Fixing Poverty: What Education Really Has To Do

 

One night just before Thanksgiving several years ago, trying to go to bed early, I made the mistake of turning on Poor Kids a PBS Frontline documentary on childhood poverty. The story was about a white family, a single mom with 2 children—a 12-year-old son, Tyler, and a 10 year-old daughter, Cayley– living in a stark farmhouse on the outskirts of Stockton, Iowa. At one point the mom totals her monthly income at $1480.0 against bills of $1326.0 before she’d paid for transportation, clothes or food. Cayley explains how if you wait long enough hunger sometimes just passes. Tyler describes how they often swap milk for cereal or cereal for milk but rarely have them together.

During the day Cayley and a friend “canned,” they went around Stockton collecting soda and beer cans to redeem. “I like to go canning to make money. I walk the whole town,” Cayley said. The girls were a team, on an adventure. They poked and snooped and made up stories about what they saw. On this journey they filled two plastic garbage bags with cans, put them down besides a community center building and went off to play on the adjoining playground. Looking up, they saw Tyler trying to make off with the bags of cans—perhaps out of brotherly teasing, but perhaps out of more than that. Cayley and her friend run after him frantically yelling: “drop ‘em,” “drop ‘em.” Catching him, Cayley pulls Tyler’s sweater while her friend gets the bags out of his hands. They drop to the ground. Tyler chuckles cynically in defeat but then in a flash of anger, kicks one of the bags right into Cayley’s chest. She stands there, immobilized, outraged, and then stomps off, out of the camera’s range. The camera stays with Tyler who, trying to recover his calm, saunters over to a garbage can and begins rummaging through it. In both his anger and its aftermath, his despair is palpable—over his fate, his family’s painful poverty, the low status it castes him into, in town, in school.

It occurred to me, now completely unable to sleep, that Tyler’s face, as he kicked those cans, revealed a fundamental challenge for American education. How do you bring kids like Tyler into our schools, economy and society–especially when there are so many of them? Twenty-three percent of U.S. children under 18 live in poverty—-a family of 4 living on $24K per year. This percentage goes to 45% if you include low-income children too—a family of 4 living on $44K. And now, for the first time in our history, the majority of students in our public schools, 51%, are poor or low-income. Can our schools deal with poverty on this scale? Do we have the understandings to reach the Tylers of our society–the right educational paradigm?

In Aristotle’s day, the paradigm people used to understand astronomical phenomena saw the sky as a canopy with tiny holes in it that, at night, let in light from the “other side.” It was an understanding that explained observable things—like twinkling stars. That’s how paradigms work; they’re understandings about some part of the world that, once in place, shape what’s logical to say or think about that part of the world. Once you understand the sky as a canopy, it only makes sense to ask: “how high is the sky?”

We have a reigning education paradigm; a “cognitive-accountability” paradigm: the purpose of education is to transmit cognitive skills and knowledge to students–especially skills and knowledge critical to our society and economy–and the best way to do that is to hold educators and schools accountable to tests that measure that transmission.

This paradigm intensified its grip in the U.S. when, in the late 1990’s, our students performed poorly on the then new PISA exam (Programme for International Student Achievement). The PISA compares 15 year-olds in math, science and reading across the 35 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. We ranked 29th in math and 19th in reading on the latest 2012 PISAs. Our schools got most of the blame, even though poverty itself has to be substantially involved. (The U.S.’s percentage of poor children is higher than all but one OECD nation, Romania, and their poverty-linked skill deficits are evident before they begin school.) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was the bipartisan legislation that gave an ensuing era of school reform its legal framework and national scope. The just-signed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) relaxes national control over the NCLB’s testing program, but retains cognitive tests as its chief accountability.

