Same anecdote as always, in a riddle attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? Still four - calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
You can pass all the laws you want, saying that some gangbanger with a drug habit has a future brimming with prospects or that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Reality has a presence apart from language.
Regards,
Shodan
At some level, yes, a gangbanger with a drug habit does have a future brimming with prospects. It’s just going to take a lot of really hard work, by both the student and all the people around him, to achieve those prospects. And this change in terminology doesn’t make it any easier, for any of those people.
Remind me again which side attempts to control words/language/meaning more than the other.
I was just going by the quote in the article:
But yes, the law might not attach an actual penalty to the use of “at-risk.”
Well, this change is more targeted at the child of the “gang banger with the drug habit”, and I do sympathize with the idea that calling that young boy or girl “at risk” doesn’t really help, and may cause some real harm.
“At-promise” is just stupid, of course.
I’d prefer if they just didn’t try to label the kids, but I understand the necessity to have some term of art, particularly in the legislation. In the best case school districts (which, I repeat, are NOT obligated to or forbidden from either term) will just take this as guidance to not use “at-risk” and will instead come up with a neutral term or something of a technical nature that doesn’t have any connotations (yet, at least).
Yeah, I saw that in your cite as well and was curious, so I read the actual legislation as well as a legal article about it. One cite here: New Laws for California Schools: AB 413, use of 'at-promise' vs. 'at-risk' – CSBA Blog
“AB 413 does not levy any new or additional requirements on school districts or county offices of education as a result of the change in Education or Penal code. Rather, the bill endeavors to phase out the use of “at-risk” due to the stigma which can surround the term.”
I do some reading to small kids every now and then. If this thread were posted before I started doing that, I would have laughed at the phrase “at-promise.”
But after seeing how kids take on the identity of how teachers treat them in the classroom, I have a totally different opinion. I’ve learned that most kids are such blank slates that so much of how they view themselves is determined by how adults treat them.
Kids who are treated as smart have so much more self-confidence. Kids who are treated as bad kids learn that they are bad. Very rarely are they taught how to manage conflict, drama, and big feelings. If you don’t think being labeled as a bad kid has an impact on the kid, you are fucking deluding yourselves.
So yeah, the phrase “at-promise” is awkward and probably won’t last long. But if you don’t think that kids getting labeled “at-risk” doesn’t re-enforce the types of poor behavior that society is seeking to reduce, I invite you to step outside your little bubble.
As is any label you use to apply to people, human nature being what it is. Which is why people (me included) have a problem with the PC police.
If you are a something, and don’t want to be a something, change. The negative term (if it s seen as a negative) is a cross to bear for being that something.
Now stuff you cannot change, you don’t need to label anyone but some of the terms are used to actively PROMOTE the difference. That needs to stop also.
Black person? Why do you need to identify black, or latino, or white, or any other person BY COLOR, at all?
The people using those terms now are using it to try and BENEFIT those people. That is inherently racist, because if the term was used in reverse it would rightly be called out as racist.
Kids are primarily labeled as “at-risk” kids not because of the kids but because of the parents.
I firmly hold that NO kid is inherently bad, but they can damn sure turn out that way, due to a myriad of reasons but primarily because of BAD PARENTS.
Want that to stop? Find a way to fix the bad parents from having kids.
Ravenman, yes, how you treat the kids makes an enormous difference. But that’s not the same thing as what label you use to refer to them.
Kearsen1, it may be true that the term “black” is mostly used by those trying to help black people. But that’s just because those trying to hurt them use different words. If there are people out there trying to hurt black people, and we try to stop that, then yes, that is “helping black people”, but that doesn’t mean that it’s racist. If those same people were trying to hurt white people, we’d try to stop that, too.
I’m not Ravenman, but having started working a lot more with elementary-aged children in the last year or so, I can’t agree that what label you use to refer to a kid has no impact on their development. Once you call a kid “a troublemaker” or “inattentive” or “unfocused” or whatever (possibly accurate) label you use it becomes extremely difficult to change the behavior. Particularly when the label used is obviously negative.
