Stop Homework

Today’s guest blogger, Rick Posner, was the assistant principal at the Open School in Jefferson County, Colorado, from 1999-2001, where he taught for 30 years. His new book, Lives of Passion, School of Hope: How One Public School Ignites a Lifelong Love of Learning, describes the school, which unlike most others, has no set curriculum or course of study and allows students to set their own goals and be self-directed learners. Posner looks at what happened to Open School alumni and shows how the graduates of this 39-year-old school went on to lead productive, interesting lives. The book is well worth reading; those of us who don’t live in Jefferson County, Colorado, are left to wonder why this type of school doesn’t exist in every community in the country. Be sure to visit Posner’s website.

Free At Last: Living Without Grades
By Rick Posner Ph.D.

Believe it or not, there is a public pre K-12 school in a very conservative school district in Colorado that has thrived without grades or credits for almost 40 years. Yes, it’s true. There are hundreds of alumni from the Jefferson County Open School (a public school that is open to anyone who lives in Colorado’s largest school district) who have become happy, well-rounded, productive adults without one single A, F or 12.5 unit designation on their school records. It may serve as a further surprise to learn that most of them have gone to college and done quite well in conventional, graded systems, and that, more startling, their college completion level is twice that of the national average.

Here’s what they say about the inhibiting aspects of grades and credits:

Grades and credits kill the inherent love and joy of learning that we are born with by making the process of learning competitive and impersonal. With grades there are always winners and losers, and the standards are

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Today’s guest blogger, Tracy Stevens, is a former high school Spanish teacher who infrequently gave project-based homework to her students. She wrote here last year about her son’s difficult experience in first grade in a public school and her decision to have him repeat the year at a Waldorf school. This year, she decided to homeschool her two boys, and today she writes about that experience. You can also follow her on her blog, abettereducation, which is full of interesting interviews (including one with Daniel Pink) as well as reports on her experiences with homeschooling.

Experiences in Homeschooling
by Tracy Stevens

I got laid off in July of this year and after not finding any jobs that could keep our two kids in private school, I decided to homeschool. My older son is 8 and he did first grade at a public school two years ago. It was a very difficult year as he, one of the youngest boys in the class, struggled to learn to read at the pace they set for him. To “help” him learn to read, they kept him from recess to do more worksheets. This was in addition to the tutoring and the ridiculous load of homework.

So we decided to repeat fist grade, but this time in a private Waldorf school. The year went much better. There was no homework, plenty of art and nature, and the expectations of reading come much later in a Waldorf school.

I knew when I lost the ability to pay for a Waldorf education that he would be even worse off in a public school than the previous year, because now we were on the Waldorf reading schedule, making him even further behind the public school reading demands. This lead to my decision to homeschool my four and eight year old sons this year and surprisingly it has been an outstanding experience so far.

I take an eclectic approach, with influences from Waldorf and Democratic schools. We work on reading through art, stories, and manipulatives like magnet letters, in addition to old fashioned paper and pencil. We do math

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Today’s guest blogger, is FedUp Mom, the mother of a sixth grader who used to attend a public school in suburban Philadelphia and now attends a private Quaker school. FedUp Mom’s sixth post, I Hate Reading Logs has received more comments than any other on this blog. You can read her other five posts here, here, here, here and here.

Homework Is an Elaborate Charade–Lots of Quantity and No Quality
by FedUp Mom

People generally talk about homework in terms of quantity, and it is shocking to see how much time kids are spending on it. But I would like to step back and consider the question of quality.

First of all, if we plan to assign a certain amount of homework every night, we’re already in trouble. This is practically the definition of busywork. “We don’t know what schoolwork would be useful for kids to do every night, but we’ll make sure and assign 10 minutes per grade level of this stuff, whatever it might be.” The theory is that 10 minutes per grade level per night will create “good study habits”, but it’s crazy to expect kids to learn good study habits in the absence of anything worth studying.

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A few days ago, President Obama talked about increasing the length of the school day and school year. Before I even had a chance to fashion a response in my head, I received this piece from K, who has been teaching science at a small independent college for over a decade and has written for this blog before here. She spends her leisure time learning from her three young boys. You can read more of her random thoughts at her blog, raisingthewreckingcrew

A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day
by K, A College Teacher

President Obama advocates increasing the length of the school day and the length of the school year. More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer Vacation.

There are many problems with this.

President Obama seems to be arguing: if something isn’t working, what we really need is more of it. It just plain doesn’t make sense. While some countries provide more learning in more time, there are other nations that make better use of less time and have better student outcomes.

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I received the following email from a former-graduate student:

A Former Graduate Student Speaks Out

I admire your mission. The subject of how I spent my life doing homework and what turned out to be worthless schooling is a subject I often cry and get angry about, but a past situation I would for one like to make up for, and also a situation that I would like to help others on. I am turning 30 now, and have a lot of living to catch up on and have wasted many of my best years.

Actually my grade school, middle school, and high school were mostly fairly run and had opportunities for the smart and driven students, but they forced students to do work whether they liked it or not. The harder courses were taught by efficient, inspired, and helpful teachers. The dumber courses were run like penitentiaries. I myself was a very smart and driven student, eager to get work done early.

