In my first year of college, I took an urban education class that exposed how deficit-thinking and the culture of compliance in American schools affected my academic experience.
Statistics often illustrate that Black students, compared to white students, experience achievement and performance gaps.
Dominant discussion around the achievement gap suggests that Black and brown students need to assimilate and comply with certain standards.
But somehow, I ended up outside of some of these statistics.
And the reason is simple: I had access to navigational capital and other various privileges that allowed me to mold myself into what I interpreted as the “ideal student.”
For my final project in the urban ed class, I produced a podcast episode. It was very much like this one, just with a bit more academic jargon. This episode is an updated version, and dare I say, a bit more conversational.
So in three parts, I’ll cover the basics of the system that allowed me to be an “ideal student,” how and why I assumed this role, and the lasting impact this role had on me.
Oh, and just for the record… the ideal student doesn’t exist.
THE SYSTEM DEFINED
The culture of compliance that I mentioned about earlier is based on the work of a researcher affiliated with the University of Michigan, Carla Shalaby.
She wrote in an article that the “deep orientation of care” children naturally have is “frequently unlearned over time, replaced by ways of being that are traditionally rewarded in schools.”
She wrote that schools have a culture based around “competition over cooperation, individualism over collectivism, independence over interdependence.”
What she described is the culture that I subscribed to.
While I was still able to keep my heart — or “care” ethos due to my upbringing and interactions with others, I embraced school as a place for competition, individualism and independence.
Those three traits are highly valued in the United States ironically, despite still needing to have well-developed collectivist ideals. I mean when was the last time you saw a job posting that didn’t mention how their desired candidate should be a collaborative team player?
Shalaby also wrote about how “practices and policies— both inside and outside of schools— sacrifice some for the benefit of others.” Examples of the practices she mentioned include “expelling preschoolers” and “placing aggressive policing programs in school buildings with Black and brown youth.”
So, students who embrace traditional values of schooling are advantaged to the disadvantage of others.
Meritocracy slips in here too, a concept with Darwinist undertones.
Wayne Au, Associate Professor at the University of Washington Bothell defines meritocracy this way: “regardless of any other form of socially or institutionally defined difference, everyone has an equal chance at becoming ‘successful’ based purely on individual merit and hard work.”
He goes on to write, “Consequently, meritocracy also asserts that failure is due to an individual person’s (or individual group’s) lack of effort and hard work.”
Growing up, I tied my academic achievement to individual merit. Anything that my peers did whether academically or behaviorally, I connected it to their lack of effort or even in some cases, cultural deficiencies.
And the belief in cultural deficiencies is a deficit-thinking practice.
Tara J. Yosso is a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
She wrote about how having knowledge of higher social classes is perceived as culturally valuable. So, if you don’t have social class advantage, you may not be able to access certain knowledge or social mobility through “formal schooling.”
She also cites that this is often used to explain the achievement gaps between students of color and white students.
Essentially, deficit-thinking props up the idea that the achievement gap is due to a lack in student’s skills, abilities and cultural assets.
And meritocracy suggests that individual merit equals success. So failure, in the context of school, is the result of a lack of effort and/or cultural deficiencies.
Pretty harmful thinking, right?
THE HOW
Shy. If you asked anyone who knew me during my formative years of education, you’d likely hear “shy” as a descriptor.
Outside of being shy, I was a student that complied with nearly every instruction of authority figures.
I never spoke – well I rarely spoke anyway – but I never spoke out of line. I raised my hand when I had something to say. I worked independently. I stood in a straight line, and I was ready for the next activity when need be.
I was also one of the students who teachers and substitutes would entrust to give a behavior report if they left the room.
At that time, I didn’t understand why my classmates couldn’t seem to just follow directions.
Educators, parents of my peers and other adults in education settings would regularly ask me: “why can’t everyone be like you.” It’s not surprising that I developed such a harmful mindset when it seemed like every adult in education was impressed with my behavior.
So, I embodied the expectations that they had for me. I could not be anything other than the “ideal student,” because I was unreasonably aware of the consequences of losing the identity marker.
Some of my peers were labeled troubled, threatening, and bad. Even though I never consciously processed it at the time, I was aware that because of the negative labels, they weren’t granted the same access to the advantages that I was.
