Education Week - July 17, 2019 - 22

COMMENTARY

Stop Measuring Student Deficits.
Measure Systemic Ones

By Dave Paunesku

Getty

ike many well-meaning researchers,
teachers, administrators, and philanthropists, I used to talk a lot about achievement gaps. I wanted to help close the persistent attainment disparities between
white students and students of color
and between rich and poor students. I
wanted to improve the outcomes of those
who have historically been left behind. As a researcher,
I thought I could help do that by identifying the deficits in students' skills and competencies that need to
be improved.
However, three years of participating in the Building Equitable Learning Environments Network has
convinced me that we need to turn this thinking on its
head. In the BELE Network, I worked hand in hand
with a coalition of educators, researchers, philanthropists, and nonprofit leaders to create more equitable
opportunity in America's schools-to adapt systems and
enable all students to thrive.
This work reinforced my prior belief that quantifiable
metrics can help us identify the deficits that need to
be improved. More importantly, though, it also helped
me realize that I had been looking for deficits in the
wrong places. The attainment metrics I had been using
registered the deficits in the students. But the deficits
are not in the students. They're in the systems that are
supposed to serve them.
For too long, American schools have had a default
orientation toward measuring students' abilities and
achievement, rather than focusing on the resources-
such as engaging learning environments and highquality, culturally responsive teaching practices-that
empower students to learn new concepts and skills.
Focusing solely on achievement rather than opportunity can reinforce a deficit-oriented discourse that
blames underserved students, families, and communities for disparities between their educational outcomes
and those of their more privileged peers. It reveals the
symptoms, but not the causes of inequitable attainment.
When data reveal students' shortcomings without revealing the shortcomings of the systems intended to
serve them, it becomes easier to treat students as deficient and harder to recognize how those systems must
be changed to create more equitable opportunities.
I have seen this play out firsthand as concepts from
social psychology, like growth mindset and belonging,
have started to enter the education mainstream.
My fellow social psychologists and I spent years documenting the conditions that students need to thrive and
develop, like the need to belong, to see work as relevant,
and to understand that academic abilities can improve.
But as those concepts have been popularized in education in recent years, I have watched in terror as those
insights about the conditions students need to thrive
have transformed into yet another set of "competencies"
in which students can be labeled deficient.
Some of my colleagues have objected to treating social
psychological constructs as student competencies on
narrow, technical grounds, arguing that the currently
available measures of those constructs are demonstrably unfit for such use. However, even if we were to overcome those technical hurdles, more fundamental problems would remain with treating social psychological
concepts like student competencies.

First, this plays into the deficit discourse. When a
teacher believes a student has a fixed mindset as opposed to a growth mindset, that teacher is more likely
to label that student as deficient.
"I can't teach those students because they have a
fixed mindset," one might say. Some teachers have even
forced students to recite "I belong here" at the start of
class each day, as if a sense of belonging were developed the same way a multiplication table is memorized.
That's deeply troubling.
We should be very cautious of measures and practices
that can influence educators to perceive students, or
groups of students, as deficient, unless we accompany
those measures and practices with the training educators would need to implement them effectively and
equitably.
Second, measuring social psychological constructs as
if they were the competencies of individual students
belies their social nature. This line of thinking conflates
the deficits of learning environments with the deficits
of students. Educators then have a harder time thinking innovatively about how to build equitable learning
environments that support healthy social, emotional,
and academic development for all students.
A teacher who wants students to feel they belong in
class should focus on building strong relationships with
and between students, on giving students a platform to
contribute to the classroom in meaningful ways, and on
honoring their cultures and communities. Those practices are both more concrete and more psychologically
sound than building belonging by "intervening" with
a specific student who was "diagnosed" as having low
belonging.
Approaches that diagnose and intervene with individual students might work for supporting students who
need extra academic help. But if students don't feel like
they belong in a class, it's not the individual students
who need extra support and attention so that they can
"do better"-it's the educator creating the social environment in which those students are learning.
As social psychologists, our work implicitly recognizes
that students' mindsets, feelings, and attitudes about
school arise from the social contexts in which they
learn and grow. However, in reflecting on the training
most teachers receive and on the messages we send
as a research community, it's clear we haven't always
equipped educators to understand new findings and act
on them in a productive way.
This realization has profoundly affected the way my
team and I talk about student motivation, and the
kinds of measures we help educators utilize. Rather
than concentrating on the mindsets of individual students, we've started to measure the learning conditions
that foster equitable development and on giving educators formative feedback about the learning environments they're creating for students. For example, do
students feel respected and valued by their teachers?
Do they understand that the critical feedback they're
receiving from their teachers is intended to help them
grow as thinkers? The results of these measures leave
less opportunity to blame students, and they help educators focus on creating environments that foster equitable learning and achievement.
They say what gets measured gets improved, so let's
start to measure opportunity. n

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | July 17, 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

DAVE PAUNESKU is co-founder and executive director of PERTS
(Project for Education Research that Scales) at Stanford University.

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Education Week - July 17, 2019

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