Biopsychiatrists at the Harvard Medical School have shown that mothers who frequently abuse their children even verbally can impair the circuitry of … - Robert D. Putnam

Schooling — unequal as it is in America — plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

By contrast, almost all our richer kids said that (with some qualifications) they do trust other people. That comparison reflects not paranoia on the part of poor kids, but the malevolent social realities within which they live and the fact that people and institutions have so often failed them.

High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes.