High-achieving kids from low-income families too often fall into the achievement trap; as they progress up the grades, their academic performance falls, and they are far less likely to remain star students than are middle-class or wealthy high-achievers. So says the first U.S.-wide analysis of high-achieving students from poor families (published…

"Math is language, too," Phyllis and David Whitin (2000) remind everyone in their informative book about reading and writing in the mathematics classroom. This means that students in elementary school math classes are learning two distinct, yet related languages--one of numbers, the other of words. These languages of numbers and words…