Yet, as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reminds us, paradigms do shift, usually when the dominant one starts to fail in explanation, or as a guide to practice. With Tyler’s scowl and predicament in mind, my worries deepened into concern about the cognitive-accountability paradigm itself. Is it up to educating children in Tyler’s situation? My aim in this article is to convince you that it isn’t, and that there is a better educational paradigm, one that we have to shift into to succeed with our Tyler’s. The alternative paradigm includes cognitive accountability. But it’s not the paradigm’s top priority. It’s a paradigm built on another recognition: that for students to sustain meaningful school achievement they have to identify with school; they have to feel that they belong there, are valued there, can succeed there, and thereby, come to hold themselves accountable to doing at least fairly well there. This relationship to schooling is of course critical for all children. For Tyler though, the barriers to it are greater than for better-off kids—his hunger and pressures for food alone, are enough to make school seem hardly relevant. In the alternative paradigm, cognitive development—even as measured by tests–is seen to follow from this identification. It’s a different view of what schooling is most fundamentally about. It’s goal is the student’s sustained caring about school and about how he or she does there–more than test performances per se. Let’s call it the “identification paradigm.” Much of this article develops it.  But its rationale comes, in part, from what we’ve learned about the limitations of the cognitive-accountability paradigm—and how much those limitations could be a root of our nation’s truly formidable educational challenges.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this paradigm is that it hasn’t worked. Test scores (our PISA’s for example) haven’t improved much under its dominance, if at all. The test score gap between rich and poor has steadily increased over the last five decades. And the use of tests in accountability has had notorious unintended consequences, ranging from “teaching-to-the-test,” especially in low-income schools, to schools cheating to better their test score profiles, even to teachers leaving the profession.

Moreover, cognitive tests don’t predict future achievement any better than character traits our grandmothers stressed: perseverance, ability to delay gratification, resilience, etc. The goal of the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan in the 1960’s 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, getting along with others, etc., 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 quality 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 cohort of North Carolina ninth graders—464,502 students. Their character—this time measured through behaviors like attendance, on-time graduation, suspensions and grade point average—predicted life outcomes such as college attendance and later income better than their cognitive test scores.

So, why not hold schools accountable to non-cognitive measures? The ESSA allows exploration of this, and several California school districts are trying it. But concerns arise. Are these measures reliable and fudge-proof enough to use in high-stakes accountability—with money on the line? Also, is it smart to hold teachers accountable to something that, as of yet, we haven’t trained them to do, at least not consistently?

Still, these two facts—that grandma’s traits predict as well as cognitive tests and that a national regime of test-score accountability hasn’t improved test scores—raise the chief worry: that education’s cognitive accountability paradigm is, itself, flawed, and flawed in ways especially bad for disadvantaged students.

Think of Tyler showing up to school. This is a moment when he needs some sign that he belongs there, is valued, and has potential. So to meet him with a tedious, basic skills curriculum not much connected to his life or interests, frequent testing that he has to experience as only confirming his deficits, authoritarian discipline, etc., is likely sending him exactly the wrong signals—that he doesn’t belong and can’t succeed without near-heroic efforts that, given the realities of his life, would seem hardly possible. Modest immediate gains might occur. But it’s hard to imagine this approach encouraging Tyler to care about school, to identify with it in the sense of its becoming a sustained self-accountability. Seeing this, as I have, feels a little like seeing overly harsh parenting in the super-market. You can understand the frustration, even see good intentions. But you can also see that the parent’s basic understanding of parenting—the paradigm they’re following—is tragically misguided.

Could such misguidance be a significant root of our nation’s educational problems? Could an identification paradigm do better, be transformative?

The first step in answering these questions is to better understand how poverty affects people, how it positions them for schooling, and what it takes, given that positioning, to sustain their engagement with school.

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Whither Opportunity edited by Richard Murname and Greg Duncan is perhaps the social sciences most updated compendium of poverty-driven impediments to school success. The great thickness of the book foretells the plentitude of such impediments. Reflecting these deprivations and desperations, poor children are more likely to have suffered intrauterine stress, a fragmented family structure, an authoritarian parenting style that fosters weaker self-regulatory skills. They are exposed to less vocabulary, read to less, taken to fewer non-routine places, and are less likely to talk with adults in ways that foster logical thinking and participative skills. They are more likely to experience trauma and ongoing stress. Once they’re school age—society’s first good chance to engage them—they’re most often segregated into schools with other low-income students, with the least experienced teachers who have the highest turnover rates, and are most often assigned less engaging, basic skills curricula. Even when they wind up in better off schools, they are mostly assigned to academic tracks that recapitulate the disadvantages of lower-income schools.

