As Baltimore schoolteachers and students return to their classrooms later this month, the enduring tale of America as a land of opportunity will resound again with great fervor. All good teachers will weave into their lesson plans a narrative of hope: If you do this drill on the board, keep your uniform neat, complete your homework, follow the curriculum, make the grade—above all, matriculate upward—you can change your condition, overcome economic insecurity, and procure a spot in America’s bounteous middle class or beyond.

School and civic leaders will broadcast this story with even greater urgency this fall, pointing out that we are in the time of the Great Recession, jobless recoveries, and colossal debt, and we are beset by the Chinese and the whirlwind of global competition. Education may be our only hope.

For Baltimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso, educational attainment has even morphed into something beyond mere hoping. Writing on the Johns Hopkins School of Education’s blog, Alonso offered a more portentous vision of the land of opportunity: “In the hyper-competitive global economy of the 21st century,” he wrote, “education is fate.”

John Marsh, in his important and accessible new book Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality (Monthy Review Press), challenges this widely held, almost mystical American belief in the powers of education. “The faith in the power of education to make or break lives traverses the political spectrum,” writes Marsh, an assistant professor of English at Penn State University. “[N]othing dominates our thinking about poverty and social inequality so much as the belief that education (or lack of it) causes these problems and thus that education (and more of it) will fix them.”

Marsh begins his argument by reviewing the massive amount of data showing America to be a grossly unequal society and one tending toward greater gaps between haves and have-nots. He concludes with many others that “poverty and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is the worst it has been since the 1920s and the worst among developed countries.” Impressively for a professor of English, Marsh offers a reader-friendly appendix explaining the “Gini coefficient,” one of the most common methods of measuring income inequality internationally.

Beyond the absolute measures of social inequality, Marsh also looks at the data on social mobility in America: “[T]he most common intergenerational experience,” he observes of the data, “is to be born poor and remain poor. The next most common experience is to be born rich and remain rich.”

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