Advantages as simple as a sticker, to accruing free time and prizes at the end of the week.
When I was in grade school, we had behavior cards displayed in the classroom. Pretty much everyone’s behavior, or if you took it as far as I did, everyone’s identity was condensed into a colored card. We were told to change our cards from green, to yellow, to blue, to red when we exhibited corresponding behavior. Each color symbolized the escalation of poor behavior. Green cards were tickets to prizes and other little advantages.
As you can guess by now, my card was always green.
We left colors in grade school and the letter system took over. A through N. Despite our behavior not really having anything to our grades anymore, an A still served as my green card.
I associated my compliant behavior with my academic achievements. I felt like the A reflected me as a person – “the ideal student.”
A pattern emerged as I let this conclusion define my perspective of my peers too.
I noticed that it was my fellow Black students who were usually labeled negatively. They were usually labeled by educators as problems, and when absent or removed from class, some educators made it known that they were happy the student was gone.
Children are way more intuitive than our dominant culture likes to believe. I was aware of the system enough to figure out how I could benefit from it and avoid what I perceived to be costly disadvantages. Those disadvantages? They ranged from losing out on prizes to tainting the positive reputation I felt like others had of me.
However, I didn’t have the awareness or language to unpack why I was holding onto a system that left so many of my peers at a disadvantage and why I was drawing so many unfair conclusions of others.
BUT… WHY?
Fortunately, now I have the language and awareness to begin to explain my behavior.
My upbringing, socioeconomic status, social network and the way others interacted with me, influenced why I assumed the role of an “ideal student.”
Doing school this way had benefits. Educators were favorable toward me. I was seen as “good” and “good” got you places. That’s related to the mobility from the Yosso article I mentioned earlier.
Being labeled as “excellent, responsible, thoughtful” were all things that I held onto because they usually came with positive feelings. Walking in a straight line instead of being out of line allowed my card to stay green. Because of that, educators never seemed to be upset with me, and held favorable opinions of me.
Curious as to why other students weren’t treated the same way, I began to draw my own conclusions. That’s where the deficit-based thinking comes in. I thought something had to be wrong with others because they didn’t comply.
Because I exemplified that it was possible for a student to be this compliant, I ended up hurting my peers. I was regularly used as an example of what other students should be.
Until my urban ed class, I didn’t really consider how my behavior affected the perpetuation of practices that targeted Black and brown students.
Being “good” and participating in a socially-constructed behavior binary is rewarded with mobility and opportunity. My goal was always to achieve high marks and what I perceived to be academic success. Assuming the role of an “ideal student” allowed that to happen.
But, it was all at the expense of my own academic, social, and emotional state and at the expense of others.
IMPACT
The consequences of the ideal student mold are quite complex and… honestly personal.
The ideal student mold was beneficial for the perks and mobility, but in the long-run it did a lot more than it sounds at face value. The impact the mold had on me is similar to the plight of gifted students (which I also happened to be as a kid).
It can be common for “ideal students” and “gifted” students to be not as great socially, as they are academically.
A lot of us have been told that we’re sooo smart, sooo advanced and sooo mature. While it might feel good to receive praise like this from authority figures when you’re a kid, it can become harder to relate to your peers, harmful mindsets develop and resentment might harbor.
Socio-emotionally and mentally, it can be hard to feel like you belong. When you’re singled out for your academic achievements, your self-worth can become wrapped up in your performance.
Participating in this behavior dichotomy was rewarded with so much opportunity. But my sense of self-worth and identity developed largely relative to my academic performance.
Especially when you leave academic institutions and your performance isn’t wrapped up in grades anymore, it’s like one of the stones that seemed to be propping up your identity has shattered.
It’s kind of like how in Inside Out 2, Riley’s sense of self is developed from memories and experiences that are representative of what she believes about herself.
So with this ideal student mold, my sense of self – all those little memory marbles – were made up of what other people said about me and my achievements. There were, and I admit still are, countless little memory marbles attached to my sense of self of all the times that I would log into my school portal to ensure my academic performance was still in tip-top shape when a newly graded assignment got posted.
I put my focus on being an ideal student because it felt good.