A rocky road of obstacles indeed. And there is increasing evidence that traversing this road leaves disturbing traces: effects on brain and nervous system development that can “become permanent differences in neural structure and function, altering the opportunities of children as they grow into adulthood” said Charles Nelson and Margaret Sheridan in their review of this research.

Poverty is also a pressure on the immediate experience of school.

In their book Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist, and Eldar Shafir, a Princeton cognitive psychologist, report a brilliant series of field studies showing that the scarcities of poverty (like those of time) can so focus one’s attention on immediate concerns as to leave little bandwidth for planning, building cultural capital, doing homework, etc. The urgency of having to rummage through garbage to find enough cans that his family can have milk and cereal at the same breakfast will surely curtail Tyler’s bandwidth for school.

Even the identity of being poor poses challenges. In school, for example, Tyler can’t know if he will be judged and treated in terms of negative stereotypes about the poor. How will he be judged if he answers a question incorrectly in class? If his rural dialect slips into his speech? Is the teacher’s critical feedback intended as help, or is it a reflection of how she views the poor?

There is an adage among current-day school reformers that “to fix poverty, we have to fix our schools first.” I appreciate the commitment. I share it. But sustained school achievement, I am arguing, requires identifying with education. For middleclass children there are relatively few barriers to this identification. But for Tyler, going to school competes with hugely pressing needs. And as noted, this is a big way that poverty undermines education—by making it seem irrelevant.

To succeed with children in Tyler’s straights, I believe will require going beyond cognitive-accountability, beyond remedies like more hours in school, hiring teachers with M.A. degrees, evidence-based teaching and so on. These things can help. But only if they’re part of something bigger: a strategy that enables these students to identify with their education—right in the face of empty stomachs, pressing needs, and the rocky road of challenges they face.

As for Tyler’s learning “non-cognitive” traits critical to school and life, a follow up to Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow experiment” makes an important point. The original experiment measured 5-year olds’ ability to delay gratification by seeing how long they would wait for a second marshmallow after they’d been given a first one. In the follow up, the experimenter preceded the marshmallow delay test with a coloring book task. As the children began coloring, he said he would return in a moment with newer crayons. For half of the children, he did so. For the other half, he returned with crayons no newer than the original ones. All participants then went on to the marshmallow delay task. The children who got newer crayons—a promise fulfilled–waited longer for a second marshmallow (i.e., delayed gratification longer) than the children who got the older crayons—a promise unfulfilled.

The ability to delay gratification manifested itself when it made sense–when doing so would likely get you another marshmallow—but not when it didn’t make sense—when you couldn’t count on another marshmallow.

And that’s the point. When conditions of schooling make identifying with school promising, then learning to delay gratification and have grit in school makes sense. They facilitate what you want. But if school seems irrelevant or unpromising, why bother. Non-cognitive strengths in school grow out of the same conditions that school identification itself grows out of. Tyler might already have these traits in parts of his life where they pay off–a paper route, a city basketball league, a gang—yet, in an unforthcoming school, have none of them.

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Imagine you are back in elementary school, let’s say the fourth grade, and unfortunately, you are among the worst math students in your school, and known to be so—a fourth grade Tyler with bad math skills. You’re assigned a tutor. This has happened before. The first tutor was kind. She explained the problems; explained your many errors; repeated the correct reasoning; praised your correct answers, and so on. You hated it. You felt like a bundle of deficits. Even when you got a problem right, you didn’t feel like your own thinking had figured it out. You didn’t trust the tutor’s confidence in you. You learned a little, but built no interest in math.

The new tutor was different. She was relational, not gushy, but attentive. She wanted you engaged–by challenge. She valued your curiosity. She let you influence what you worked on. She wanted you to see that your own thinking could solve problems. She picked problems right at the frontier of your skills. “Now this is level 3…it’s going to get more difficult.” She inoculated you against frustration; ”now this may be a little harder since it has been a minute since we have done that type of problem.” Her praise was largely indirect; “we’re ready for the next level of work,” or, she reminded you of how hard the problem you solved was–with just a note of being impressed. She diminished your failures; “I think I didn’t tell you what I wanted.” She was Socratic. She corrected you by asking questions about your reasoning. She used questions to stimulate your curiosity; “OK, can you think of yet another way to solve the problem?” She built a relationship with you. You trusted her confidence in you.

