Stop Homework

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in South East Mis­sourian, a mid­dle school in Bloom­field, Mis­souri, is try­ing out a no home­work pol­icy. After the prin­ci­pal noticed that poor grades were a result of either low home­work scores or fail­ure to turn in home­work assign­ments, she decided to see whether a change in pol­icy, allow­ing for less lec­ture time, more hands-on teach­ing, and no home­work, would improve stu­dent success.

Accord­ing to the School Dis­trict Super­in­ten­dent, if stu­dents receive instruc­tion and then do 8 – 10 prob­lems and still don’t get it, doing 10 more prob­lems won’t help. “At the point we need to re-teach,” he said, “more help at the class­room level will really ben­e­fit those stu­dents who don’t fin­ish their work at home.”

The day I wrote about the Mil­leys, par­ents from Cal­gary, Canada, who nego­ti­ated a con­tract with their children’s school allow­ing their chil­dren to opt-out of home­work, the national press asked me to put it in touch with the Mil­leys. Since then, the Cana­dian news­pa­pers, radio, and TV have reported the story, all of the cov­er­age pos­i­tive and supportive.

I hap­pened to be in Toronto last week and was thrilled to open the Toronto Globe and Mail to dis­cover an edi­to­r­ial, Peace on the Home Front, sup­port­ing the Mil­leys and sug­gest­ing that “school boards could eas­ily cur­tail home­work until Grade 9 with­out fear of edu­ca­tional harm. Younger stu­dents could thus be encour­aged to read at home, play sports or music and spend more stress-free time with their family.”

Read the rest of this entry »

My favorite edu­ca­tion blog­ger, Susan Ohan­ian, posted a link to this won­der­ful piece by Mar­ion Brady in the Wash­ing­ton Post.

The One Rea­son Duncan’s “Race to the Top Will Fail
By Mar­ion Brady
Novem­ber 4, 2009

When “Race to the Top” fails, as it will, the main rea­son won’t be any of those cur­rently being advanced by the cor­po­rate inter­ests and politi­cians now run­ning the edu­ca­tion show.

It won’t fail because of lack of aca­d­e­mic rigor, poor teach­ing, weak admin­is­tra­tors, too-short school year, union resis­tance, dif­fer­ing state stan­dards, insuf­fi­cient per­for­mance incen­tives, sorry teacher train­ing, or lin­ger­ing traces of the early-20th Cen­tury Pro­gres­sive movement.

It will fail pri­mar­ily for a rea­son not even being men­tioned by lead­ers of today’s reform effort: A cur­ricu­lum adopted in 1893 that grows more dys­func­tional with each pass­ing year. Imag­ine a car being dri­ven down a wind­ing rural road with all the pas­sen­gers, includ­ing the dri­ver, peer­ing intently out the back window.

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In April, I wrote about a school in Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada, which, after elim­i­nat­ing most home­work, found that stu­dents were more engaged and less tired and teach­ers were more focused. Now, the County Dis­trict in which that school is located, Sim­coe, just insti­tuted a new district-wide home­work policy.

Some of the things that I par­tic­u­larly like about the policy:

• the home­work must be differentiated
• teach­ers must keep to a min­i­mum the num­ber of assign­ments that are due the fol­low­ing day so as not to inter­fere with extra cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties and “activ­i­ties that sup­port per­sonal and fam­ily wellness”
• home­work shouldn’t be due imme­di­ately after hol­i­days, sig­nif­i­cant faith days, or length­ier school breaks (Decem­ber or March Break)
• group projects must be worked on at school dur­ing the school day

Read the pol­icy here.

And a big con­grat­u­la­tions to the prin­ci­pal, Jan Olson of Bar­rie, Ontario’s Prince of Wales ele­men­tary school, who started home­work reform in his District.

