We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.

The solution for rising up kids in the income distributionlies is in creating better childhood environments for kids growing up, especially in low income families. And so what means such things like schools, the quality of neighborhoods. If you think about what's gone on in Baltimore, it's a place of tremendous concentrated poverty. People aren't really seeing a path forward and I think revitalizing places like that can have a huge impact, even in the face of globalization and changes in technology.

Cities that tend of have better schools for middle-income families, they tend to have much better prospects for kids moving up in the income distribution.

The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.

The latest research on social mobility showed that there's a large aggregate decline in the U.S. in your chances of earning more than your parents. But I think where the story becomes more optimistic one is that there are pockets of America, where children from low-income families have significant chances of rising up in the income distribution. This finding of big geographic variation is an encouraging one because it shows that there are places where we see the American Dream thriving and we simply need to understand how can we replicate those successes elsewhere throughout the country.

There's an evidence from a number of studies which show that where you grow up and the age at which you move to the suburbs or to a neighborhood that in general seems to have better conditions can really affect a child's outcomes. The kids who moved at young ages are dramatically better as adults. They're earning 30 percent more, they're 27 percent more likely to go to college, relative to the kids who stayed in the high poverty public housing projects. And so there's clear scientific evidence that you can change kids' outcomes just based on where they grow up.

Atlanta's a good example of a city that's quite sprawling, where there's a sharp division between where blacks and whites live, between where low-income and high-income families live.