"One fact stood out in all the academic research: the [achievement] gap began when children were very young. By the time they started kindergarten, there was already a large and disturbing difference between the scores that poor and minority students received on various tests of cognitive abilities and scores that middle-class white students were receiving on those same tests. This didn't let schools off the hook altogether, of course, but it did mean that schools couldn't possibly be the whole problem. Something was going wrong early on, in the homes and families and neighborhoods of poor children, before they ever set foot in a school building." (Whatever It Takes)