In Sep­tem­ber, I wrote about par­ents in Pam Beach County, Florida, who were up in arms about the School Board’s new pol­icy allow­ing for 60 min­utes of home­work in 3rd grade and 90 min­utes in 4th and 5th. Home­work was just one of their con­cerns. The oth­ers included fre­quent test­ing, a cal­en­dar of skills that teach­ers were to cover at a required pace, and mon­i­tor­ing by dis­trict staffers who would visit teach­ers’ class­rooms to make sure they are fol­low­ing the program.

The par­ents banded together, set up their own web­site, Par­ents for Edu­ca­tional Reform, and more than 1,000 par­ents and teach­ers packed the School Board meet­ing last week to protest and voice their concerns.

The upshot: school con­trol has been returned to the indi­vid­ual schools, which will get to decide whether they want to imple­ment any of those policies.

The les­son to be taken: there’s strength in num­bers and we should all orga­nize in our own communities.

The Cam­bridge Pri­mary Review, just released its first com­pre­hen­sive inquiry into Eng­lish pri­mary edu­ca­tion in 40 years. A team of 14 authors relied on, among other things, more than 4000 pub­lished sources, both national and inter­na­tional, as well as 28 specially-commissioned research sur­veys, to write the report.

The con­clu­sion I’m most inter­ested in is the one sug­gest­ing rais­ing the start­ing age of school to age 6. The authors found that intro­duc­ing chil­dren at the age of five into the con­straint and dis­ci­pline of a class­room – a throw­back to Vic­to­rian days – pro­vided lit­tle ben­e­fit and could even be harm­ful. “They are not going to learn to read, write and add up if you have alien­ated chil­dren by the age of four and five,” said Gillian Pugh, chair­woman of the Cam­bridge Pri­mary Review’s advi­sory committee.

“That’s the stage at which we are tun­ing chil­dren into learn­ing … If they are already fail­ing by the time they are 4 1/2 or five, then it’s going to be quite dif­fi­cult to get them back into the sys­tem again,” she added.

Sadly, the Eng­lish gov­ern­ment dis­agreed with the Review and called its con­clu­sions “dis­ap­point­ing” and out of date.

Read the report and the sur­round­ing com­men­tary here.

I was really happy to see this piece by David Shenk, “Does Home­work Work?” in the Atlantic Monthly:

School’s back, and so is Big Home­work. Here’s what my 7th grade daugh­ter has to do tonight:

1 Math review sheet,
1 Sci­ence essay,
French vocab for pos­si­ble quiz,
His­tory read­ing and ques­tion­aire, and
Eng­lish read­ing and note-taking

About two hours, give or take. This is con­sid­ered a pretty light load, so as to ramp up gen­tly. Over the next few weeks, it will get up to three hours or more.

Most of us give very lit­tle thought to this long-lived com­bi­na­tion. School and home­work seem as inter­con­nected as cars and gaso­line. Kids need home­work to get smarter — right? It’s sup­posed to be how they pick up a good work ethic.

Read the rest here.

Palm Beach County, Florida, insti­tuted a new home­work pol­icy over the sum­mer, allow­ing for 60 min­utes of home­work in third grade and 90 min­utes in 4th and 5th. Accord­ing to an arti­cle in the Florida Sun Sen­tinel, par­ents are up in arms. (If you’re one of those par­ents, please let me know.)

At the same time, also in Florida, the Col­lier County School Dis­trict in Naples insti­tuted a new pol­icy of abol­ish­ing the grad­ing of home­work. Its new pol­icy came about after the Dis­trict, in response to parental con­cerns, looked at research into best prac­tices. Accord­ing to Naples News, the Chief Instruc­tional Offi­cer wrote in a memo to mid­dle school prin­ci­pals, “Research advo­cates that home­work receive teacher feed­back ver­sus a grade; the con­cept here is that we should have the oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice before we receive a grade. Think of it as learn­ing to drive — you must have the oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice on many occa­sions — with feed­back — before you go to the DMV (Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles) to be tested.”