Lead in text:
A striking look at how three girls from middle to low income families in Galveston are fighting their way toward a college education and success. “Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer — the place where upward mobility gets started,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.”
"I don't want to work at Walmart" like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor. Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O'Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to "get off the island" - escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston.
