Widening educational gap between rich and poor

For some reason, two studies that came out back in the fall have been getting press this week (including substantial coverage in the New York Times). Both were part of a compilation of studies Wither Opportunity? put out by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Spencer Foundation examining widening opportunity gaps in education based on family income over the past several decades.
One of the studies, "Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion" (to quote from the abstract):

...find(s) growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families.

From the Times article:

The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.

In the Stanford study, which looked at standardized test scores:

The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.

As the Times correctly notes (and illustrates with a chart), this has been happening at the same time that achievement gaps between white children and children of color have been substantially narrowing.
I should perhaps point out that the Times then goes on to blow it by throwing around a lot of conservative economic theory (no,wait! Income doesn't matter! And it's all the fault of the dang War on Poverty, anyway!), which doesn't precisely forward the conversation. Rather than ending on the note they do ("The cupboard is bare."), I'd suggest that we go back to the middle of the article, which hints a start of a solution:

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Add that appropriate pre-natal and VERY early childcare, and we might start to get somewhere. The cupboard isn't bare, after all.