Moms and Dads on a Mis­sion – Sharon, Connecticut

Fred Baum­garten, the father of two daugh­ters in pub­lic school in Sharon, Con­necti­cut, began talk­ing to other par­ents in his daughter’s fifth grade class about home­work after he read The Home­work Myth, by Alfie Kohn, a col­lege class­mate. Fred, who has a M.S. in Edu­ca­tion from Bank Street and is cur­rently a direc­tor of Foun­da­tion, Gov­ern­ment and Cor­po­rate Rela­tions at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege, has a blog, Home­work Headaches, where he recently posted the let­ter he wrote to the Fifth Grade par­ents at his daughter’s school. In addi­tion to read­ing his let­ter, you should visit his blog, where you can fol­low his orga­niz­ing attempts.

Dear Fifth Grade Fam­i­lies & Friends:
by Fred Baum­garten
Sharon, Connecticut

I’ve spo­ken with a num­ber of you indi­vid­u­ally in the last few months about prob­lems with fifth grade home­work that have had an impact on our fam­ily and on our daughter’s atti­tudes toward school. Many of you have shared sim­i­lar stories.

Recently the Prin­ci­pal sent out a let­ter address­ing some of these con­cerns and reit­er­at­ing the school’s home­work poli­cies and atti­tudes, but this let­ter pro­poses no sub­stan­tive changes and fails to get at the heart of the problem.

There are really three home­work prob­lems, in my view:

(1) Quan­tity: Even if it’s true that our stu­dents are spend­ing an aver­age of an hour a day on home­work assign­ments, it would still be too much; it means that some days it takes a lot longer; it doesn’t take into account after­school activ­i­ties; and it takes away from time legit­i­mately spent in fam­ily activ­i­ties, relax­ing, reflect­ing, read­ing for fun, going out­doors, etc. Most of all there is the relent­less­ness of home­work – every night, and on week­ends too, which also relates to the sec­ond point, below.

(2) Con­tent: With very few excep­tions, fifth grade home­work assign­ments have been repet­i­tive, unen­gag­ing, and one-dimensional – lit­er­ally the same thing, night after night.

Vir­tu­ally every assign­ment, from every sub­ject – social stud­ies, lan­guage arts, sci­ence – involves the same type of exer­cise: vocab­u­lary, label­ing, regur­gi­tat­ing “facts,” or sum­ma­riz­ing texts. (This also has the effect of reward­ing a very lim­ited range of learn­ing styles.) Math assign­ments are invari­ably work­sheets or text­book pages of prob­lems. Assign­ments are often unnec­es­sar­ily dif­fi­cult and not well pre­pared for in class. There is lit­tle or no room for cre­ativ­ity, think­ing and reflec­tion, or per­sonal inquiry on top­ics that might inter­est our chil­dren as individuals.

(3) Grad­ing: The near-obsession with grad­ing, par­tic­u­larly in math, turns every assign­ment into a mini-test, with all the pres­sure that entails to get the “right” answers, rather than an oppor­tu­nity to over­come chal­lenges, learn some­thing new, take risks, or sim­ply to derive plea­sure from doing home­work. It also means that there are no breaks from home­work, not even for vaca­tions or sick days, because every assign­ment must be “counted.”

This state of affairs is unac­cept­able. In less than a year my daugh­ter has come to see school not as a place to learn but a place to do work – an end­less, often bor­ing, some­times dif­fi­cult and con­fus­ing series of repet­i­tive taks. As a result, home­work and school have become a strug­gle. I believe that many other stu­dents and their fam­i­lies are going through the same thing.

