Pathologizing the Language and Culture of Poor Children

Abstract

There has been a resurgence of deficit discourses that implicate deficiencies in the language and culture of poor students as the cause of their academic failures. An influential study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley concludes that high levels of academic failure among poor children can be linked to the quantity and quality of language interactions among poor children and their parents. However, strong claims about the language and culture of poor families are undermined by serious methodological flaws in the Hart and Risley study; an ethnocentric bias that takes for granted the normative status of the linguistic and cultural practices of the middle- and upper-income families in their sample; and the failure to make explicit the theory of language and culture that frames their analysis. But the fundamental problem with the Hart and Risley study — and deficit perspectives more generally — is that deficit thinking fails to consider linguistic and cultural resources all children bring with them to school. Ultimately, the remedy for disproportionate levels of failure among children living in poverty is a school curriculum that respects their background knowledge and experience and builds on students— linguistic, cultural, and cognitive —funds of knowledge.—