Stop Homework

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

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.

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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.

Today’s post is by Laura, an intel­lec­tual prop­erty and rein­sur­ance attor­ney in Chicago with three chil­dren rang­ing in age from 5 years to 4.5 months. A long his­tory of LD and ADD makes effec­tive edu­ca­tion one of her hot but­ton issues. She wrote a lengthy let­ter to her daughter’s kinder­garten teacher explain­ing her posi­tion on homework.

Home­work is Detri­men­tal to Long Term Suc­cess
by Laura

Dear Kinder­garten Teacher,

I am writ­ing regard­ing the progress report we received for Libby this past week, specif­i­cally the home assign­ments to her. The pri­mary pur­pose of this let­ter is to out­line our posi­tion regard­ing home assign­ments for our five year old. We expect this let­ter should be included in her school records. Prin­ci­pal _____ is copied on this let­ter; please feel free to pro­vide it to any admin­is­tra­tor who has a valid rea­son to read it.

I under­stand assign­ing home­work at all grade lev­els is Chicago Pub­lic School pol­icy; how­ever, I strongly believe that home­work at the kinder­garten level, absent spe­cific defi­cien­cies, is detri­men­tal to long term edu­ca­tional suc­cess. A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of lon­gi­tu­di­nal stud­ies show home­work, espe­cially in the younger years, increases fam­ily strife, increases the child’s stress level and does not pro­vide a last­ing gain in test scores. I agree that the lessons learned in the class­room should be rein­forced at home, but I believe we do that ade­quately by show­ing how what was learned in the class­room is used in real life and in fact home­work inter­feres with our abil­ity to do that.
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Last year, I posted a piece by a par­ent of a mid­dle schooler in Mass­a­chu­setts, who had asked, to no avail, that her child be allowed to opt out of the Renais­sance Learning’s Accel­er­ated Reader program.

Today, she pro­vides an update.

Our School’s Use of the Renais­sance Learning’s Accel­er­ated Read­ing Prod­uct Has a Detri­men­tal Effect on Our Children’s Desire to Read
by a Mid­dle School Parent

Our mid­dle school uses Renais­sance Learning’s Accel­er­ated Reader quiz prod­uct to ver­ify that stu­dents are read­ing books at home. Scores on the 10 – 20 ques­tion fact-recall quizzes are then applied directly to stu­dents’ English/Language Arts grades.

AR is widely used in schools in the U.S. and around the world, often in con­junc­tion with prize incen­tives and awards to “top read­ers.” Some schools, like ours, use it as part of a read­ing grade for stu­dents’ “free read­ing” at home – which is sep­a­rate from in-class read­ing and lit­er­a­ture instruc­tion – despite the company’s clear state­ment in its sup­port­ing mate­r­ial that quiz scores are not meant to be read­ing grades. I am shar­ing this here because I know we are not the only par­ents who are con­cerned about the unin­tended con­se­quences of this and sim­i­lar well inten­tioned but poten­tially dam­ag­ing require­ments that turn children’s at-home plea­sure read­ing into a chore.

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Torri Chap­pell, a teacher and mother from San Anselmo, Cal­i­for­nia, has writ­ten here before about her expe­ri­ences advo­cat­ing for home­work reform. When some­thing strikes Torri as being wrong, she doesn’t hes­i­tate to speak up, either in let­ter or in person.

Recently, when her School Dis­trict had a meet­ing to talk about the school facil­ity, Torri was on hand to talk about the impor­tance of not only where chil­dren learn, but also what they learn.

What and How our Chil­dren Learn is More Impor­tant than Where They Learn
by Torri Chappell

We have two facil­ity issues in Ross Val­ley result­ing from abundance…an abun­dance of chil­dren and an abun­dance of assessments.

The first facil­ity issue is regard­ing the facil­i­ties WHERE our chil­dren will learn. We have an abun­dance of students.

The sec­ond facil­ity issue is regard­ing the district’s facil­ity in mak­ing unin­formed deci­sions about WHAT and HOW our chil­dren learn.
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Diana Toma is an artist and the mother of a pre-schooler and a second-grader who attends a pub­lic school in Atlanta, Geor­gia – a school which encour­ages par­ents to vol­un­teer at least 10 hours a year. Before they moved to Atlanta, her daugh­ter had attended an alter­na­tive school in Brook­lyn, New York, where there was no cur­ricu­lum, home­work, or grades and where the focus was on play. Diana, who hails from Roma­nia, writes here about her expe­ri­ences talk­ing with her new daughter’s teacher about home­work and education.

When Par­ents and Teach­ers Work Together, Our Lives are Eas­ier
by Diana Toma

When I went to meet my daughter’s teacher at the new school, I have to admit I was going with some pre­con­ceived ideas. Every­body at the Brook­lyn alter­na­tive school had told me that pub­lic schools are to be avoided like some sort of “edu­ca­tional hell on earth.” I was scared to have those opin­ion con­firmed. Plus I was afraid that the teacher would judge me because my daugh­ter was “behind” in many of the skills that the pub­lic school stu­dents in Geor­gia had.

When I sat down with her and had a con­ver­sa­tion, I was pleas­antly sur­prised that she was will­ing and ready to lis­ten to what I had to say. I told her where my daugh­ter is com­ing from. The teacher told me that she hadn’t ever had any con­tact with alter­na­tive schools, and she asked me ques­tions about it and lis­tened care­fully to what I had to say. I quickly got that she was really inter­ested in who my daugh­ter is and what meth­ods would work or not with her. After all, that is all I could ever wish from any teacher!

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(I’ll be back after Win­ter Break, on Feb­ru­ary 22.)

I highly rec­om­mend Linda Darling-Hammond’s new book, The Flat World and Edu­ca­tion: How America’s Com­mit­ment to Equity Will Deter­mine Our Future. As Howard Gard­ner states in his blurb, “Any­one who desires a quan­tum leap in the edu­ca­tional achieve­ments of Amer­i­can stu­dents – as opposed to the ‘quick fix’ – must address the issues raised in this care­fully argued and well-documented work.”

The book is incred­i­bly detailed and researched and shows pre­cisely why edu­ca­tion needs to be over­hauled if it is to meet the needs of stu­dents and soci­ety. I par­tic­u­larly loved the chap­ter where Darling-Hammond looks at the ways in which Fin­land, Korea, and Sin­ga­pore over­hauled their schools and how their stu­dents have “cat­a­pulted from the bot­tom to the top of inter­na­tional rank­ings in stu­dent achieve­ment and attain­ment, grad­u­at­ing more than 90 per­cent of their young peo­ple from high school and send­ing large majori­ties through col­lege as well, far more than in the much wealth­ier United States.” (Page 192.)

All three sys­tems have:

*funded schools ade­quately and equitably

*elim­i­nated exam­i­na­tion sys­tems that had pre­vi­ous tracked stu­dents for mid­dle schools and restricted access to high schools

* revised national stan­dards and cur­ricu­lum to focus learn­ing goals on higher-order think­ing, inquiry, and inno­va­tion, as well as the inte­gra­tion of tech­nol­ogy through­out the curriculum

*devel­oped national teach­ing poli­cies that built and sub­si­dized strong teacher edu­ca­tion programs

*sup­ported ongo­ing teacher earn­ing by ensur­ing men­tor­ing for begin­ning teach­ers and pro­vid­ing 15 – 25 hours a week where teach­ers plan col­lab­o­ra­tively and engage in analy­ses of stu­dent learning

*pur­sued con­sis­tent, long-term reforms (Pages 192 – 193.)

Is Arne Dun­can reading?