Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.

What he needs when he gets to school is something other than cognitive accountability— its good intentions notwithstanding. He needs signals that address his churn and that help resolve it: signs from adults and fellow students, for example, that he belongs in that school, that he is valued for who he is and who he can be, and that he is seen as having the potential to succeed there. And it wouldn’t hurt if he found some things about school interesting. For example, if his homeroom teacher read the class a compelling story every morning to get the day rolling. He needs signals that despite his status— and his churn to the contrary— he can trust the school’s beneficence toward him.

Yet in his school— very likely in the grip of cognitive accountability— he isn’t likely to have such experiences. Rather (as we shall see), he’s likely to get a more basic skills curriculum not much connected to his life, needs, or interests; a rigid disciplinary system; and frequent assessments of his cognitive skills that, from his perspective, may reinforce his image as a poor student— to himself and others.

Could such misguidance be a root of the educational inequalities that trouble our society? Could an expanded paradigm— one that also focuses on building students’ trust in their school’s ability and willingness to invest in them— make a transformative difference?

For students facing Tyler-type identity threat, they improve performance less by directly affecting their learning than by reducing the identity threat that can otherwise interfere with their learning. That’s their route of action, their shared active ingredient. They do it in different ways. But they all change the socio-psychological experience of school for these students. And throughout the now extensive literature testing these effects, it is for these students that these interventions have their largest, most reliable effects.

Looked at from the standpoint of cognitive accountability, these strategies— socio-emotional learning strategies or strategies reducing the identity threat many students can experience in school— can seem beside the point, of marginal importance, not rooted in cognitive principles of learning. But looked at from the standpoint of building students’ trust in their schooling and their identification with it, they have a clear unity: They all address Tyler’s primary need to trust, care about, and engage with school. The good news here is that from an expanded paradigm— the identification paradigm— falls a much-expanded set of fixes.