I'm curious about the studies you mention. I grew up poor, drug abuse, gangs, violence, etc, but I was also encouraged to go to the library, which inspired my love of reading and self-education. Other low income students, broken homes, etc I became friends with in the private schools I got put into later in childhood, they were the same. Do you have an idea of specifics about these studies, in this regard? Does it take into account the people from broken homes and poverty who still managed to excel in school? I'd be interested in data about that specific phenomenon.
Yeah, this varies widely of course -- my parents didn't go to college and we were lower middle class but I was an obsessive reader. These are just trends noticed by various ethnographers. The particular study I based my comment off of is a fairly old piece (1982) by Shirley Heath, "What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school". This is by no means a quantitative, or recent, or widespread, study, but it gets at these issues very well and frames the problem much more eloquently than in my comment for sure! There are a few other studies like this, but this is just a memory from a course I took a couple years ago so I don't have sources immediately available. There's also the fact that you ended up going to private school, which probably has something to do with your observations; families who stress education enough to send their child to a private school probably also encourage behaviors like reading that play a role in how schools defines success.