Your new tutor’s Socratic tutoring was precisely the tutoring used by “expert tutors” as nominated by peer teachers in a classic tutoring study done by Stanford’s distinguished social-developmental psychologist Mark Lepper and his students in several Palo Alto elementary schools in the early 1990’s. (The above quotes are theirs.)

The new tutor relieved your worry that math was endlessly frustrating and would only sum you up as deficient. She showed you that you could understand and do math. You flourished—just what happened to the real students fortunate enough to work with these tutors.

The expert tutors illustrate identification thinking—a broader education paradigm. They recognize the wall of defense that disadvantage and poor reputation can put up. They recognize that you probably took the direct, informational approach of the first tutor as a sign that you were seen in terms of your deficits, and that your first need was trust—that you’d be seen as having potential. They understood that, without this trust, you wouldn’t likely learn much.

“…exactly those things that one would do to present information to students most efficiently about the existence and sources of their errors and misconceptions are, at least for unconfident remedial [image-threatened] students precisely the same things that seem likely to further undermine these students’ sense of competence and control” said Mark Lepper.

What a difference a paradigm can make.

But can it be used broadly, scaled up to classrooms, entire schools?

In the mid 1960’s a young James Comer, a physician finishing his psychiatry residency at Yale’s Child Study Center, walked into Baldwin school, an urban New Haven, Connecticut elementary school on a training site visit. As he entered, a teacher grabbed his arm and said: “help me, help me.” “Children were yelling…milling around, hitting each other, calling the teacher names. When the teacher called for order, she was ignored. When I call for order, I was ignored.” Comer finished his residency and stayed in New Haven. He’d built good relations with the school system. This would help with what he wanted to do next: develop a systematic approach to reforming schools like Baldwin—all guided by a basic assumption not dissimilar from that of the expert tutors: “When the adults in [children’s] lives show trust, support, positive regard, high expectations, affiliation and bonding their learning comes naturally.” The “Comer Process” focuses first on building trust among a school’s stakeholders–teachers, staff, parents, students and the community. Three teams are established; a reform planning team of staff, teachers and parents to define and plan reform, a parent support team and a staff and student support team. Implementing reform through this process takes time and focus. But in dozens of schools where it’s been tried it, to at least a reasonable degree, it has improved grades, test scores, self-concepts, and classroom climate–putting the lives of many like Tyler on better trajectories.

Geoffery Canada, the tall, thoughtful, genius organizer of the famous Harlem Children Zone (HCZ) can be thought of as Comer dialed up; not only designing rigorous schools—a pipeline of pre-K through 12 Promise Academies—but also, for a 24 square block area in Harlem, a suite of programs that support students and their families from infancy through college. The Zone does many things: connecting students and their families to parent training (e.g., Baby College) health care, reemployment training, financial literacy and so on. But the message of the expert tutors—that the students belong to a valuing community in which they are seen to have promise–is conveyed through all of its aspects. And against the direst of odds, the Promise Academies report some of the strongest academic gains of any school reform effort—gains on track to eliminate, for its students, the traditional racial achievement gap observed in the rest of New York City’s schools.

David Kirp, in his important book, Improbable Scholars, describes the same principles scaled up to entire school districts. His chief focus is on low-income Union City, New Jersey schools where students score as well as their much better off suburban counterparts in writing, reading and math. No silver bullets. No off-the-shelf reform package. Rather, it’s stable leadership and day-to-day, year-in, year-out commitment to doing all of the big and little things that put expert-tutor type wisdom into students’ daily lives: child-centered over staff-centered priorities, big investments in pre-school, rigorous and integrated curricula, explicit and constant attention to building cultures of respect and confidence in students’ potential. The academic mission of these schools is unconditional. But they further get the importance of students being seen as part of that mission, as able to fulfill it.

Can smaller implementations of expert tutor thinking help–say, when major reform isn’t possible or even necessary, when your school is, for example, pretty good academically but still challenged by the needs of disadvantaged students?

When a patient arrives at an emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack, the doctors can’t fix many of the actual causes of an attack—a life-long poor diet, a smoking habit, a lack of exercise, and so on. But if the heart itself is in pretty good shape, they might prevent the attack by addressing its proximal cause—blocked coronary arteries that prevent blood flow to the heart—with a simple coronary stent.