The problem that I and most students faced was that doing our work better and faster only led to getting placed into harder courses that assigned even more work. There was no incentive to reach completion since we were like hamsters caught in a wheel. The faster we ran, the more the wheel turned. The dumber courses did not teach anything, but just wasted time, and assigned about the same amount of work- just dumber and more repetitive. Students who were non-compliant or who failed certain mandatory tests were forced into yet more schooling, summer classes, and force-fed education-–which we all feared.
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Today’s guest blogger, K, has been teaching science at a small independent college for over a decade. She spends her leisure time learning from her three young boys. You can read more of her random thoughts at her blog: raisingthewreckingcrew.

We Hold Their Hands Too Much
by K, a College Teacher

Having your teen carry a cell phone is a good idea for many reasons. But, I would argue, it is also a bad idea for those same reasons. If your teenager gets a flat tire, they should be able to fix it without calling daddy. If they find themselves alone at home and hungry, they should be able to feed themselves without calling a parent. This topic is covered very nicely by Lenore Skenazy over at freerangekids.

You may think that I exaggerate, but many college students can scarcely survive a day without having their parents run interference for them. For example, I teach a study abroad course in the Caribbean. The charter flights operate on Caribbean time: Planes have been late, rescheduled, cancelled, and we were once told that our flight didn’t even exist. If you travel a lot, this probably sounds familiar. When it happens to you, you go into problem-solving mode, right? You stay calm and kind, but insistent. You figure it out. What has been fascinating is some of my students’ reactions. I have seen them cry, throw up their hands and say “we’ll never get to the beach”, and call mommy and daddy.

They also call mom and dad for fairly routine situations. When I had a van
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Today’s guest blogger, Candace Hanson, is a graduate of Oral Roberts University and is currently studying Counseling at Valparaiso University. She is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. She just sent me the following piece a few days ago and her timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The Comments to Monday’s blog post are about this very topic.

Homework Discriminates Against Children from Dysfunctional Homes
by Candace Hanson

I have long thought about how productive homework actually is. In school I was the type who aced all of my tests, participated in class, and generally learned the material. But it never failed–the more homework I had for a class, the worse I did in it since I didn’t do the homework and completion was counted as a part of my grade.

Why would such a smart kid not do homework? Especially if it was the only thing that stood in the way of getting an A? Well my home life was not really one in which it was easy to do homework. I had an extremely dysfunctional family. There was always yelling and fighting. My parents were both pretty checked out, so my sister and I kept the household going. We were the oldest so we cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and helped the younger kids with homework and baths etc. When we got home, we were pretty much the heads of the household, and doing our homework was not only physically impossible, but school was not even on our minds at home–we were concerned with surviving and our siblings’ survival.

Now when I look back, I think of how many kids there probably are out there like me. Home is chaos, dysfunction, or overflowing with unreasonable amounts of responsiblity for whatever reason. How can these children be graded on their ability to complete tasks at home, when home can be an unpredictable, uncontrollable environment? How can a teacher mark a child’s grade down for not doing homework, and mark another child up because he completed it, when the fact that the child did not do the homework may be completely out of his control? Maybe home life is easier for child #2. His parents encourage him and help him with his homework. He has not much to worry about other than cleaning his room and practicing the piano. Is it fair for child #1 that his grade is dependent on his home, which is not his fault, and under which he rarely has control?

It’s just another reason why homework needs to GO! A student’s achievement as far as grades go should be measured in the class, during the school time. Whenever grades are influenced by something the child is supposed to do outside of the class, I would go as far as to say that this could be construed as discrimination. Students from less stable or healthy families are discriminated against.

Could the presence of homework be one of the many factors that is causing and perpetuating the stratification of society by socioeconomic status and race and contributing to the achievement gap?

Today’s guest blogger, Ben Kestner, is the Middle School Principal at the Berlin Brandenburg International School, where he initially started as curriculum coordinator for the IBO Middle Years Programme. He studied flute at the London College of Music and in Berlin with Andreas Blau and after spending time playing and teaching he pursued a career in education after completing his PGCE in the UK. He wrote to me several weeks ago to tell me he’s an “avid supporter” of Stop Homework. He has a blog that’s worth reading.

Homework Should be Relevant, Interesting, and Personal
by Ben Kestner

I am currently the Middle School Principal at an International School in Berlin, Germany.

Over the last two years, I set out to examine the whole idea of homework at our school. After reading relevant books and research I decided that we really needed to re-think the whole idea of homework and go back to the question of why we set it. Then, during the current academic year, I pulled together a task force in the Middle School to look at the issue of homework. Throughout the year we have discussed the issue in staff meetings, parent meetings, and student leadership groups and during the last two years student surveys were conducted. It has become clear that homework is certainly a topic which creates a range of opinions and emotions amongst staff, students and parents.

The student survey was interesting. To the question “Do you find your Homework interesting”, 61% said no, only 4% said yes, with the rest answering “don’t know”, suggesting that the last group had no particular feeling about their homework assignments. The survey also revealed that 83% of our students take part in extra curricular activities in or outside of school on an average of 3 times per week, which shows that they are using their time after school for relevant tasks, and that additional homework can overwhelm that benefit.

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