journal of Black Studies, 43 (6): 693-718. 2012.