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Recent empirical work has found significant intra-household child specialization across labor market and education activities. Related recent theoretical work has explored the efficiency implications of such specialization and has identified potentially important distortions in the distribution of human capital across children in poor households. Connecting these literatures has been impeded by the difficulty in measuring human capital levels – particularly for children in the midst of the accumulation process. In this paper we approach this issue using the intra-household dispersion of the rate of progress through the education system as a proxy for the final dispersion of intra-household human capital. Focusing on intra-household dispersion avoids many of the problematic issues associated with measures of human capital levels. Using Brazilian data we identify a previously unreported relationship between the intra-household dispersion of this observable human capital (OHK) and household income. We explore various explanations and implications of this pattern, and argue that this relationship is consistent with the inefficient distribution of intra-household human capital suggested by recent theoretical work. * The manuscript was begun while Horowitz was a Fulbright Scholar at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio d