From "Backwardness" to "At-Risk"

Barry M. Franklin is Associate Professor of Education in the School of Education at Kennesaw State College. He is the author of Building the American Community: The School Curriculum and the Search for Social Control and is the editor of Learning Disability: Dissenting Essays.

• Foreword by William J. ReesePrefaceAcknowledgments1.  Learning Difficulties and the American Public School: A Conceptual Framework2.  Educating Atlanta's Backward Children, 1898–19243.  From Backwardness to L.D.: Medicalizing the Discourse of Learning Difficulties4.  Private Philanthropy and the Education of Children with Learning Difficulties: From the Junior League School for Speech Correction to Whittaker Center5.  The Struggle for School Reform in Minneapolis:Building Public School Programs for Low-Achieving Youth, 1930–1970Epilogue: At-Risk Children and the Common School IdealNotesBibliographical NoteIndex

"Barry M. Franklin's history of low-achieving, troubled, innocent children is sometimes chilling. For all their ostensible attempts to help children, America's public schools have frequently clipped the wings of youth. With a poet's eye but historian's sensibility, Franklin deftly recovers missing pages of the past. He provides the reader with valuable historical perspective on current policy debates on at-risk children." — From the Foreword by William J. Reese