Despite expanding democracy in educational chances, access and reward for literacy still travel along dividing lines by region, wealth, and prerogative. National tests of reading and writing performance routinely turn up correlations between higher literacy achievement and higher socioeconomic status. And although literacy among America's racial minorities rose steadily across the twentieth century, gaps by race endure. At least in the aggregate, literacy clusters with material and political privilege. It favors the richer over the poorer, the freer over the jailed, the well connected over the newly arrived or the left out. These disparities have always existed in the history of literacy, but they took on new connotations at the start of the twenty-first century as the status of literacy itself grew so high, so central to economic and political viability. Where once literate skill would merely have confirmed social advantage, it is, under current economic conditions, a growing resource in social advantage itself. On the one hand, this intensifying worth of literacy brings renewed possibility to the democratic hope in public education that more equal distribution of literate skill can moderate the effects of inequality in wealth and civil rights. But, as a matter of fact, the advantage of literate skill is helping to aggravate social inequity. Just, as it seems, the rich get richer, the literate get more literate.