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In this study we investigated the lives and academic histories of eight students enrolled in an alternative-school program in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Through the triangulation of interviews, fieldnotes, local newspaper articles, artifacts such as student work and information provided in cumulative folders, and a battery of measures of cognitive performance in reading, we constructed a case history of each student and an ethnographic portrait of the middle-school program in which they were enrolled. We then compared and contrasted these case histories and the program portrait to cognitivist, socioculturalist, and macrostructuralist explanations of school failure. Our findings suggest that no single explanation comprehensively accounts for the range or complexity of each or of all eight students' life histories or current patterns of school behavior. Our observation of instances of engaging and disengaging instruction for the students in the alternative program also provided some insight into how to approach the development of curriculum and instruction for students who struggle in school for a wide variety of reasons.
The question of who struggles in middle and high school-of the relation of past, present, or projected experiences to students' struggles; and of the interrelations among the ways that students may struggle socially, academically, and personally-is a topic fraught with much theorization but, from our reading, little comprehensive investigation. Literacy researchers have tended to emphasize the role of literacy in the problems that some adolescents may have in school (e.g., Adams, 1990; Finders, 1997; Finn, 1999; Gee, 2000; Hull & Schultz, 2001; Juel, 1988; New London Group, 1996; O'Brien, Springs, & Stith, 2001; Stanovich, 1986; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001; Willis, 1995), and have accordingly placed those issues at the center of both their theoretical and empirical activities. From this vantage point, the struggles of adolescents in school are characterized either as the result of an inability to read and write or as the result of alienation from and/or resistance to the literate discourses of school settings. Consequently, the responses to the struggles of secondary students projected from this research have also tended to focus on the improvement of either instruction or curriculum in literacy, on the assumption that an increase in the quality and quantity of secondary students' literate activity holds the key to reducing those struggles...