[ashark]

It's no myth that kids in the poor schools around here are surrounded by peers who generate frequent school-wide lockdowns over (often realized) fears of significant violence, disregard authority and the importance of school to the point of cursing at and threatening teachers all the time (I'm talking lower elementary school kids here, not high school) and often, eventually, end up on the wrong side of the law. Kids in middle class and higher schools aren't dealing with that crap. In legitimately upper-middle-class (professional class, if you prefer) schools there's additionally peer pressure to do crazy stuff like study for the SAT outside of just the super-nerd clique, which, by that age, is vastly more effective than anything a parent would do to encourage that kind of thing. Norms and expectations among one's peers in school are, as I understand it, so hugely important that they overshadow most other factors in education (aside from basic home-life stability stuff, like not being abused and having food).