My conceptualization of the ideal student was that they don’t talk when they’re not supposed to. In order to finish classwork on time, they can’t chat during work time. They can’t play or act in certain ways because there are rules. They can’t express certain emotions because it’s inappropriate. Doing well academically is great and all, but healthy risk-taking and bonding with others is important too.
I molded myself into someone who worked efficiently, quietly and independently, while my peers were bonding, risk-taking and working.
A huge risk of assuming the role of an ideal student is that one’s sense of self develops relative to their performance and achievement. So when they don’t get the A or maybe they’re not doing as well as before, they start to doubt their abilities and their self-esteem plummets.
When I did dual enrollment at a community college, the most difficult thing was not the academic rigor, exams or making it through 2 hour lectures. It was actually the discussions. Having been trained to sit quietly, raise my hand and work independently, it was almost a culture shock. In some courses, raising your hand was discouraged, large percentages of our grades were made up of semester participation and some finals were even contingent on completing a group project.
We were treated as adults who could regulate ourselves, so some courses didn’t have electronics or food policies. No one prompted me to speak and I had to learn to do that for myself.
Now, I’m not saying that college is free for all — I had courses that had more busy work and stricter policies than high school. But what I am saying is that some of the behavior that I mastered in order to succeed, in what I perceived was the most efficient way possible, had to be unlearned.
FUTURE HOPE
A classroom culture that isolates and excludes students who do not comply or assimilate to certain expectations has adverse effects on not only the student, but their peers who do comply, as illustrated by my personal experience.
I think educators can turn the good v. bad student behavior binary around by doing three things: changing their language and behavior toward so-called “ideal students” and their peers; reframing their thinking in a way that centers the assets of communities, as suggested by Yosso; and understanding classroom management as curriculum as suggested by Shalaby.
Do Away With Comparison
Changing the way that we speak about students, especially in relation to their peers is my biggest takeaway for any educators or individuals who interact with children. Labeling children as good and bad is harmful. It doesn’t create space for any nuance or the root of why they behave in a certain way.
Quite literally asking a student “why can’t everyone be like you?” continues to fuel competition and favoritism. And yes, the student and their peers are very, very aware of it.
Particularly, if a student of color is always being threatened in front of other students to be sent out for minor infractions, while white students are not, students will pick up on that. Students may begin to draw conclusions about certain racial groups or treat that student in a different way.
Embracing Cultural Capital
Educators can reframe how they think about communities of color in a way that acknowledges the cultural assets of the community and decenters rampant assumption-making. Micro-aggressions stem from deficit perspectives and the perception of a lack of cultural values.
We often see this with students of color: some educators believe the narrative that families who have children who don’t assume the identity of an ideal student do not value education.
Considering that perceptions of racial groups are relative to whiteness, decentering whiteness in academic spaces may help to remove discriminatory practices and low expectations of students of color.
Reframing Classroom Management
Lastly, circling back to the work I mentioned earlier from Carla Shalaby, it is important for educators to reframe classroom management. She wrote, “traditional approaches to classroom management, because they reward some behaviors and punish others, are a series of lessons for children on what we value, what is good, and how to be.”
“Changing the way we understand the goals and objectives of classroom management may help us notice that when we are so worried about policing bodies, we miss opportunities to teach community care.”
NOW WHAT?
So… do I wish I hadn’t participated in this system? To some degree, yes. With the knowledge that I have now, how could I not.
But holding onto what I wish I would have done is unproductive.
The ideal student was something I molded myself into for the purpose of navigating K-12. Maintaining this identity is what I perceived to be the most effective, efficient and beneficial way of getting through school as a kid.
There was definitely a better way to navigate those years, but at this moment, I hope my experience can help to ensure that anyone who is listening reflects on whether they’re perpetuating these practices. By reflecting on these concepts, I am committed to identifying and not perpetuating these practices in the spaces I occupy.
Whether you’re an educator, a parent, a student or a listener and learner, you can take my story and hopefully the stories of others to create a more sustainable environment for students.
Outside of my own story, there are likely numerous others who have assumed some form of the mold, like the numerous individuals who have experienced the effects of being labeled a gifted kid.
So to those of you who were former, so-called ideal students, I hope that you may also find the words to tell your story.
It’s important.
