Stop Homework

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.

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’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?

Yesterday’s New York Times had a won­der­ful op-ed by Susan Engel, Play­ing to Learn, about the press­ing need to com­pletely over­haul the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Instead of schools focus­ing so much on stan­dards and facts, the author writes:

So what should chil­dren be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave ele­men­tary school? They should be able to read a chap­ter book, write a story and a com­pelling essay; know how to add, sub­tract, divide and mul­ti­ply num­bers; detect pat­terns in com­plex phe­nom­ena; use evi­dence to sup­port an opin­ion; be part of a group of peo­ple who are not their fam­ily; and engage in an exchange of ideas in con­ver­sa­tion. If all ele­men­tary school stu­dents mas­tered these abil­i­ties, they would be pre­pared to learn almost any­thing in high school and college.

With that in mind, schools could be an engag­ing place where stu­dents read for 2 hours a day, write about sub­jects that are mean­ing­ful to them, prac­tice the math basics (and then go on to activ­i­ties that are equally essen­tial for math and sci­ence such as devis­ing orig­i­nal exper­i­ments and observ­ing the nat­ural world), and have plenty of time to play.

Is any­one listening?

Read the piece here and then copy and send it to the prin­ci­pal of your child’s ele­men­tary and mid­dle school.

Lis­ten to this inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on ADHD on BAM! Radio.

If you’re not aware of what stu­dents are required to do in kinder­garten these days, be sure to read this arti­cle in Rethink­ing Schools titled “Test­ing Kinder­garten: Young Chil­dren Pro­duce Data, Lots of Data.”

A teacher with 6-years’ expe­ri­ence in the Mil­wau­kee Pub­lic Schools writes about how lit­tle recess and nap time her stu­dents get and describes in great detail the amount of test­ing she is required to administer:

I have seen a decrease in dis­trict ini­tia­tives that are devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate, and an increase in the amount of test­ing and data col­lec­tion for 5-year-olds. Just when I thought the dis­trict couldn’t ask for any more test scores or drills or prac­tice, a new ini­tia­tive and data sys­tem pops up for my school to com­plete. My school has not met our Ade­quate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the past three years. Due to our fail­ure to meet AYP, we are now a School Iden­ti­fied for Improve­ment (SIFI), with Level Two status.

The stu­dents in my class­room dur­ing the 2008-09 school year com­pleted more assess­ments than dur­ing any of my prior years of teach­ing kindergarten:

Mil­wau­kee Pub­lic Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kinder­garten Assess­ment (com­pleted three times a year)
On the Mark Read­ing Ver­i­fi­ca­tion Assess­ment (com­pleted three times a year)
A monthly writ­ing prompt focused on dif­fer­ent strands of the Six Traits of Writ­ing
28 assess­ments mea­sur­ing key early read­ing and spelling skills
Chap­ter pre– and post-tests for all nine math chap­ters com­pleted
Three addi­tional assess­ments for each math chap­ter com­pleted
A monthly math prompt
Four Class­room Assess­ments Based on Stan­dards (CABS) per social stud­ies chap­ter (20 total)
Four CABS assess­ments per sci­ence chap­ter (20 total)
Four CABS assess­ments per health chap­ter (20 total)

I recently learned that my stu­dents will also be expected to com­plete four bench­mark assess­ments begin­ning in the 2010-11 school year.

Read the arti­cle here.

In an arti­cle in the Decem­ber 2009 issue of the Ontario Prin­ci­pals’ Coun­cil Exem­plary Lead­er­ship In Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion, Jan Olson, the prin­ci­pal of the Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada school which elim­i­nated home­work last year, and some teach­ers from that school, write about their expe­ri­ences with no home­work and why adopt­ing a no home­work pol­icy is sound policy.

It’s too bad that so few prin­ci­pals have taken the steps that Olson, and Chris­tine Hen­dricks (a prin­ci­pal who insti­tuted a no-homework prac­tice at her school in Glen­rock, Wyoming) have. Both of those prin­ci­pals dis­cov­ered ben­e­fits to their poli­cies that they didn’t expect. In Olson’s case, stu­dents’ grades and test scores increased and he believes it was due to the empha­sis placed on teach­ers work­ing more closely together and work­ing on effec­tive teach­ing strate­gies, rather than send­ing work home with the stu­dents. in Hendricks’s case, she found that stu­dents came to school bet­ter rested and more eager to learn, and that there was a sig­nif­i­cant decrease in neg­a­tive inter­ac­tions between teach­ers and students.

You can read the arti­cle here. (Per­mis­sion to reprint this arti­cle was received by the Ontario Prin­ci­pals’ Coun­cil. The orig­i­nal arti­cle appeared in The OPCReg­is­ter, Vol. 11 No. 4.)

The web­site, Great Schools, just pub­lished a series of arti­cles on home­work, includ­ing an inter­view with me.

When I was doing research for my book, I found that every­one, includ­ing the National PTA and the National Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion referred to the 10-minute rule, but I never did dis­cover its ori­gin. But in read­ing the pieces on GreatSchools, I dis­cov­ered that so-called home­work guru, Har­ris Cooper, made it up out of whole cloth:

So how can you know if your child is doing the right amount? Who came up with that 10-minutes-per-grade rule that’s become the accepted norm? (And if that is the magic num­ber, why is my neighbor’s 8-year-old daugh­ter doing two-plus hours a night?)

The oft-bandied rule on home­work quan­tity — 10 min­utes a night per grade (start­ing from between 10 to 20 min­utes in first grade) — is ubiq­ui­tous. Indeed, go to the National Edu­ca­tion Association’s web­site or the national Par­ent Teacher Association’s web­site, and 10 min­utes per grade is the rec­om­mended amount for first through 12th grade.

But where did it come from? “The source [of that fig­ure] was a teacher who walked up to me after a work­shop I did about 25 years ago,” says Cooper. “I’d put up a chart show­ing mid­dle school kids who reported doing an hour to an hour and a half were doing just as well as high school­ers doing two hours a night. The teacher said, ‘That sounds like the 10-minute rule.’” He adds with a laugh, “I stole the idea.”