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Compensatory education for alienated students at risk of dropping out is a recognized part of the educational landscape. This is the first ethnographic study of such a program. It focuses on students and staff at two state-supported sites--one composed of white students, the other being ...

Compensatory education for alienated students at risk of dropping out is a recognized part of the educational landscape. This is the first ethnographic study of such a program. It focuses on students and staff at two state-supported sites--one composed of white students, the other being predominantly African American. Participants are paid to attend, and are given academic remediation, counseling, and job assignments in the community. The author found that, unknown to the staff or the state, the program is unsuccessful in its main goal of reintegrating adolescents into their schools. He associates this failure with the program's perception of its students, the trivial curriculum, and the lack of student involvement in planning. Coming from the perspective of critical theory, the author challenges the mainstream view that this program compensates for deficiencies that individual students bring with them to the classroom. His findings support the idea that the program legitimates stratification by giving potentially disruptive students mixed messages. Operating from an "ideology of hope," the program tells students that they should challenge themselves to aspire to become middle class profesionals. At the same time, however, it ignores institutional barriers and fails to give its students the tools they need to succeed in school. This study has implications for all educators attempting to reach at-risk youth.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress enacted a vast body of legislation to protect the environment and individual health and safety. Collectively, this legislation is known as "risk regulation" because it addresses the risk of harm that technology creates for individuals and the environment. In the last ...

In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress enacted a vast body of legislation to protect the environment and individual health and safety. Collectively, this legislation is known as "risk regulation" because it addresses the risk of harm that technology creates for individuals and the environment. In the last two decades, this legislation has come under increasing attack by critics who employ utilitarian philosophy and cost-benefit analysis. The defenders of this body of risk regulation, by contrast, have lacked a similar unifying theory. In this book, the authors propose that the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism fills this vacuum. They argue that pragmatism offers a better method for conceiving of and implementing risk regulation than the economic paradigm favored by its critics. While the authors employ pragmatism to support risk regulation, they find that it also offers a perspective from which this legislation can be held up to critical appraisal. In the end, the authors reject the picture--painted by risk regulation's critics--of widely excessive and irrational regulation, but the pragmatic perspective also leads them to propose a number of recommendations for useful reforms to risk regulation.