At-Risk Students

The term at-risk students describes youth who are seen as being in danger of not being able to assume constructive adult roles in society, whose life chances may be diminished long before they reach adulthood. It is a term attributed to those students who are not succeeding in school, who often eventually leave school without graduating, or who graduate without the necessary skills to function as productive citizens and workers. How students come to be unsuccessful in school has been framed in various ways, and this framing becomes critical to any discussion of what can be done to remedy the problem.

Commonly, school failure has been individually attributed as a personal and private failure on the part of a student. From this lens, the factors associated with being at risk are seen as residing in the individual student and/or the student's family. These factors could include membership in a racial or ethnic minority and/or low socioeconomic status. Students growing up in homes where parents have a low level of educational attainment are also seen as placing students at greater risk for school failure. Beyond this, issues such as truancy, retention, or below-grade-level performance are all seen as indicators that the student's connection to school is tenuous.

Students may be described by terms such as “lazy” or “unmotivated,” or they may be considered diagnosable, with either behavioral or emotional disorders or learning disabilities. Their families may be described as “broken” or headed by a single parent, probably female. Parents may be viewed as not caring about their child's school success. They are perhaps not involved in school functions, and therefore a “blank canvas” on which negative attributes such as these can be inscribed. The students and their families may live in low-socioeconomic, often urban areas, which are seen as having little to offer students in terms of future success.

These renderings of at-risk students frame the issues as individual attributes (perhaps nonnormative development on the part of the youth) or a set of problems, such as a response to family or environmental problems. Viewed this way, the issues fall within the realm of the individual, and the solutions suggested include counseling or psychological testing and diagnosis. With older students, the remedies may fall within the realm of disciplinary actions designed to pull wayward students into line or finally confirm that they do not fit in the school setting in a productive way. This individualistic orientation leaves unexamined the institutional and societal responsibility in constructing the problems of students considered at risk. It avoids the realities of how societies place some students at risk.

Much of this viewpoint fits within a “culture of poverty” argument originally developed in the work of Oscar Lewis. The “culture of poverty” argument evolved into a stance that children are handicapped because their homes do not provide them with the cultural patterns necessary for the types of learning characteristic of schools and the larger society. In essence, this point of view argues that the children's homes do not provide the necessary stimulation for the “normal” development of these children. For example, some researchers link the experiences of children growing up in a “culture of poverty” with a lower sense of selfesteem. This thesis was specific to a particular socioeconomic niche in American society: the poor.

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