A new law in California bans the use, in official documents, of the term “at risk” to describe youth identified by social workers, teachers, or the courts as likely to drop out of school, join a gang, or go to jail. Los Angeles assemblyman Reginald B. Jones-Sawyer, who sponsored the legislation, explained that “words matter.” By designating children as “at risk,” he says, “we automatically put them in the school-to-prison pipeline. Many of them, when labeled that, are not able to exceed above that.”
The idea that the term “at risk” assigns outcomes, rather than describes unfortunate possibilities, grants social workers deterministic authority most would be surprised to learn they possess. Contrary to Jones-Sawyer’s characterization of “at risk” as consigning kids to roles as outcasts or losers, the term originated in the 1980s as a less harsh and stigmatizing substitute for “juvenile delinquent,” to describe vulnerable children who seemed to be on the wrong path. The idea of young people at “risk” of social failure buttressed the idea that government services and support could ameliorate or hedge these risks.
Instead of calling vulnerable kids “at risk,” says Jones-Sawyer, “we’re going to call them ‘at-promise’ because they’re the promise of the future.” The replacement term—the only expression now legally permitted in California education and penal codes—has no independent meaning in English. Usually we call people about whom we’re hopeful “promising.” The language of the statute is contradictory and garbled, too. “For purposes of this article, ‘at-promise pupil’ means a pupil enrolled in high school who is at risk of dropping out of school, as indicated by at least three of the following criteria: Past record of irregular attendance . . . Past record of underachievement . . . Past record of low motivation or a disinterest in the regular school program.” In other words, “at-promise” kids are underachievers with little interest in school, who are “at risk of dropping out.” Without casting these kids as lost causes, in what sense are they “at promise,” and to what extent does designating them as “at risk” make them so?
This abuse of language is Orwellian in the truest sense, in that it seeks to alter words in order to bring about change that lies beyond the scope of nomenclature. Jones-Sawyer says that the term “at risk” is what places youth in the “school-to-prison pipeline,” as if deviance from norms and failure to thrive in school are contingent on social-service terminology. The logic is backward and obviously naive: if all it took to reform society were new names for things, then we would all be living in utopia….
The above comes from a Feb. 19 story in City Journal.
This is a standard tool of any totalitarian system that doesn’t know how to improve things but instead relies on renaming the troubled realities and hopes to buy time until the new renamed “reality” fails to deliver desired improvements. It then renames it again to and hopes to buy some more time to “improve” reality and so on and on…..
This is absolutely ridiculous and, as noted, totalitarian. I worked for years with youth fire setters. (We used to call them “juvenile fire setters,” but we were told not to use “juvenile,” since it was associated with “delinquent!” I said we could simply explain that juveniles were young people who were minors, but political correctness carried the day.). Some people really are “at risk.” The problem is often more with the adults than the young people with whom we work. “Words matter,” yes! Then why attempt to make them mean something else? As a cancer survivor, I guess I’m “at promise” of a recurrence. Smokers are at promise of developing lung cancer. And, let’s all avoid mortal sin or we’re at promise of hell. It seems popular American English is “at promise” of meaninglessness. I’m glad I recently retired from the Fire service, so I’m no longer “at promise” of doing something illegal by stating something honestly and truthfully.
This is the third City Journal article in a row that I’ve found fascinating.
People who are pro-abortion were demonized, so now they call themselves pro-choice. New names don’t change the beliefs. The kids who are at risk face a life at risk. The statistics show that they don’t have the means to move out of the at-risk cycle because the system doesn’t work for poor people as it does for the more affluent. We would likely do more good if we didn’t worry about labels, but concentrated on good schools with good teachers and good learning materials.