Is Social Capital and Network Theory Deficit in Nature?

So I had one of my dissertation committee members read over my proposed research summary. He said he was going to play devils advocate and suggested that my topic had a tone of "deficit thinking". I told him I am not assuming that just getting a poor kid sitting next to a middle-high income kid in the classroom is going to make things all better. I don't want to make the assumption that poor kids don't have assets, resources and capital to bring to the table, because I have noticed that many poor students have resiliency skills they acquired from life experiences that other kids just don't have. But I do think there is certain capital that has power and certain capital that does not contain the same level of power. I realized that social capital and network theory alone is not going to do justice to my topic. There are issues of race, class, and unequal distribution of power (hence critical race theory) that generate the structures that these networks are working within. I will be blunt; what happened at Johnston and what is happening at Reagan is racist and classist. The simple fact a school that has a high concentration of students in poverty and a high percentage of minority students does not have the basic college preparatory courses that other schools have is WRONG! The unequal access to resources among different high school context is an issue of race and class. A classmate of mine made me realize we are so focused on inequities of the children, that the children have deficits, when in fact it is the school context and structure that has the deficits. So how do students acquire resources/capital and build networks that lead to opportunities within a structure that is racist, classist and has apparent structural deficits?