Micah Zarin's Blog

As anyone who has ever taught will tell you, teaching and learning are entirely different skills. Tutoring and teaching, meanwhile, are cousins who see each other at holidays and pretend not to notice how awkward things have become. Teaching is, in general, much more difficult than tutoring. It requires identifying a single pedagogy that can somehow reach fifteen to thirty completely different students at once, each arriving with their own background knowledge, interests, attention span, and mysterious ability to forget everything discussed the previous day.

If this sounds difficult, that is because it is nearly impossible.

Every student walks into class carrying invisible baggage: home life, sleep deprivation, extracurricular commitments, and a deeply personal relationship with the concept of “trying.” In response, our education system has developed a sophisticated solution: we sort students into “regular” and “honors” classes and hope this will flatten human complexity into something manageable. In theory, students who excel in a given subject are rewarded with faster pacing, harder material, and the vague promise of future success.

In practice, this mostly just creates two versions of the same worksheet.

Of course, the worksheet does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in buildings funded by property taxes, which is a polite way of saying some students get science labs and some get inspirational murals about perseverance. Some students attend schools with college counselors, AP options, and functioning printers. Others attend Title I schools where “equity” means a rotating cast of substitutes and a Chromebook that only charges at a specific angle.

We like to say education is the great equalizer, but we have designed it with the precision of a carnival game. The rules are technically the same for everyone, but some players start closer to the prize, with better lighting, clearer instructions, and unlimited retries. When the ball misses the target, we blame effort. When it hits, we call it merit.

Thus, it is clear that grades are not measuring intelligence, mastery, or learning. They are measuring resources and stamina.

So why do we pretend otherwise? Maybe grades should be determined by parental income. This would simply formalize what already happens. Instead of wondering whether a B+ reflects shaky understanding or a missed homework assignment during a bad month, students could check their household tax bracket. Six figures? That’s an A. Working nights with no benefits? Solid C. Character-building.

This would immediately solve several problems. First, it would eliminate ambiguity. Instead of wondering whether a B+ reflects conceptual understanding or a missed homework assignment in October, students could simply check their parents income bracket.

Naturally, critics will object that this is unfair. They will argue that students don’t control their starting circumstances. But neither do they control class size or whether their school has functioning air conditioning. We’ve already decided those things don’t count.

By tying grades directly to salary, we could relieve teachers of the impossible task of educating humans and instead ask them to do something far more reasonable: capitalism. No more pretending that learning happens on a bell schedule or that understanding can be captured by a number. If the prediction is wrong, that’s fine. It always is.

And when students end up learning nothing, we can, of course, always blame the teacher. After all, the teacher was given the standards, the curriculum, and the data. The teacher knew students were different. The teacher attended the professional development session on differentiation. If learning didn’t occur, it must be because the instruction wasn’t rigorous enough, engaging enough, or personalized enough. Somewhere between first period and lunch, the correct pedagogy simply failed to materialize.

This is why grading by parental income makes perfect sense. It preserves the appearance of accountability while protecting the system itself. Outcomes remain predictable, hierarchies remain stable, and any mismatch between expectation and reality can still be traced back to instructional quality.

And if the results are disappointing, then clearly, the teacher should have done a better job.