New approaches, he says, could focus on social and emotional development as well, since science now tells us that relationships and interactions with the environment sculpt the areas of the brain that control behavior (like the ability to concentrate), which also can affect academic achievement (like learning to read).
As of 2014, the national poverty rate was at 14.8 percent, according to U.S. census figures: 26.2 percent of African-Americans and 23.6 percent of Latinos are poor, compared with 10.1 percent of whites and 12 percent Asian-Americans, proving that poverty is not equally distributed among ethnic groups.
Young minorities who are more likely to experience poverty—and in turn more likely to face the cognitive development challenges laid out by science—could end up shouldering another burden, says W. Carson Byrd, assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville: the assumption, based on these studies and headlines, that minority children "are less capable than their white peers.
In 2013, Clancy Blair of the New York University Neuroscience and Education Lab, led a study that found the time a child spent in poverty, and in a household filled with chaos, was significantly related to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