What you may not real­ize is that this sit­u­a­tion is com­pletely unnec­es­sary. There is a severe lack of evi­dence that home­work accom­plishes the goals it is sup­pos­edly designed to accom­plish. Home­work has not been per­sua­sively shown to raise test scores or class grades, help stu­dents retain what they learn in class (i.e., “rein­force­ment”), or even instill “good work habits” (unless by that we mean learn­ing that work is some­thing unpleas­ant to be done under duress). In fact, about the only thing con­clu­sively known about home­work is that it causes fam­ily con­flict and a loss of inter­est in real learn­ing. In addi­tion, there is con­sid­er­able evi­dence to sug­gest that home­work, espe­cially when it is graded, causes stu­dents to take fewer risks, when risk-taking – mak­ing the edu­cated guess, try­ing some­thing new, tack­ling more dif­fi­cult prob­lems – is the way chil­dren inher­ently learn.

Please don’t just take my word for it (although, in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I have a back­ground in ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion, work in higher edu­ca­tion, and have a M.S.Ed. degree from Bank Street Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion, one of the top teach­ers col­leges in the coun­try, and one of the most pro­gres­sive). Try this exper­i­ment: Go to Ama​zon​.com and type in “the case for home­work” (notice the word­ing). What you will come up with is a list of books mostly against home­work. “The case for home­work” is very shaky.

What I would like to ask from you: The pur­pose of this e-mail is to ask for your sup­port in demand­ing changes from the school admin­is­tra­tion in two areas:

(1) Reduce the home­work load

(2) Vary the nature of home­work assign­ments to allow for more cre­ativ­ity, make them more engag­ing, and allow for alter­nate styles of learning

The Principal’s let­ter asked us to con­tact our “child’s sub­ject area teacher” if we have con­cerns. Per­son­ally I find this sug­ges­tion imprac­ti­cal, frus­trat­ing, and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. There are few assign­ments that don’t con­cern me, and I don’t have the time to main­tain four or more indi­vid­ual conversations.

In Novem­ber, I met with the Prin­ci­pal to dis­cuss my ini­tial con­cerns (when the prob­lem had already become appar­ent) and to gauge how she would respond. While she has been gen­er­ous in offer­ing to help our daugh­ter through “her” home­work dif­fi­cul­ties, there has not been any move to address the larger issue. Again, other par­ents have reported sim­i­lar experiences.

At our meet­ing, I made a few mod­est sug­ges­tions that I believe would at least begin to ease the home­work grind, while not insist­ing on a rad­i­cal change:

(1) Insti­tut­ing a home­work “hol­i­day” one night a week

(2) No home­work on week­ends, or at most 1 – 2 week­ends per month

(3) Requir­ing teach­ers to assign dif­fer­ent kinds of assign­ments, such as ungraded assign­ments, projects that require work over sev­eral nights and that incor­po­rate cre­ative think­ing or research, col­lab­o­ra­tive projects, answer­ing one thought-provoking ques­tion, etc.

It is also rea­son­able to ask the school to pro­vide solid evi­dence that home­work makes for “valu­able prac­tice of aca­d­e­mic content” – and, if it does, what this “prac­tice” accomplishes.

Please let me know if you sup­port mak­ing changes. I also wel­come your feed­back and addi­tional sug­ges­tions. If you do sup­port this effort, I am assum­ing your per­mis­sion to count you – so that I can demon­strate to the Prin­ci­pal how many fam­i­lies are in sup­port of mak­ing changes.

Thank you very much for read­ing through this e-mail. I hope you will con­sider sup­port­ing this effort, espe­cially if you have expe­ri­enced sim­i­lar dif­fi­cul­ties, but even if you have not. To bor­row shame­lessly from Shake­speare and Bubba, the fault lies not in our­selves – or our chil­dren. It’s the home­work, stupid!

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Posted in category Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on February 7, 2010 at 9:23 pm
| 14 Comments »

14 Comments on “Moms and Dads on a Mis­sion – Sharon, Connecticut”

  1. PsychMom says:

    The let­ter cer­tainly is thorough.…if all of that is going on, how can par­ents pos­si­bly not be notic­ing prob­lems for their kids? It would seem obvi­ous to me that this pace can­not be sustained.

    It’s good to hear that more par­ents are rec­og­niz­ing that chil­dren hat­ing school should not be the default and should not be accepted. Why do we send our kids to a place they hate every sin­gle day? It’s no won­der peers become more impor­tant in kids’ lives.…the only pleas­ant face all day is your friend’s.

