Privilege begets privilege. There are many students with the mental potential to get all A's in school that do not, often due largely to family discord and stress from poverty. Coming from a privileged background of a stable family with educated parents makes the achievement of straight A's mean much less than someone coming from a less privileged background. There are not objective measures of ability that you can cleanly separate out from their environmental dependencies. Being born poor is one of the worst things you can do to your health: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401251/poor-health
> There are many students with the mental potential to get all A's in school that do not, often due largely to family discord and stress from poverty.
There are also many students that do not have the mental (either intellectual or psychological) potential to get all A's in school because of a history of family discord and stress and physical environmental effects associated with poverty. (That is, even if you took away any effects of current poverty holding them back from what they intellectually and psychologically could do under ideal circumstances, they still would not do well because of past circumstances.)
Yes, that's unfortunately true as well. Poor people tend to find housing in hazardous areas, and the developmental damage from some things, like lead poisoning, are permanent. Chronic stress also hampers physical development. To see how extreme just the psychosocial effects can be, I encourage everyone to read up on these two concepts:
