“Lives on the Boundary concerns language and human connection, literacy and culture, and it focuses on those who have trouble reading and writing in the schools and the workplace. It is a book about the abilities hidden by class and cultural barriers. And it is a book about movement: about what happens as people who have failed begin to participate in the educational system that has seemed so harsh and distant to them.”

The Preface is short and sets up the premise for Rose’s book, which is the investigation of how students labeled “at-risk” or “remedial” are victims of an educational system structured to leave them behind. Rose’s goal, as he outlines here, is to reveal the barriers these students face both in school and in the community at-large.

“English A students vex universities like UCLA. By the various criteria the institutions use, the students deserve admission—have earned their way—but they are considered marginal, ‘high risk’ or ‘at risk’ in current administrative parlance. ‘The truly illiterate among us,’ was how one dean described them.”

Here, Rose defines the large subcategory of learners that are being left behind by the education system. The students Rose focuses on in his book are labeled “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to fail out of or experience increased difficulty in school. But Rose’s last sentence shows something else, too: the labels the system places on these students carry a stigma that hurts, rather than helps, students.

“The back-to-back basics movement got a lot of press, fueled as it was by fears of growing illiteracy and cultural demise. The movement raked in all sorts of evidence of decline: test scores, snippets of misspelled prose, enrollments in remedial courses in our finest schools. […] The back-to-basics advocates suggested—and many university faculty members solemnly agreed—that what was needed here was a return to the fundamentals: drills on parts of speech, grammar, rules of punctuation, spelling, usage.”

Rose identifies the back-to-basics educational movement as one of the things that contributes to the marginalization of at-risk students. In this quote, he defines and contextualizes the movement for readers so that his later criticism of it makes sense.