Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

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?

So, the cognitive-accountability paradigm may keep out of view, or at least in dim view, something very important to the academic achievement of students like Tyler— the social-psychological dimension of his school experience, including that tied to his identity. The cognitive-accountability paradigm is essentially identity-blind. It knows that this aspect of a student’s experience can affect school achievement— for example, that it can be helpful when student experience is shaped by a middle-class background and less so when it is shaped by a lower income background.

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.