In Tightrope, the authors demonstrate how education can be a key component of an individual’s ability to escape poverty, and how poverty, in turn, can determine how well one is able to pursue education. They conclude that in an increasingly globalized, automated world, education—and in particular, early childhood education, as well as vocational education and technical training—must form an important part of America’s strategy to improve the welfare of the working class.

As the authors note early in the book, America ranks low on global lists for high school graduation rates and standardized test scores (even though American students are more confident than students in other countries that they’ve mastered a topic). However, the reason that working-class American children are struggling isn’t that they are less intelligent or motivated; instead, it’s that their backgrounds, as well as the school systems in which they are educated, make it difficult for them to thrive. On the one hand, many of the people the authors profile were raised in families in which parents had little formal education; as a result, families like the Knapps did not place the same priority on acquiring book-based knowledge, as the parents hadn’t received or needed it in their working lives: “The Knapp home had guns but not books; the children were taught how to tinker with cars but not to read” (115).