Excellence Gap Report Card: Across America, low-income students are less likely to reach advanced levels of academic performance despite having equal intellects creating a “persistent talent underclass.”

To shed light on the Excellence Gap and raise awareness of the need for better strategies to support students across the country, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation initiated a groundbreaking study that examines state-level interventions that are intended to foster the maintenance of academic achievement within low-income student populations, with the goal of identifying policies that could be implemented more widely. States were then graded on both their current policy interventions and their student outcomes.