When a disadvantaged child like Tyler arrives at school, wary, and with significant deficits, unless he lives in the Harlem Children Zone, his school can’t fix many of the things that cause his problems–stress at home and in the community, distracted family support, emotional challenges etc. The school can’t fix poverty. But if its academics are decent, it might prevent his failure by remedying its most proximal cause—the sense of not belonging, being valued or seen as having potential.

As best you can, imagine yourself as a young African American seventh grader in a roughly, half and half, white and black working and middle class junior high school just outside a small Northeastern city. You, and other African American students, come from the lower-income sector of this community. Your school has a well-known racial gap in performance. It’s sometimes mentioned in the local newspaper.

One day, at the beginning of your seventh grade year, your teacher hands out to each student in your class an envelope with his or her name on it. You open yours and find the instruction to write for 15 minutes about the things most important to you. (Most students write about important family relationships, friendships, and favorite activities like a sport, a church choir, or playing a musical instrument.) You do this, and return the envelop to your teacher. That’s it.

Then something begins to happen. Within a few weeks, your grades go up, gradually at first, but by the end of the school year, your grades, and those of the other African American students who followed the same writing instructions, are high enough to reduce the standard black-white grade gap by over 40%. By the end of your eight-grade year, almost two years after you wrote your essay, your grades and those of other African Americans in your essay group are, on average, 25% higher than the grades of African American students in a control group who wrote a non-affirming essay for their teacher. For African Americans who were doing worse as they began the seventh grade, this effect after two years was even greater, 41%.

How could this brief writing exercise have such effects? It may start with how African American students can feel in a school of this make up. They come from greater disadvantage. They know they can be viewed through negative stereotypes about their academic ability, aggressiveness, and emotional control. So the chance to both affirm for themselves, and privately tell their teacher about the version of themselves they treasure most–about people who love them and things they love to do–mitigates worries about themselves and how they’re seen. They trust the place more. It’s easier to engage schoolwork. They do better. Their worries further subside. They do still better. The writing exercise then, like a coronary stent forestalling a heart attack, launches a positive cycle of less vigilance and increased performance that can carry them forward for years to come.

(Fittingly, the writing exercise had no effect on white students’ achievement—a group not under the same identity pressures in the setting.)

This is what social psychologists Geoff Cohen, Julio Garcia, Nancy Apfel and Allison Master found in a seminal study done in that Northeastern junior high school. Other researchers have gotten similar results for similar writing exercises in similar schools across the country—with Latino students in Colorado and California, with women in college Physics courses, and again with African American students in Wisconsin. Several studies asked students to record their thoughts in the months following the writing exercise.  From these records “It seemed that the…[exercise] changed the narratives that the students were telling themselves about their academic experiences [for example, seeing setbacks as less indicative of being prejudiced against] and that they carried these stories with them beyond the immediate location where the intervention took place” said the authors of one report.

For image-threatened students, writing an affirmation that your teacher sees can help, even dramatically, at least in pretty good schools. (Some schools report using a “getting-to-know-you” questionnaire to good effect.) It reduces the interfering “blockage” of vigilance and worry these students might otherwise have. But perhaps not in all schools, all the time. Students have to trust that teachers will read and use these exercises. Nor is an affirmation likely to help much if the curriculum is stultifying, or taught by poorly trained teachers. You can clear coronary arteries, but if the heart itself is in bad shape, it won’t help much. We will learn more about where these exercises are effective in the years ahead.

In the meantime, how should these findings guide practice? The answer is through the underlying paradigm they support; the basic understandings about the needs of disadvantaged students they reveal. Whether in relation to regular public schools or charter schools, suburban, urban or rural schools, class-segregated or class-integrated schools, this understanding holds, with clear guidance: for disadvantaged students we have to go beyond cognitive accountability—to an explicit focus on building identification with schooling.

The good news is that from a broader paradigm, a broader set of fixes can fall–something that, in recent years, is much underway.

“What we discovered is that these kids weren’t going to be able to make progress on the academics until they’d gotten help with their social and emotional issues” said Billy Aydlett, principal of Leataata Floyd Elementary in Sacramento, in describing his low-income students in a recent New York Times article on social-emotional learning (SEL) approaches in education, many of which embody the insights of expert tutors.

