The most important factor in the success of a child is arguably the stability of their home life. A poor kid with two dedicated parents can very easily get further in life than the wealthy child of a nasty divorce. And left in the dust is the kid that was "raised by the wolves," so to speak, in a ghetto, no matter how much government assistance the family receives to normalize their situation. Higher income of course confers countless perks that the highest achievers can take advantage of, but when understanding the majority of the population it is most useful as a heuristic for stability of home life.

It is nearly impossible to do justice to both sides when they are starting from such different places in life. How do you level the playing field when one was read bedtime stories to since they were a toddler and the other entered school not knowing how to read? How does the kid from an average nuclear family fare with the kids whose parents cannot even be trusted to feed them? How does a kid sheltered in a quiet suburban neighborhood feel safe around a kid that grew up fighting on the streets?

For decades the focus of the system has very clearly been on trying to offset the damage incurred in the home life of these children. And sadly, it has utterly failed at fixing multigenerational poverty. Indeed, policies stemming from No Child Left Behind seem to have made the problem even worse, raising generations of problem children who have been emboldened by weak administration that provides little consequence for consistently disrupting classes or assaulting students or even teachers!

The sad truth is that you can't fix home problems at school, and that our educational and social policies have only enabled the proliferation of broken homes.

Yes. We do the exact same with disabled students. Yet no one talks about them. I suppose because it is because "looking out for the poor" makes people feel good.