ABSTRACT
The increasing interest of educators in the problems of at-risk children during the late 1980s and early 1990s, not unlike the concerns voiced on behalf of first backward and then learning disabled students, can be tied to ongoing societal and economic changes. The interplay during these years of three such shifts, a heightening of racial and ethnic conflicts, a changing international economy marked in this country by the decline in relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs and their replacement by lower paying service occupations, and an increasing poverty rate, has undermined the position and status of the nation's families and their children. One approach to differentiating the curriculum for at-risk students involves the establishment of alternative schools and schools-within-schools. Although never completely realized, the ideal of common schooling first spelled out by mid-nineteenth-century school reformers provides a moral compass for our efforts to improve education.
