Research findings released today depart from the usual bleak news about the academic prospects of American children born into low-income families: The gap in kindergarten academic readiness between high- and low-income students narrowed by 10 percent to 16 percent between 1998 and 2010. The significant narrowing comes after decades of a widening gap that caused education advocates to fear the United States was at risk of producing a permanent underclass. The school readiness gap for cohorts of children born in the mid-1970s and mid-1990s had grown by about 40 percent.