At-Risk Students

The label “at-risk” gained prominence in the taxonomy of educational research in the 1980s subsequent to the publication of the commissioned report, A Nation at Risk. This document both documented and lamented the status of the U.S. educational system in comparison to the school systems of other industrialized nations. America's schoolchildren, it argued, were falling behind children in other technologically rich countries. Years after the publication of that landmark report, the at-risk label has been more liberally applied as a moniker to describe certain types of students. A politically loaded term, at-risk is often used as a code word for various groups of less fortunate and dispossessed students in the United States. At-risk students are most likely to be absent from school, fail a grade and have to repeat it, or be suspended from school. Their weak academic profiles are usually due to the challenges of poverty, broken homes, violence, limited English language proficiency, and other disadvantages in the family and community context. Such students are in danger not only of poor educational outcomes but also of health-related conditions, involvement in criminal activity, low economic productivity, early parenthood, and higher mortality rates.

Because the correlations among select social identities and low academic performance and school failure are strong and positive, at-risk has increasingly become a code or synonym for particular groups of students, especially low-income and some racial and ethnic minority learners. These social groups are not the same, however, despite the correlations. This entry focuses on the meanings of at-risk as it pertains to class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language skills, race, and academic achievement. Many other classifications of students could be assigned to the at-risk category—for example, alcohol- and drug-dependent youth; physically and learning disabled students; rural students; and students with mental health conditions.