That’s why schools (at least the ones I’ve been involved with) work very hard not to label children with an obviously negative grouping term. I help with reading interventions sometimes, but I would never tell the kids I’m working with that they are bad readers - it just doesn’t help, and actually causes quite a bit of harm. Yes, mean kids will turn neutral terms into insults - mean kids will turn anything into an insult. That doesn’t mean the grown-ups have to use obviously loaded terms too. Notice that even though “special” has become an insult we still use “Special School District” or “special education” to refer to those services - because the term itself is not insulting or potentially harmful. And it fills a need since it includes (at least in my district) services addressing physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and even gifted education.
So my take is “at-promise” is dumb, but “at-risk” is probably harmful and should be avoided. Some background around the discussion can be found here: Why it’s wrong to label students ‘at-risk’
Ooooh! Why didn’t ANYONE think of that before! I mean, we have all these schools trying to make children into better adults. Turns out we need more abortions for those kind of people or whatever it is that you are implying here.
Sounds like a treatment issue, not the use of a single phrase that, in all likelihood, is shared with the parent and between educators more than with the child.
You can actually continue to use a commonly-known and understood phrase, AND still treat the kids with respect all at the same time.
Without doing the research that has likely been posted here before, I don’t need to call out any of “those” people as I am almost 100% sure that bad parents come in all flavors.
But we the people are UNWILLING to take kids out of bad situations, strictly due to parental desire. THAT is what needs to change. YOU fuck up being a parent a very limited amount of time, no more kid, or ever again. (In my hypothetical world anyway)
The re-phrasing or re-naming of certain things within the education system is nothing new, it is on-going. The idea behind it is admirable, that you don’t want to harm a student by placing them in a category or making a judgement on them, but the results are often quite silly. Young people can be very insecure and you don’t want to reinforce that.
A long time ago when I was young my reports came home with ‘not living up to his potential’ or some bullshit, and I was in the top part of the class, and rather than motivating me to try a bit more it just pissed me off.
Billy is not a habitual liar, he is an ‘inaccurate reporter. ‘
Even terms that used to be used, like special needs, can be labeling. A student with special needs now has ‘accommodations.’ If you are having trouble with Suzy you may be told that she is ‘heavily accommodated’. This is code for maybe her medications need to be adjusted.
I could go on but I am off work now.
Reminds me of a passage from Flowers for Algernon where the protagonist, who through a medical procedure has gone from intellectually disabled to genius-level, reflects on terminology like gifted, bright, retarded and slow and notes the then-current vogue (the novel was published in 1966, expanding on a short story first published in 1959) was to replace them all with the term exceptional for both ends of the spectrum: “I’ve been exceptional my whole life.”
“Exceptional” is still a term of art. There is now a term “twice exceptional” to address students that have both gifted capabilities as well as one or more disabilities.
To be fair, at least “exceptional” is an accurate use of the English language (unlike “at-promise”). These are kids that are exceptions to the normal spectrum of abilities, on either end of that curve.
If — and I mean if — you are right that kids are entirely ignorant of pejorative labels being applied to them, then what difference does it make to call them by a less pejorative label? It’s hard to believe that using this awkward euphemism can be condemned in terms of doing anyone harm.
You know what? The term “at-promise” is stupid, but this shows, really clearly, that we DO need a different term. Because you (and most of the thread, apparently) have no fucking clue what “at risk” means. States vary a little in how they define it, but generally an “at-risk” student is one who has one of more of the following traits:
“At-risk” wasn’t intended to imply that a kid was a “problem”. In fact, it doesn’t even mean a kid is currently doing badly at all–it means he or she is “at risk” of doing so in the future, because of one or more of these factors. A kid with straight As who lives in a poor, single-parent household is classified as “at-risk”, and with good reason. if his single parent gets laid off or gets really sick, he’s at significantly higher risk of losing the progress he’s made and dropping out of high school than a kid with a more robust support system.
Y’all are using the term wrong, and you’re using it in a way that maligns good kids, and kids struggling with issues out of their control.
“Unusual” or “atypical” would fill the same grammatical role. “At-promise” just seems nonsensical to me. It’s not even usefully descriptive for a kid whose conditions are positive.