What is Positive Deviance?
The Positive Deviance (PD) Approach will be utilized by the IFT to reduce high school dropouts for African American and Latino students. PD is a developmental approach that is based on the premise that solutions to community problems already exist within the community. The PD approach differs from traditional problem-solving models in that it does not recruit outside experts to solve problems. Instead it seeks to identify and optimize existing resources and solutions within the community to solve community problems. For high school dropouts, the PD approach asks us to focus our attention on what works in our schools by paying attention to students that graduate and what their parents and teachers are doing to create a culture of success for these students.
