Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2)
“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.”
Jules Feiffer (1965)
In the previous post, I laid out the history of phrases used to describe students who did poorly in the age-graded school since the late-19th century. “At risk” is the current phrase. Like previous ones, the words have fixed upon mostly poor and minority students. The phrase has replaced “culturally deprived,” “socially disadvantaged, ” “educationally disadvantaged,” ones that policymakers, educators, and media outlets have constructed and used over the past half-century. In this post, I describe and assess the widespread use of “at risk” for urban and rural poor and minority students.
Origins of Label
Some researchers see the phrase coming from epidemiology where individuals with heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer, and other ills display “at risk” factors. These individuals are “at risk” in displaying certain factors such as smoking, carrying around too much weight, exercising little, and genetic inheritance. It is a medical framing of the problem. Education is like medicine and student failure or poor academic performance is the disease. Children have “risk factors.” Keep in mind that the focus, then, is on the individual child. After all, seldom do I read or hear of a policymaker, researcher, or journalist calling a school, district, or state “at risk.” The label is intended to refer to individual and groups of children and youth that share similar characteristics, not the resources allocated or structures within which children learn or the community factors that impinge on both the teaching and learning. As past phrases of “culturally deprived” and “disadvantaged” has become synonymous with children of immigrant, migrant, and indigenous families who are mostly poor and minority so has “at risk.” In short, the medical reframing of the problem of academic failure as children being “at risk” is the latest incarnation of earlier labels all of which target the individual student (see here, here, and here).
Effects of Labels
In schools as in life, labels have consequences. I see two: stigma and focus on the individual rather than the structures in and out of the school.
Stigma comes from labeling. Labeling individuals occurs because they deviate from the norm, i.e., students who fail in age-graded schools (see here). There are Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