Across the country now, elementary school students are regularly asked to freeze their faces in the expression of sadness, anger, bliss, etc., and then discuss their own similar emotions. This sensitizes them to emotional life. But it can also give them a sense of being valued for who they are—like writing a self-affirming essay for your teacher.

The education writer Paul Tough recently described visiting Polaris Charter Academy on Chicago’s near West Side where students begin each day in small groups of other students—a “crew” of regulars. They greet each other, shake hands, and check in on personal matters. These meetings, the students report, are what give them their sense of belonging in the school.

SEL strategies vary in specifics. Some foster school identification better than others. Some dominate school culture. Others are essentially a few minutes of calming meditation. Despite this variability, a classic meta-analysis of SEL programs in over 200 schools found they reduced classroom disruption by 10%, and impressively, raised achievement test scores by 11%–an effect that any cognitively oriented intervention would be proud of. These programs too, do multiple things, from improving emotional control to reducing distraction. But they also convey a valuing of students, and implicit conviction about their prospects.

Powerful psychological strategies are emerging too. Close in timber to self-affirming essays, they shape students’ self narratives about school. Teaching growth mindsets, for example—that academic ability is not fixed and limiting but expandable with effort—bolsters students’ narratives about their capabilities in school. A now major research literature shows this can produce substantial achievement gains. Similarly, efforts to make students feel “identity safe”—that though disadvantaged and of minority status, they won’t be negatively stereotyped in school—fosters significant achievement gains.

Looked at from the cognitive accountability paradigm, these strategies can seem off-target, not cohered by clear principles of learning, even as distractions from more important work. But looked at from the identification paradigm, they have a profound unity: they all address Tyler’s first need, to trust, care about and engage school.

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Against this emerging picture of what works, what do our schools actually deliver to students, including our Tylers?

A research team headed by Robert Pianta, Dean of the University of Virginia School of Education actually observed what teachers do in 737 5th grade classrooms (87% public school classrooms) and additional 1st and 2nd grade classrooms in 302 school districts over 33 states. The quality of instruction and emotional climate in these classrooms varied considerably, but one thing didn’t: 91% of every day was dominated by basic skills teaching, largely lectures and whole-class worksheets. The average 5th grader spent 500% more time on basic skills instruction than on problem solving or reasoning activities. And this pattern was especially true for low-income classrooms. Ninety-one percent of those classrooms were rated low in instructional quality and 76% were rated low in emotional climate.

If 51% of our nation’s public school students are low-income yet, extrapolating from this study, they get only 9% of the quality instruction and 25% of the quality emotional climate, we can safely say they don’t get much of what they need to trust and become identified with school—what they’d need to elevate our nation’s PISA scores, or bring our upward mobility to that of many European nations, or improve the skills of our workforce.

How’d we get here?

“…the role of education in…the integration of new workers into the wage-labor system came to dominate the potential role of schooling as the great equalizer and the instrument of full human development” wrote Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describing the early 20th Century foundations of American education in their classic Schooling in Capitalist America. Under the press of a modernizing economy, we adopted a pragmatic, cognitive-accountability paradigm for education: any developmental focus on the whole child—as in the pedagogy of the great early 20th Century educator John Dewey—had to function within the constraints of this larger accountability.

The kind of schooling that Pianta and his colleagues document, is likely a legacy of this pragmatism.

What a difference a paradigm makes.

Another legacy of this pragmatism—and its myopic focus on the cognitive–is our poor perception of the broader needs of low-income students. It’s a myopia that leads us to over-attribute their achievement problems to cognitive deficits—of unknown tractability—and to see as most plausible, remedies focused on those deficits per se.

Yet the interventions I’ve described—while indeed aiming at cognitive deficits—have been successful by also addressing the first, often psychological, needs of these students, be it through a 15-minute chance to affirm themselves and their belonging with a teacher, or a full school reform focused on whole-child development.

