As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento … blah, blah, blah.”

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.

Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

The African American parents face a different world outside of the parent-teacher conference. They, too, are racialized by diversity. But for them it is a more common experience. To work, be educated, get healthcare, buy food and clothes, they must regularly transact with people of different identities— often of greater social power and status— who may see and treat them stereotypically. Their day involves more diversity than does the teacher’s day. And that diversity can blanket their lives with the threat of stereotype-based devaluation, keeping them in churn much of the time.

In contrast, in Renick’s early years at GSU he knew of several low-income students who were dropped from school for not meeting only one small bureaucratic requirement, never to be heard from again. These kinds of experiences brought Renick to an important insight: Academic ability was rarely the reason low-income students dropped out of college. It was mostly little things, potholes along the road to graduation. As Andrew Grumbel put it in Won't Lose This Dream, his compelling book describing the transformation of GSU: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, academic performance was not the most important predictor of student success or failure.

The goal of the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s was to help low-income children get the skills they’d need for school and life. The project measured “hard” cognitive skills, assessed by tests, and “softer” character traits like persistence and getting along with others, assessed by teachers and self-reports. Looking at how these children grew up, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and his colleagues found that “softer” traits predicted children’s life outcomes— whether they finished college, their income level, and the equality of their jobs— better than “harder” cognitive skills measured by tests. Kirabo Jackson, a Northwestern University economist, found essentially the same thing for the entire 2005-2012 cohort of North Carolina ninth graders— 573,963 students. Their character— this time measured through behaviours like attendance, on-time graduation, suspensions, and grade point average— predicted life outcomes such as college attendance and later income better than cognitive test scores.

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.