You're missing the point. The original comment in this chain comes from someone whose family made sacrifices in order to live in an area with good educational opportunities. This 'Adversity Score' would penalize them for making that sacrifice. Between two families with identical incomes, the one that chooses to curb luxuries to live in a place with a better school district would be penalized for that choice. The fact that good school districts tend to be populated by people with higher incomes is largely tangential to the point at hand.

> Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.

I don't doubt that people of all income levels want their kids to succeed. But there definitely are differences in behavior between demographics. The wealthier people are the more likely they are to use test prep across all demographics, but Asians are more likely to do so regardless of income. Asians also spend more than twice as much time studying outside of class than any other race [1]. There are differences in how much emphasis is put on education, this cannot be denied.

1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

> No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat. Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.

Yeah, but whatever version of Mario Kart this is, it's pretty obvious how those two objects are going to stack up in terms of balance. Affirmative action has always been used for either of two purposes: to advance a left leaning view of social justice, and to enforce de-facto caps on disproportionately successful minorities. If you're an optimist you can portray this as giving groups labeled disadvantaged a better chance that they deserve (but invite criticism from those that may not believe in either how you define disadvantage, and from those that more broadly disagree with putting one's finger on the scale). If you're a pessimist you suspect that this is a way of enforcing informal caps on successful groups, namely Asians which have been demonstrated to have been subjected to such caps in the last several decades.