Latent in this work then, is a paradigm shift in how to educate, especially low-income students. It’s a shift in goals. While not ignoring the importance of test performance, it gives students’ relationship to schooling—identification–a higher priority. What has to be achieved in this paradigm is students’ conviction that they belong in school, that they are valued there, are seen as able to succeed, and that education is about their broader development and inclusion in society, not just test scores. This conviction on their part, and the support needed to make it a realistic possibility, are essential for schooling to become a self-accountability for them. Their sustained school achievement (and higher test scores) depends on it.

As educators in this paradigm, our job is to increase student behaviors that reflect school identification—better attendance, broader participation in school activities, on-time class arrival, improved homework habits, more reading, etc.—the inputs of better school achievement that reflect “joining up,” caring about school.

As I’ve described, there are multiple ways of doing this. Even small things, nudges if you will, in the direction of helping students feel belonging and promise, can have big and lasting effects, even when they don’t directly remedy cognitive deficits—something effective teachers, I am rather sure, know well. And multiple nudges in a school can take it to a tipping point—a change in the whole school culture that transforms the experience of all students.

This isn’t to argue against the importance of effective K-12 policy and funding at the local, state, and national levels, or the importance of the political will needed for these things. It’s to point to another avenue of reform, and to claim a coherence to it that has been—for paradigmatic reasons—too little understood and too marginalized. It’s also to stress how actionable this avenue is. In the spirit of constant improvement, a nudge to ask the “belongingness-promise” question can make a huge difference when persistently applied to school decision-making–curriculum decisions, disciplinary policies, rules for composing student study groups, after school options, the examples used in presenting STEM material, the importance of empathy in hiring teachers and staff, the time in teacher orientation spent on student’s background cultures, and so on.

The social psychologists, Jason Okonofua, David Paunesku and Greg Walton, asked 31 math teachers from 5 low-income, largely minority, California middle schools to complete 2 brief online modules designed to evoke an empathic mindset—that misbehavior can reflect students’ developmental challenges and social pressures. They further prompted them with: “a teacher who makes his or her students feel heard, valued and respected shows them that school is fair and that they can grow and succeed there.”

Suspensions in the nation’s K-12 schools increased from 1.7 to 5 million from 1974 to 2011—a disproportionate percentage of whom were minority and low-income students. Yet teachers, in this study, who got the online belongingness prompt, suspended only half the students over the next year as a control group of unprompted teachers. No policy change, no training program, no teacher accountability system, just a prompt, a nudge to be empathic and consider students’ sense of belonging and promise.

This is a big way that good schools—like good restaurants as my colleague Joshua Aronson has pointed out to me–get built; guiding principles minutely and persistently applied to all aspects of schooling, keeping track of how they work out and refining them to better and better effect—the ground game of school improvement.

Just how much can be accomplished this way? How big is the claim here? Pretty big. The focus, patience, discipline, and grit needed for school reform in the complex policy and funding world in which most public schools exist today, can’t be minimized. School reform is tough. And sustained school reform is…well…a true feat.

That said, I have two reasons for my “pretty big” optimism. The identification paradigm identifies what is probably a major mal-effect of the cognitive accountability paradigm—the fact that, for students in Tyler’s situation, it probably fosters more school alienation than school identification. And because this paradigm is the dominant U.S. paradigm, this mal-effect is likely massive. Simply not doing this so much, not entrapping these students in school cultures that send so many signals about their deficits and how much grit and the like it will take for them to be even “normal” would probably help a lot. When you have a life that makes schooling largely irrelevant to your biggest, pressing needs, signals like these give you slim grounds for the heroic faith the cognitive accountability regime asks of you. Part of my optimism comes from believing that a lot less of this could itself be transformative—as is the mode in many of our Independent schools and some of the best school systems in the world such as, most famously, the case of Finland.

My second optimism is that the identification paradigm brings into an overarching strategy many tactics for school improvement that have been demonstrated to have high leverage effectiveness, but that have been used in only scattered and marginal ways throughout U.S. public schools. Using them more, developing them more and consistently asking the “belongingness-promise” question in school decision-making, I believe, could help change the sad fabric of American schooling that Pianta and his colleagues have documented.

What a difference a paradigm can make. As research increasingly shows, even a little effort helping these students feel they belong and have promise in our classrooms–despite their empty stomachs, deficits, ongoing stresses and the negative images they contend with—as many good teachers know—can make a big difference.