At-Risk Learners

At-Risk Learners

Who is an “at-risk” learner? When and why is a student considered to be “at risk?” 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 evidenced and lamented the status of the United States' educational system in comparison to the school systems of other industrialized nations around the world. America's schoolchildren, it argued, were falling behind the children in other technological-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” primarily refers to those students from families and communities with limited resources corresponding to low educational outcomes. That is, at-risk students are those most likely to fail or drop out of school due to the challenges of poverty, broken homes, violence, limited English language proficiency, and other disadvantages in the family and community context. Furthermore, because the associations among race, ethnicity, and low academic performance and/or school failure are positive, increasingly at risk has become code or synonyms for low-income (or poor) and racial and ethnic minority students. The two groups are not the same, however, despite the correlations. Perceived by some thinkers as a pejorative label of students believed to be “culturally deprived,” the term is laden with historical, political, and social meanings. A survey of the term's usages shows that its meaning varies.

This chapter specifically focuses on the meanings of at risk as it pertains to class, ethnicity, gender, language skills, race, and academic achievement, although 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. The first section delves into some different attributes often assigned to the at-risk label, and it reveals the strong correlations among race/ethnicity, poverty, family structure, and other factors. The second section outlines some of the academic, economic, and social risks or behaviors in which at-risk students have a greater probability of participating. The third section engages with the myriad explanations of why students from certain social groups and environments are likely to be at risk for either educational failure or low performance. The final section of the chapter considers some implications for how the proliferation of an at-risk student population contributes to the persistent state of a nation at risk.