    I hope Fred got a group together.

    February 8th, 2010 at 8:40 am
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  2. Fred Baumgarten says:

    Hello Sara — thank you again for post­ing this let­ter. And hello and thank you for your com­ment “PscyhMom” — you may be inter­ested in read­ing some of the fol­lowup on my blog. You would think this would be a cause for anx­i­ety for most or all the par­ents, wouldn’t you? Yet you’ll see from some of the sub­se­quent devel­op­ments that it’s not always so. Many fam­i­lies accept the sta­tus quo and accept on faith the effi­cacy of home­work, so they appar­ently find ways to “accli­mate.” I think some par­ents also read into my mis­sive a “rad­i­cal agenda” (and maybe they’re right), and ours is a fairly con­ser­v­a­tive town. Any­way, I’ve got­ten a small cadre of sup­port­ive par­ents, and I’m work­ing hard to con­vince oth­ers to question.

    February 8th, 2010 at 9:15 am
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  3. PsychMom says:

    I read your blog Fred and tried to post a com­ment but was unable to fig­ure it out.….

    As for par­ents asleep at the wheel…I think they are.….asleep at the wheel. The unseen pres­sure that kids are under just com­pounds the obvi­ous pres­sure but some­how it’s all become accepted as a rites of pas­sage and shared mis­ery. School is sup­posed to be awful. Kids are sup­posed to dread it.

    But doesn’t any­one find close to 50 % skip­ping rates in high school alarm­ing? Kids are leav­ing high school early in alarm­ing numbers.…that’s a bad thing. How can it be the kids’ fault? If we say they’re not respon­si­ble adults til they’re 18, who’s respon­si­ble?
    You know, if ele­men­tary kids had the option…I’d bet more younger kids would skip school than cur­rently recorded. You’d see 5 and 6 year olds choos­ing to go some­where else if they had the option.

    February 8th, 2010 at 9:28 am
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  4. FedUpMom says:

    Fred (can I call you Fred? You can call me “FedUp”!) — I wish you all the luck in the world. At the same time, my expe­ri­ence with the pub­lic schools makes me deeply pessimistic.

    Par­ents are com­pletely dis­en­fran­chised in the pub­lic school sys­tem. The teach­ers answer to the prin­ci­pal, the prin­ci­pal answers to the board. A par­ent with a com­plaint is seen as a tem­po­rary nui­sance. Prin­ci­pals have care­fully worked out meth­ods to keep string­ing par­ents along with­out mak­ing any actual changes.

    I would cau­tion you against ask­ing teach­ers for more assign­ments that involve “cre­ative thinking” — in my expe­ri­ence this can result in excru­ci­at­ingly dumb projects that use up a lot of crayons. As soon as a project is assigned and graded, real cre­ativ­ity is pretty much impos­si­ble any­way. Even art schools take the posi­tion that cre­ativ­ity can’t be taught, only tech­nique can be taught.

    It’s inter­est­ing to me that every­thing started to fall apart in your daughter’s 5th grade year. That was our expe­ri­ence too. Appar­ently a lot of schools feel that it’s impor­tant to ramp up the pres­sure in 5th grade “to get the kids ready for mid­dle school.” Then mid­dle school is uni­ver­sally acknowl­edged to be a horror.

    Have you looked into the alter­na­tives? Are there good pri­vate schools in your area? Is home­school­ing an option? The chances that you will be able to make real changes in the pub­lic schools in time to make a dif­fer­ence in your daughter’s life are very slim.

    In the mean­time, you may need to make uni­lat­eral deci­sions. Set a time limit for your daugh­ter, and don’t let her keep work­ing beyond it. Tell the teach­ers it was your deci­sion and you don’t want your daugh­ter to be punished.

    Good luck, and please keep us posted!

    February 8th, 2010 at 10:00 am
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  5. Fred Baumgarten says:

    Thanks again, Psy­ch­Mom. It looks like I might need to change a set­ting on my blog. I’ll try to work on it tonight.

