Deficit ideology

States that an individual’s difficulties are expressions of fault within them that must be fixed; the function of deficit ideology is to justify existing social conditions by identifying the problem of inequality as located within, rather than as pressing upon, disenfranchised communities so that efforts to redress inequalities focus on “fixing” disenfranchised people rather than the conditions which disenfranchise them (Weiner, 2003; Yosso, 2005).