While educators, such as James Banks, James Cummins, and Enrique Trueba, have focused on the strengths, possibilities, and knowledge that immigrant parents possess that benefit their children, contemporary educational and social models are still greatly influenced by the deficit-based hypothesis.

Immigrant parents are blamed for their children's academic shortcomings, thus relieving the schools of their responsibility to provide an escape route out of poverty and deprivation. In sum, the prevailing discourse is about the failure of children to learn English, rather than the failure of the schools to teach that language effectively.

Cummins argues that this form of discourse defines culturally diverse students and parents as inferior in various ways and therefore makes them responsible for their own school failure and inability to benefit economically. Along with having a deficiency in knowledge, bicultural children are also viewed as having a deficiency in culture.

Thus, the inability of bicultural students to succeed in school is not regarded as a problem with the education system, but rather the inability of the family to Americanize or acculturate into the dominant culture and its benefits. Richard Valencia claims that the deficit theory operating in many schools is largely responsible for the failure of immigrant children and families to Americanize quickly enough to suit the culture of the schools.

Educational deficit thinking is a way of blaming the victim that views the alleged deficiencies of poor and immigrant students and their families as being responsible for the students' academic failure, while holding blameless much of the structural inequality in schools and society. Deficit thinking can be found in the very popular "at-risk" construct that now underlies both conservative and liberal approaches to educational reform.