Stop Homework

This week I’m try­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent. Please write about whatever’s on your mind in the Comments.

I saw this post on Teach­ers Net:

You know that you have trained your class to ignore
dis­trac­tions well when some­one throws up DURING state
test­ing and no one even flinches and con­tin­ues with their
testing!

No lie!

My class­room!

Today!

Luck­ily he missed the book by an inch and hit the trash­can
which I had shoved in front of his face when I saw him
start­ing to turn green!

Nurse is right across the hall, off he goes, trash­can and all!

First ques­tion the prin­ci­pal asks me at the break is… did
any­thing hit the test book? Evi­dently there is some major
pro­ce­dure involv­ing fort knox and some secu­rity com­pany
trained by the cia and fbi that needs to be fol­lowed when
some­one barfs on the book!

I rec­om­mend watch­ing this video, where Yong Zhao, a Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Edu­ca­tion at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity, talks about how stu­dents need room to dis­cover and learn, not sub­scribe to a set of rules and inter­ests dic­tated to them from the outside.

About a month ago, I posted a piece by Fred Baum­garten, the father of two daugh­ters in pub­lic school in Sharon, Con­necti­cut, who had been talk­ing to the other par­ents in his daughter’s fifth-grade class about home­work. I recently checked to see what kind of progress he’s making.

He writes all about it on his blog, home­work headaches.

Should Home­work be Reduced – 13 sup­port; 3 opposed; 1 unde­cided; 4 no response
by Fred Baumgarten

As of today, out of 21 fifth grade fam­i­lies in our school, 12 have indi­cated their sup­port of my efforts to reduce and improve home­work; 3 are opposed (2 of them strongly; one just responded to another recent e-mail thus: “We do not sup­port your move­ment. I thought lack of our response would have given you some indi­ca­tion”); 1 is pro­vi­sion­ally sup­port­ive but still research­ing it; and 5 have not responded to e-mails and phone messages.

In my lat­est e-mail I invited those par­ents who are sup­port­ive or who had not responded to join me at a meet­ing with the prin­ci­pal. None have responded pos­i­tively to the invitation.

Nev­er­the­less, I have gone ahead and sched­uled a meet­ing with the prin­ci­pal. Given that more than half of the fam­i­lies are in sup­port, and greater than 75% of those who responded are in sup­port, I feel I have a pretty strong case for proceeding.

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this nicely writ­ten piece by a teenager in his local news­pa­per, The Esta­cada News.

Zzz…Teenagers need more sleep
School board should con­sider late start for high school, junior high stu­dents
BY RUSS CAREY

It is time for the Esta­cada School Dis­trict to switch the school start­ing time of the high school and junior high schools with that of the grade schools. Today’s teens are sleep-deprived.

There are many stud­ies that clearly show that teens need more sleep that they are get­ting. I believe that the junior high and high school classes should begin later in the morn­ing to help solve this problem.

At present, classes for high school and junior high school stu­dents begin at 7:45 a.m., and grade school classes begin at 9:05 a.m. I would like to pro­pose switch­ing these two times. My rea­sons: Teenagers have more home­work, more extra-curricular activ­i­ties and require more sleep than younger chil­dren. This change would give the older stu­dents the extra time for the sleep they need to succeed.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Yesterday’s Mom on a Mis­sion isn’t the only per­son to think that high-stakes test­ing isn’t ben­e­fi­cial. For­mer Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Diane Rav­itch, once a staunch sup­porter of No Child Left Behind, is now an out­spo­ken critic with a new book, The Death and Life of the Great Amer­i­can School Sys­tem. One of her biggest con­cerns is the way the law requires school dis­tricts to use stan­dard­ized testing.

Accord­ing to NPR, “The basic strat­egy is mea­sur­ing and pun­ish­ing,” Rav­itch says of No Child Left Behind. “And it turns out as a result of putting so much empha­sis on the test scores, there’s a lot of cheat­ing going on, there’s a lot of gam­ing the sys­tem. Instead of rais­ing stan­dards it’s actu­ally low­ered stan­dards because many states have ‘dumbed down’ their tests or changed the scor­ing of their tests to say that more kids are pass­ing than actu­ally are.”

I recently started a group on face­book (please join) where I heard from April Pea­cock, a mother of a third grader from Penn­syl­va­nia. She was look­ing for advice on how to respond to her son’s teacher, who had sent home a high stakes test­ing prac­tice book­let, with instruc­tions to the par­ents on how to review with their children.

High Stakes Test­ing Isn’t Ben­e­fi­cial
by April Peacock

Yes­ter­day, I received a packet from my third grade son. The front let­ter says the following:

Dear Par­ent Helpers,
Attached is this week’s PSSA Prac­tice Packet to review with your child. As always your help and assis­tance in your child’s edu­ca­tion is so impor­tant. This is one way you can help show them what they are doing in school is important.

Remem­ber to review the packet with your child. Make sure they read the story and ques­tions care­fully before try­ing to fig­ure out the answers. A lit­tle each night works well. The answer key is included for your ref­er­ence. Research has shown (Ash­baugh, 2009) that when par­ents prac­tice with their chil­dren in high stakes test­ing, stu­dents do much better.

Please fill out and return the paper below to your child’s teacher on 2/1. Do not return the packet.
Third Grade Teachers

Week # 1
Student’s Name
Time spent on this packet with stu­dent _______________ mins per day.
Were you able to fin­ish the packet? Y N
Please list any­thing that your child did not under­stand, so that we can review it in the classroom.

Here is my dilemma: I’m glad that they make the mate­r­ial avail­able to us, but I don’t feel that “high stakes test­ing” is ben­e­fi­cial and I resent that I am required to fill out a form stat­ing exact­ing how long I prac­ticed with my child. I dis­like them telling me how to spend my time.

Does any­one have an good responses to this? I would like to send in a short let­ter with ref­er­ences, etc., but I don’t want to sound upset. Basi­cally, I want my let­ter to be just as PC as theirs. My Case Against Home­work book is packed away because we just moved.

The Eva Sim­mons Ele­men­tary School in North Las Vegas insti­tuted a new pol­icy in Jan­u­ary, encour­ag­ing par­ents to make sure their chil­dren read every night and prac­tice their math skills using a web­site resource. “One size fits all home­work is just not a best prac­tice for our stu­dents,” said the prin­ci­pal, in defend­ing the deci­sion to elim­i­nate the tra­di­tional nightly home­work assign­ments. Any home­work that is sent home will be geared toward the indi­vid­ual child. Read more here.