... and to continue that thought, many of the adults in homes like that are simply not in a position to do much advocacy on a child's behalf.
It may be a matter of financial resources, lack of parental education or awareness, or a matter of a simple lack of time in a single working parent, but most kids from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes won't have guardians/parents that can help them to be identified even if they should be.
Where would most of our kids be under those conditions? Languishing in classrooms where they are slowly crushed into conformity? Or labeled as "problem" kids who are disruptive and defiant?
Most teachers would not identify such children as likely candidates for the relatively scarce "extra" resources of a gifted program, assuming that one even exists in the first place (and in many low-income neighborhoods, it does not).
__Parents who went unidentified may have little reason to suspect that a child who seems "just like I was" is a gifted child, and as most of us know, schools aren't necessarily going to bring it up if parents do not.
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Heritability of cognitive potential exists, certainly. Twin studies have shown that it may be as high as 80% correlatable to genetic potential, in fact-- but that says nothing about racial characteristics, and the fact of the matter is that most adoptive homes are likely to be on the "enriched" side of things as well. Few adoptive parents are going to be in the socioeconomically disadvantaged category and have an adopted twin for a study, so I'm guessing that the relative differences between adoptive homes show only the limits of just how much heredity can contribute-- rather than how little it may matter under truly dreadful conditions.
Ergo, ideal conditions may produce cognitive ability which is limited mostly by genetics... but abysmal conditions may themselves limit potential to far less than genetics would otherwise predict.
