Precursors of School Failure
Frank Oberklaid MBBS, FRACP, DCH1
Melvin D. Levine MD2
1 The Department of Ambulatory Pediatrics, Royal Children's Hospital, Victoria, Australia
2 Chief, Division of Ambulatory Pediatrics, Children's Hospital Medical center, Boston
School failure is pervasive. Its impact extends beyond the classroom and can contribute to emotional turmoil, social difficulties, delinquent behavior and lifelong maladjustment. School failure does not qualify as a disease, a syndrome, or a unique pathogenetic process. It is rather the product of constitutional predispositions that have interacted with environmental factors and life events in an ongoing process. Intrinsic handicaps may be subtle. Their outward manifestations are likely to vary from child to child and evolve with age, shaped by neurologic maturation, experience, and changing external expectations.
Children with school problems form a heterogeneous group with diverse etiologies, symptom complexes, diagnostic findings and service needs. Nine common precursors of school failure are suggested in this review. Although presented individually, these precursors are not necessarily discrete, nor are they mutually exclusive; they may themselves stem from multiple factors. They are conceptualized as "risk factors" that may predispose to or foreshadow later failure. These, in turn, interact with a set of variables we have characterized as sources of "developmental buoyancy." The latter may neutralize or counteract early susceptibility to academic problems. Individual children may have one or multiple identifiable precursors of variable severity and differ in the extent to which they can minimize or overcome these potential predispositions to school failure.
