Throughout the world, your chances of success in school and life depend more on your family environment than on other factors. Three-year-old children with excellent family environment are one year ahead of their poor peers. They know twice as many words as poor children and their IQ is 40 points higher than theirs. By the age of ten, the gap is three years. At that time, some poor children had not mastered basic reading and arithmetic skills, and many children would never master these skills: at this age, failure began to become irreversible.

Some school systems seem to have found a way to bridge this gap. Finland ensures that every child can complete basic education and meet strict standards. When a Finnish local official was asked how many children in her city had not finished their studies, she replied, "If you want to know, I can quote their names." In the United States, "knowledge is power engineering" contract schools recruit students from the poorest families, and ensure that each of them can graduate from high school and 80% of the students can go to college. In the past 20 years, Singapore has reduced the achievement gap between ethnic minority students from 17% to 5%.