After the "At-Risk" Label

Book excerpt: This book examines how the use of the “at-risk” category and label creates problems for students and teachers. Drawing from research across various education sites, the author illustrates how educators recognize the label’s potential to redress issues of equity, but warns that it can also stigmatize the students so labeled. Brown explores how the labeling and subsequent practices by teachers and schools actually affect students, such as classifying many individuals as deficient. The text provides a historical overview, discusses the role of federal education policy and teaching, and includes tools to help readers acquire more complex, critical understandings of risk in educational practice. After the “At-Risk” Label not only challenges the education community to reorient itself to a more equitable discourse, it provides a framework for changing the structural conditions of schooling to better serve all students. Book Features: Offers a critical appraisal of how schools, policy, and teachers may be complicit in exacerbating conditions that lead to risk. Shows how race and class biases might be manifested in the “at-risk” identification process.Outlines a framework for making sense of, and acting in response to, risk that attends to both the individual and the institution. Provides a set of key questions, terms, and a list of extended activities in each chapter. “In this book, Keffrelyn Brown takes the common notion of ‘at-risk’ and turns it on its head. It is imperative that people who deal with children and teens grapple with the centrality of her notions. This is a must read!” —Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin–Madison “In this important and timely book, Keffrelyn Brown provides a much-needed basis for radically rethinking whether risk can be part of a critical social justice project in education.” —David Gillborn, University of Birmingham, UK “This book represents an audaciously genuine call to know more about, to see more in, and do more for students who have somehow amassed the label ‘at-risk!’” —H. Richard Milner IV, University of Pittsburgh