Some are born to advantage, with moms and dads who have both the time and resources to purchase their advancement, living in communities with cohesive and strong social networks, going to excellent schools, and taking advantage of substantial public financial investments that support them as they grow. Others are born to having a hard time families that deal with everyday challenges to attend to them, living in communities with an absence of safe real estate alternatives and few job prospects for homeowners– communities with inadequate schools, many shattered by poverty and violence.

We open this story of opportunity in America where many would start– with our children, and what chance looks like for them today.

These various beginning points place kids on noticeably various trajectories of growth, leading to a sped up build-up of benefit or drawback and, ultimately, to greatly various adult results.

This polarization of life outcomes is really nationwide in scope. Some 12 million children, or 17 percent of those under the age of 18, reside in households with earnings below the federal poverty line, and almost 3.4 million children are maturing in areas that their parents refer to as unsafe. Seventeen percent of children under age 18 were residing in homes that were food insecure at some time throughout 2017, and a record 1.5 million public school children were homeless during the 2017– 2018 school year.

Irwin Kirsch, Ralph W. Tyler Chair in Large-Scale Assessment & & Director of the Centers of Global Assessment & & Research on Human Capital & & Education, ETS, and Henry Braun, Boisi Professor & of Education & Public Policy, Director of the Center for the Study of Testing, & Evaluation, & Educational Policy at the Lynch School of Education at Boston CollegeIrwin Kirsch is the Ralph W. Tyler Chair in Large-Scale Assessment and Director of the Centers of Global Assessment and Research on Human Capital and Education at ETS. Henry Braun is the Boisi Professor of Education and Public Policy, and director of the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy, at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

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