Mindset at 20: Where Do We Go From Here?
Part of the Cultural Trust Series
I recently came across the updated edition of Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success on Deepstash, an app I am trying out to find new books in my area of research. Seeing it surface as a recommended read in 2026 stopped me. Not because the book is unfamiliar. I first encountered it during my teacher training program as a student, taught it at the high school and collegiate levels, and have spent years applying and adapting its principles in my own work. I paused because I realized the book is now twenty years old, the updated edition ten, and something fundamental has still not changed.
Twenty years is a milestone worth marking. It is also a moment for reflection.
In those two decades, scholars from multiple disciplines have raised structural critiques of this work. Replication scientists have challenged the data. Equity researchers have highlighted the framework’s blind spots around race, class, and culture. Alfie Kohn has called it the “fundamental attribution error” applied to education: the habit of locating the problem in the student while leaving the system untouched. Paul Gorski has named it deficit ideology. Joshua Aronson raised the question of race and the Black-white achievement gap before the book was even published, in 2002. White scholars, Black scholars, education researchers, and psychologists have spent twenty years leveling sustained, documented critique from across ideological lines.
And after all these suggestions, the framework’s foundational assumptions still do not fully account for race, culture, and structural inequality.
The Problem Was Never the Idea
Let me be clear: growth mindset is not wrong. Its core premise that belief in one’s capacity to grow shapes motivation and persistence, is real and supported by decades of research. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) distinguished between the banking model of education, in which teachers are the sole purveyors of knowledge, and the problem-posing model, in which students co-create knowledge within an educational environment. While not identical frameworks, Freire’s banking model resembles what Dweck would later describe as a fixed mindset, while problem-posing education aligns more closely with growth-oriented learning. That parallel is not incidental. Freire was writing explicitly about oppressed communities, about students whose humanity institutions had failed to recognize, and about the political dimensions of who gets to know and who gets to grow. The intellectual lineage of growth-oriented learning has always carried that structural and political weight. Dweck’s popularization brought the idea to a wider audience, but it also softened much of Freire’s emphasis on the underrepresented.
What I am suggesting is growth mindset, and its subsequent updates, has never fully included the population Freire was lifting up: those whose humanity institutions had failed to recognize, those who are not passive receivers of knowledge but intellectual critical thinkers capable of co-creating the conditions of their own education.
I have taught this framework at every level of education, and I have watched it land differently depending on who is in the room. The majority of my current students are college students who have failed a course and are navigating failure, trauma, fractured identities, and institutional betrayal alongside whatever belief they hold about their own intelligence. What I have learned across all of those contexts is that Mindset, as written and enacted over the past twenty years, is incomplete in ways that matter enormously. It does not adequately address failure as a structural experience. It does not account for trauma as a barrier to believing growth is even safe. It does not specifically engage identity, not just race or socioeconomic status, but the full complexity of who students are, what they have been told about themselves, and the institutional messages that tell them they do not belong.
In the end, the primary barrier is not their belief about their brain. It is the institution’s belief about them. Growth mindset asks students to change their thinking. It says almost nothing about changing the thinking of the systems that receive them.
What Two Decades of An Evolving Framework Tells Us
The 2016 updated edition added two things the original lacked: a deeper treatment of “false growth mindset” and a broader discussion of organizational culture. Both are genuine contributions, but neither addition addresses the question that has been on the table since before the book existed.
Dweck has acknowledged in public statements that interventions work better in supportive institutional cultures and that telling students to “just try hard” ignores the realities of the world. That is important. But acknowledging structural realities is not the same as naming them, building them into the framework, or asking what it means to offer a psychological intervention to students whose landscape has been shaped by institutional racism, cultural exclusion, and metrics that were never designed to see their full potential.
Bryk and Schneider (2004) established institutional trust is foundational to school improvement and without it, no intervention, however well designed, can take root. Both frameworks are foundational in teacher preparation. And yet both share the same critical absence: neither fully addresses the cultural dimensions of the students they are describing. When the two frameworks most responsible for shaping how teachers understand students and institutions both leave culture out, that is not an oversight. It is a systemic gap in the field itself.
Work that does address systemic, institutional, and historical othering, namely Emdin’s (2016) Reality Pedagogy and Love’s (2019) We Want to Do More Than Survive, have received tremendous praise in academia and the public at large, but are not generally treated in the same foundational way as Mindset. These brilliant works are celebrated, assigned, and quoted. But they do not occupy the same default position in teacher preparation programs that Dweck and Bryk do. That distinction is not accidental. It speaks to whose work becomes standard training for teachers and whose work becomes recommended reading for those who want to go deeper. It makes culture secondary rather than essential to effective teacher training.
The scholars who centered culture, identity, and the historical othering of students have done the work. The widespread acknowledgment of that work as essential to the profession has simply not occurred often enough in an equitable manner.
I am not saying this is intentional. I am saying that with two decades of documented critique on the record, silence becomes a statement regardless of intent. Ali Michael has built an entire framework asking White educators to excavate themselves and their institutions rather than adjust their students. Robin DiAngelo has specifically named the defensive structures that make that excavation so difficult. These are but two examples of White scholars who looked squarely at the institutional dynamic and said: the problem does not begin with the student.
The Foundation That Never Solidified
The variable that connects growth mindset to the broader relational, cultural, and institutional frameworks discussed here is what I call Cultural Trust.
Cultural Trust is the degree to which students believe an institution actually sees them, values them, and is working with them rather than on them. It is the relational and cultural infrastructure that determines whether any mindset intervention is legible, actionable, or even believable to the student receiving it. Without it, a growth mindset intervention does not land as opportunity. It lands as an instruction to adjust yourself to a system that has already decided who you are.
This is what I have spent years building into my own practice as an adapted framework that accounts not just for mindset, but for failure, trauma, identity, and culture as structural variables. It synthesizes trust, growth mindset, culturally relevant pedagogy, reality pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching methods as foundational elements within an educational environment. Because in my experience, you cannot ask a student to believe in their own growth inside an institution without also helping them understand how to navigate institutions that may not have been designed with them in mind.
Don’t Wait for Mindset 3.0
So where do we go from here?
We stop waiting for dominant frameworks to expand to include us, and we continue building our own frameworks that center us and incorporate concepts like Cultural Trust as necessary conditions. Too often, the fixed mindset we are fighting is not the student’s. It is the institution’s fixed mindset about the student, who they are, and what they are capable of.
Black, Brown, and students of all identities whom the institution has failed, have not failed to grow. They have demonstrated an extraordinary amount of resilience in the face of systems that did not deserve that persistence. One of the things I consistently tell my students is that everything they need to be successful is already inside them. What they often need are support, language, and tools for navigating systems. Their growth has always existed. What hasn’t were institutions that fully supported and believed in them.
Achievement has never been the product of individual belief alone. It is what happens when belief is supported by an institution that has earned trust, when the cultural conditions are right, and when students are seen not as deficits to correct but as full human beings whose potential the institution is obligated to cultivate.
That is one of the frameworks the next twenty years need. The work exists. It is being done. And it needs to continue to be amplified, uplifted, and centered in teacher training and practice across education.