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From the NY Times.

Not surprisingly, children who excelled in math were far more likely to become inventors. But being a math standout wasn’t enough. Only the top students who also came from high-income families had a decent chance to become an inventor.

This fact may be the starkest: Low-income students who are among the very best math students — those who score in the top 5 percent of all third graders — are no more likely to become inventors than below-average math students from affluent families: (see chart)

“There are great differences in innovation rates,” Chetty said. “Those differences don’t seem to be due to innate ability to innovate.” Or as Steve Case — the entrepreneur who’s now investing in regions that venture capital tends to ignore — told me when I called him to discuss the findings: “Creativity is broadly distributed. Opportunity is not.”

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(Val's opinion) If anything, I think the study understates the problem because it doesn't touch on an educational environment that measures "learning outcomes" with industrial metrics (high-stakes bubble tests), or on risk aversion in funding, and other problems that come into play at universities.

The achievement gap is always a big topic of conversation in our state and our district with no or little progress made in closing it despite tons of money poured into equity initiatives. Basically the only outcomes that they are interested in are performance on math/reading bubble tests and how many kids graduate or go to college. But the bubble tests seem to be the most important thing. Anything that doesn't raise scores on the bubble tests or help make them more even, is deemed not worth an investment (incl. in some cases gifted education). Gifted education, in fact, just makes the achievement gap worse according to a lot of people. It's not worth an investment because raising the scores of the top kids just makes the achievement gap looks worse on paper.

And blackcat's thoughts highlight why the highest achieving low-income students struggle to fulfill their potential: they already meet or exceed performance goals for their subgroup (i.e. they are high-needs students who are achieving in the top performance classification on state-wide testing), so there is no institutional incentive to increase their achievement. It is true that their outcomes are likely to be better than their lower-achieving SES peers, but nowhere near their achievement peers, let alone their cognitive potential peers.

Agreed, Val this isn't surprising.

Bill Gates, while clearly bright, would never have got the sweetheart deal that he got with IBM without family connections.

Even Obama may not have been POTUS had he not been born into an affluent family and sent to an elite prep school.

Higher SES families have more connections to opportunities and are more likely to be able to afford to create them when they are not offered by the Govt.

This is why I am a big proponent of GT testing and GT programs for ALL kids regardless of parental SES.