It is not often that you see a juxtaposition between these two concepts: income inequality and school reform.

But I would like to argue here that they are related and they matter.

In a recent column, Paul Krugman reviews the evidence about income inequality.

The rich have grown dramatically richer, while the poor have gained nothing from the economic recovery.

Here are the basic facts, as he describes them:

The data in question have been compiled for the past decade by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who use I.R.S. numbers to estimate the concentration of income in America’s upper strata. According to their estimates, top income shares took a hit during the Great Recession, as things like capital gains and Wall Street bonuses temporarily dried up. But the rich have come roaring back, to such an extent that 95 percent of the gains from economic recovery since 2009 have gone to the famous 1 percent. In fact, more than 60 percent of the gains went to the top 0.1 percent, people with annual incomes of more than $1.9 million.

Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.

The people at the top–that is, the ones who think the current distribution of income is just fine and is the result of meritocracy–like to assure us that if we just test kids more often, raise standards higher, adopt the Common Core, fire more teachers, and open more charter schools, then we can heal the divisions in our society.

But of course this is nonsense. As Krugman points out, even college graduates are having a hard time in this economy, many burdened by college debt and unable to find jobs that pay what they expected and hoped for.

These numbers should (but probably won’t) finally kill claims that rising inequality is all about the highly educated doing better than those with less training. Only a small fraction of college graduates make it into the charmed circle of the 1 percent. Meanwhile, many, even most, highly educated young people are having a very rough time. They have their degrees, often acquired at the cost of heavy debts, but many remain unemployed or underemployed, while many more find that they are employed in jobs that make no use of their expensive educations. The college graduate serving lattes at Starbucks is a cliché, but he reflects a very real situation.

What’s driving these huge income gains at the top? There’s intense debate on that point, with some economists still claiming that incredibly high incomes reflect comparably incredible contributions to the economy. I guess I’d note that a large proportion of those superhigh incomes come from the financial industry, which is, as you may remember, the industry that taxpayers had to bail out after its looming collapse threatened to take down the whole economy.

In any case, however, whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we’re diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy.

Another story in the New York Times showed just how stark the current income inequality is. It says:

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.

The wizards of the financial industry, who have benefited so handsomely in the past few years, are the biggest boosters of charter schools. That is supposedly the way to open the path to opportunity for the lucky few, and perhaps it will.

But wouldn’t it make more sense to change our tax structure, so that the gap between the haves and the have-nots was not so outrageous?

I recall reading a book a few years ago called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, which argued that societies that are more equal are happier, less violent, heathier, and better on almost every measure one can imagine.

I am not making a plea here for socialism or for onerous taxation, but for the kind of society I remember from my childhood, when the distribution of wealth was not as unequal as it is today. We had people who were rich, but they were not billionaires; they did not have private jets or own half a dozen houses or employ a fleet of servants.

Unless we do something in our political economy to bring up those who struggle for daily subsistence, this will not be a society of equality of opportunity, but one where inherited wealth determines one’s fate in life.

And no school reform will be strong enough to overcome those basic economic facts.