Qwan Finch, of West Baltimore, with his two sons and as a Beginning School study participant in elementary school.

Alexander, Entwisle, and their tight-knit team of researchers would ultimately keep close tabs on 790 first-graders until they turned 28 years old—a feat unlike anything else ever attempted in the United States. The Long Shadow, their acclaimed book based on the study, was published last year, though Entwisle, who passed away at 89 in 2013, did not live to see the culmination of their work in print. As the kids matured into teenagers, the team’s queries evolved to include questions about drug use, relationships, and sex, as well as job prospects and higher-education goals. They talked with the students’ parents once a year, often making home visits, and later recorded extended interviews with students, who would occasionally cry as they looked back and reflected on their lives. Inevitably, the researchers trailed their subjects to juvenile detention centers and, later, to state prisons for interviews with the former first-graders. They also saw many of them start to raise their own children while still teenagers.

“We literally watched these kids grow up,” Alexander says. “It became our life’s work.”

At its core, the Beginning School Study— which largely included, but was not limited to, disadvantaged city kids—set out to determine who succeeds and why. Alexander, Entwisle, and Linda Olson, who started as a research assistant and ultimately served as co-author on The Long Shadow, examined each student’s family and socioeconomic background. Twice each school year, they charted their progress, eventually chronicling their entry into the workforce, and identifying patterns around who landed good-paying blue-collar jobs or completed college degrees, and who struggled to find a toehold. But the broader context matters, too. As these kids entered first grade in 1982, U.S. cities, including this one, were collapsing. More than 150,000 people had fled Baltimore for the suburbs since mid-century and another 150,000-plus would soon be on their way out. Bethlehem Steel, which had once run the world’s largest steel mill at Sparrows Point, was reporting nearly $1.5 billion in losses, and laid-off workers at Broening Highway’s General Motors plant were protesting outside the factory. The War on Poverty had morphed into the War on Drugs, and Mayor William Donald Schaefer pleaded with Congress to stop cutting federal funding to cities.

The subjects’ childhoods would also span the crack and AIDS epidemics, and by the time “the kids,” as Alexander still refers to them, reached high school, Baltimore homicides had peaked at a record 353 a year. “It was not a pretty picture, and it got less so over time.” Alexander says. “Cities, as a rule, do not shrink gracefully. Neither do urban school systems.”

Unfortunately, the issues tackled in the study would prove prophetic. The de-industrialization script continues to play out in large swaths of Baltimore, even as parts of the city are now gentrifying. More relevant than ever, the study’s data, personal stories, and conclusions get to the heart of seemingly every domestic headline today, from the growing inequality-gap and living-wage debates, to racial profiling, marijuana decriminalization, school reform, rising college costs, and stagnating social mobility.

On a chilly night this winter, Alexander, Olson, and longtime staff members Joanne Fennessey and Anna Stoll—a pair of sharp, sweet-natured, 4-foot-11 women in their 60s who became quasi-private detectives for all their chasing down of participants—gathered for a post-publication, celebratory dinner at One-Eyed Mike’s in Fells Point with a small group of study’s subjects. The “kids” are now 38 and 39 years old—it took a decade to complete The Long Shadow—roughly the same age Alexander was, and a just a few years older than Fennessey and Stoll were, when the study launched. The faces have changed and aged over time, but the mood is warm and friendly. The participants still recall the early questionnaires and the more in-depth later interviews.

They also remember the annual birthday cards, although they only just learned the secret motivation behind those hand-written missives—to help the researchers maintain up-to-date addresses. “We knew if they bounced back, somebody had moved,” says Stoll, with a smile as she looks around the table. “That’s also why we always asked for the name and contact information for a family member or close friend, someone besides the parents, who would always know where the kids would be.”

“Oh, I remember the birthday cards,” says study participant John Houser III with a laugh, a beer in his hand. “I thought it was neat every year. I thought, ‘These people care about me.’ It was a genius idea.”

Houser also recalls the gift cards to record stores like Sam Goody that researchers gave away after interviews when he was a teenager. “Ten bucks,” he says, sitting next to fellow participant Jesse Fask, who nods his head of dreadlocked hair. “Enough to buy a CD or cassette tape in those days.”

After growing up in Southwest Baltimore’s working-class white enclave known as Lumberyard, Houser—a graphic designer who graduated from Frostburg State University (“I chose the farthest in-state school from Baltimore”) with the assistance of Pell grants and student loans that he’s still paying off—certainly counts among the study’s success stories. Of the 30 or so kids he grew up with, several were into hard drugs by 18 and 19, including one friend who died from drugs. Just six or seven finished high school, and he’s the only one who went to college. “Most of us started smoking pot around 14, there was a lot of that around—the hard drugs started coming in when we were around 16,” Houser says. “You’d see junkies hanging around the neighborhood, stealing things, and crack was coming in. I saw children, basically, dealing drugs to kids’ parents and kids’ mothers turning to skeletons and turning tricks.”

Houser, who has read The Long Shadow and is anxious to talk about the results with the study’s authors, says he only smoked pot, deciding at some point to distance himself from the lifestyle he saw swallowing up his friends by hiding out in his bedroom, listening to music, and reading comic books. He also recognizes that while his family was occasionally on welfare—his father was a union sprinkler fitter and on strike from time to time—he had two parents and other relatives nearby keeping him on track. “It made me realize, even before I had my own kid, I had parents who cared and parents who wanted to be parents.”

We literally watched these kids grow up. It became our life’s work.

At first glance, the takeaways of Alexander and Entwisle’s research may not be all that surprising—but that’s at least partly because so much of what we commonly know today about disadvantaged kids’ academic achievement actually came from their study. Their most significant finding is the extent to which the study’s first-graders have remained rooted in their socioeconomic birthplace, says University of North Carolina sociologist Glen H. Elder Jr., an expert in longitudinal studies. Educational opportunity, often portrayed as the great equalizer, turns out to be the great separator.

Only 4 percent of the disadvantaged students in the study went on to earn a four-year-college degree, despite many expressing a strong desire—and making numerous efforts—to pursue higher education. Contrast that figure to the 56 percent of the better-off public-school students in the study, who benefitted from a greater wellspring of resources and earned four-year degrees.

And consider this snapshot: Seventeen of 18 black first-grade males in the study from the poorest of the 20 elementary schools had been arrested—mostly for drug possession and/or distribution, but also for more serious charges—by their 28th birthday, with seven of those adult interviews conducted in jail or prison. Seven of the 18 had dropped out of a high school, only five had been employed continuously for two years or more by the age of 28, and only one had earned a four-year-college diploma. (For racial comparison, eight of the 14 white males at the same school had arrest records. By no means a small number, but not nearly the same percentage, either.)

“The obstacles, which start with poorer children before they enter school, build up over time until they are overwhelming,” says Elder, noting that the study was among the first to document the powerful, cumulative effect of summer learning loss among disadvantaged kids. “At first, it’s things like falling back during the summer breaks, and then it’s often a combination of family, personal, and financial issues that prevent them from completing even a community-college degree.” In fact, the percentage difference between low-income college graduates and high-income college graduates in the United States widened over the course of the students’ lives.

In terms of who succeeded in landing good-paying blue-collar jobs, it was race and “the subtle legacy of Jim Crow,” as Alexander calls it, that continued to play a major factor. Manufacturing, construction, and port-related jobs have shrunk since the post-World War II boom, but they still exist. The issue is who gets them and the answer in Baltimore is working-class white men. The discriminating mechanism, researchers found, is a much more connected network for disadvantaged urban white males—family, friends, word-of-mouth—that prevails, enabling them to get their foot in the door and into the skilled trades.