MAYBE ONE OF THESE DAYS THE PENNY WILL DROP.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent study suggesting that, once again, them that has gets.

Race and class matter when it comes to who gets ahead educationally in American society, according to an analysis released today by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

The report, "Born to Win, Schooled to Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don’t Get Equal Chances to Be All They Can Be," analyzes various federal education databases to show that children who are black or Latinx [c.q.] or are from low-socioeconomic-status families perform worse over time academically that those who are white, Asian American or are from higher socioeconomic levels. The part of the report that may be particularly alarming is that these trends hold true even for disadvantaged students who are academically talented and for those who are privileged but less academically talented.

Chicago columnist Esther Cepeda has also read the report.  She asks a good question.

What would happen if we yanked all the great teachers out of high-performing schools and swapped them with middling- to low-performing educators whose professional goals were merely to make it to retirement?

Maybe not much.

There's more to it than throwing money at it.

You could pour cash into the excellent education of every Hispanic and black child in America and they’d still get left behind by a system that preferentially values whites’ long-standing wealth and far-reaching social capital.

Social capital, however, is something that people can develop.  Perhaps that is what is missing from the poorer Hispanic and black quarters, and perhaps that understanding can emerge.  Consider another story about ill-advised high-schoolers who decided to use an end-of-semester dress-down day as "thug day."  That might be Texas high schoolers being obnoxious, or coming up with a way to get a rise out of administrators.  But note, though, this reaction.

“Black people with this hair are denied jobs, internships, and get harassed at their schools. Here, Memorial High School students, are using it as costume,” a Twitter user reacted. “It’s rude. It’s racist.”

Rude behavior, yes.

Punching down, most likely.

But what sort of social capital is this Twitterer defending?  Do hip-hop style and prison tattoos and idiosyncratic pronunciations of even more idiosyncratically spelled names confer any evolutionary advantages to practitioners within a culture, let alone to adopters (appropriators?) from outside?  Or does possession of any or all of these elements of social (or is it cultural?) capital serve as a proxy for indicators of poor performance, of drug use, of welfare dependency?  Or perhaps as markers for schools that will disillusion even the most idealistic of teachers?

Dial back the misguided authenticity and perhaps the human capital will gain value.