[PHOTOGRAPH: My grandfather, circa 1945]
My grandfather, circa 1945. The system had no instrument for what he carried.
The Score We Never Assigned
Part One: The Gap Between Performance and Potential
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV
Rui Dionisio, Ed.D.
I want to tell you about two students.
The first arrived in the United States schools speaking no English. His parents worked on a factory floor. No one in his family had ever attended college. By every measure the school had for understanding him, he was a student of modest potential.
The assessments said so.
The placement decisions said so.
The quiet expectations of the institution said so.
That student was me.
The second student is sitting in a classroom somewhere right now — in Fair Lawn, in every city where schools are trying to do right by children. She is not reading below grade level. She is not disruptive. She is not flagged for any kind of intervention. She is, by all the measures we have built, invisible. Her PSAT score will not qualify her for AP Potential. Her GPA is a 2.9. Her teachers describe her as quiet, pleasant, and average.
She is none of those things.
She is extraordinary. And we have not yet built the instruments to find her.
This post is about the gap between those two realities. It is about the science of potential, the philosophy of human capacity, and the moral urgency of building diagnostic tools worthy of the children we are supposed to serve. It is about a research finding from my own doctoral work that I have spent twenty years turning over in my mind. And it is about what I believe is the next great frontier in educational innovation. Not a new curriculum, not a new technology, not a new accountability framework, but a new way of seeing.
Progress isn’t a straight line upward. Neither is potential.
What the PSAT Found. What It Missed.
The College Board’s AP Potential tool is genuinely valuable. Using PSAT/NMSQT scores as predictive indicators of AP success has helped districts like mine expand access to rigorous coursework, invite students who might not have self-nominated, and make data-driven decisions about course placement. It is a meaningful step forward from the days when AP enrollment was a function of parental advocacy and teacher intuition alone.
But I want to be precise about what the PSAT measures, because precision here is everything. The PSAT measures academic preparation at a specific moment in time. It measures what a student has already learned, in a format that rewards a particular kind of cognitive processing, under conditions that are themselves not neutral. A student who has attended under-resourced schools, who learned English as a second language, who carried the ambient stress of economic precarity into a testing room on a Tuesday morning — that student’s PSAT score is not a measure of their potential.
It is a measure of their circumstances.
The instrument is not the villain. Misreading it is.
My clinical observation has been this: the most vexing gap in education is not the achievement gap. It is the potential gap — the distance between what students are demonstrating and what they are capable of becoming. And we have built almost our entire identification architecture around the first, while largely ignoring the second.
What My Dissertation Found — and What It Could Not Yet Say
In 2009, as part of my doctoral research at Seton Hall University, I examined the effects of inquiry-based science instruction on 229 middle school students across grades six through eight in two New Jersey schools. The study used a randomized control design with three instruments: unit assessments, standardized test scores, and the Academic Self-Concept Scale — a validated measure of how students perceive their own academic confidence and effort — administered pre- and post-intervention.
The headline findings were encouraging. Students in inquiry-based classrooms significantly outperformed their peers in traditional classrooms on unit assessments. The effect was particularly pronounced for male students and students with disabilities — two populations whose potential is chronically underestimated by conventional instruction.
But the finding that has stayed with me, the one I return to in my teaching and in my work with doctoral students, is the one that, on the surface, appeared to be a null result. There were no statistically significant differences in academic self-concept between the inquiry-based and traditional classrooms. Not for the full group. Not for males. Not for students with disabilities.
The intervention moved achievement.
It did not move self-concept.
For years, I read that finding as a limitation of the study, a too-short intervention window, insufficient time for a pedagogical shift to alter deeply held beliefs about academic identity. Those are legitimate methodological explanations. But there is another reading. One I believe is more important — theoretically and practically.
Academic self-concept is not a downstream product of performance.
It is a pre-existing lens, already in place, already shaping how a student interprets every success and every failure, before the teacher says a single word.
Which means we have been measuring it at the wrong end of the process entirely.
If that is true, and the research literature increasingly suggests that it is, then academic self-concept is not a consequence we need to produce. It is a condition we need to diagnose. It is a signal, already present in the student, waiting to be read.
That realization is the seed of everything that follows. In Part Two of this series, I will introduce a framework I am calling the Student Potential Profile—a multidimensional diagnostic battery drawn from some of the most compelling non-cognitive research of the past three decades—and make the case that it is time to build the instruments our students deserve.
Coming in Part Two: The Instruments We Have. The Instruments We Need. A Student Potential Profile that moves beyond the PSAT and toward a new way of seeing every child whole.
Rui Dionisio, Ed.D. is Superintendent of Fair Lawn Public Schools in New Jersey, a professor at Ramapo College and Montclair State University, a dissertation adviser at Seton Hall University, and a scholar-practitioner whose work focuses on educational leadership, human potential, and the conditions that make belonging possible. He is a District Administration Leader of Distinction and AASA national conference presenter. He writes the Superintendent’s Corner column, “Everything Matters.”
