At-Risk Students in the Fast Lanes: Let Them Through

Abstract

At-Risk Students in the Fast Lanes: Let Them Through Does in the fast conjure up images of students with beepers or hundreds of dollars worth of clothes, or perhaps gifted students developing their own computer programs? In one sense, this commentary is about all of these. In another sense it is about all of society. For a society that does not the fast lane can very quickly go into crisis and decline. And even the briefest and most optimistic look today's fast lane gives all educators reason for alarm. More and more students are lurching through school, out of control. More and more students, as the statistics testify, are at risk of not developing their potential and not succeeding in school. The need to reach the students, to educate them properly, and to guide them to productive lives can be justified on many grounds--from the humanitarianism of Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee to the practicality of needing every self-sustaining adult we have in the 21st century. But the strongest reason to help these students is to prove society's own mettle. To lose today's students implies a society that is more than a little out of itself. Researchers point out that at-risk students differ from their peers along a critical variable: locus of control (Meeting the Needs of At-Risk Students, Research Roundup, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1990). This means that children frequently attribute their success or failure to purely external characteristics, even to luck, rather than to their own effort. These children, because of the factors that have shaped them, lack any sense of mastery over their own lives. How ironic that we ask these children to develop that essential sense of when we as society lack sufficient to mount the kinds of programs they need. We ask them to themselves when we not exercise over the factors which have harmed them to begin with. If the students are out of control, it is because society, whether it be the microcosm of their rural area, the disconnectedness of suburbia, or the city blocks that define their neighborhood, has suffered a loss of self-discipline. Maybe it is time for researchers to see how society as a whole scores on that critical variable, locus of control. Hypocrisy has never worked with children. The old saw as I not as I do has been universally discredited by child-rearing experts. Yet that is precisely where we find ourselves with students. Control your own destiny, take of your say no to drugs, but society as a whole is incapable of completely controlling drugs or of organizing its collective life enough to give these students the intensive support they need. That is why I propose we as a society restructure the fast lane. Rather than letting students out of ruin their lives, we need that fast lane for the acceleration and concentrated efforts of the child, whether in danger of developing a disability thirty-six months or on the brink of dropping out sixteen. How fine a commentary on this new decade it would be if the turn-of-the-century image of education's fast lane was a positive one of bright students forging ahead and of students who need that extra attention receiving it and moving right ahead also. That is why the fast lane is so important. For, perhaps the riskiest factor of all for these children is lack of challenge. If we not challenge them academically, we broadcast again our lack of faith in their worth as individuals. …