    FedUp, thank you too. Short answers: (1) My kids started in a pri­vate school for sev­eral years; it was won­der­ful and they loved it; but for a num­ber of rea­sons we can’t send them back at this point — and also, beyond fourth grade, there’s no assur­ance it is much less “tra­di­tional” than the pub­lic school. Other alter­na­tives are also pro­hib­i­tive in dis­tance from where we live. (2) At our school (K-8), fifth IS now “mid­dle school” in struc­ture, which is exactly part of the prob­lem — a very abrupt and pre­ma­ture change with­out even a tran­si­tional year. (3) By “cre­ativ­ity” I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean in the artis­tic sense, but in a more global sense — some­thing more indi­vid­u­al­ized, which ought to be pos­si­ble in a school where class sizes are no more than 10 or so!! (4) Much of what you say about pub­lic school is true, and I’m not overly opti­mistic, but I don’t feel I have a choice at this point except to try. (5) We have won some con­ces­sions and help from the teach­ers, includ­ing the option of time-limited math home­work, which has helped. But we can’t really opt out on a nightly basis — they just send her home with a “home­work slip” to make up what­ever wasn’t fin­ished — which just piles on the pres­sure. There’s no indi­ca­tion they will change that since it’s the home­work “policy.”

    February 8th, 2010 at 10:15 am
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  6. FedUpMom says:

    From “Bad Teach­ers”, by Guy Strickland:

    ********
    School dis­tricts don’t really care what par­ents want, espe­cially if they are chronic com­plain­ers (i.e., any par­ent who com­plains more than once.) The prin­ci­pal knows that the school dis­trict will back him up against a com­plain­ing parent…

    Even if the par­ents do pur­sue the prob­lem, the prin­ci­pal might be able to stall until the end of the year, at which time the prob­lem “solves” itself.
    **********

    February 8th, 2010 at 10:25 am
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  7. Fred Baumgarten says:

    What’s the line from “Gatsby”? “And so we pad­dle on, boats against the cur­rent…” or some­thing like that? ;-)

    February 8th, 2010 at 11:18 am
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  8. Another mom says:

    While I’m not a fan of the pub­lic schools, I see the prob­lem not with home­work but with very poor teach­ing in gen­eral. There are some won­der­ful teach­ers, but few of those. I don’t have prob­lem with the “tra­di­tional” school if only the school would teach what they taught tra­di­tion­ally. These days, schools aren’t even doing that. I’d rec­om­mend you look into Stanford’s Online High School which goes mid­dle school and up.

    Best luck.

    February 9th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
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  9. Literacy Lady says:

    I was curi­ous in regards to your reac­tions of Marzano’s beliefs as stated below:

    Point A: Home­work pro­vides stu­dents with the oppor­tu­nity to extend their learn­ing out­side the class­room. How­ever, research shows that the amount of home­work assigned should vary by grade level and that par­ent involve­ment should be min­i­mal. Teach­ers should explain the pur­pose of home­work to both the stu­dent and the par­ent or guardian, and teach­ers should try to give feed­back on all home­work assigned.

    Appli­ca­tions:
    * Estab­lish a home­work pol­icy with advice-such as keep­ing a con­sis­tent sched­ule, set­ting, and time limit-that par­ents and stu­dents may not have con­sid­ered.
    * Tell stu­dents if home­work is for prac­tice or prepa­ra­tion for upcom­ing units.
    * Max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of feed­back by vary­ing the way it is delivered.

    Point B: Research shows that stu­dents should adapt skills while they’re learn­ing them. Speed and accu­racy are key indi­ca­tors of the effec­tive­ness of practice.

    Appli­ca­tions:
    * Assign timed quizzes for home­work and have stu­dents report on their speed and accu­racy.
    * Focus prac­tice on dif­fi­cult con­cepts and set aside time to accom­mo­date prac­tice periods.

    As a pub­lic school edu­ca­tor (ele­men­tary level) I per­son­ally did not assign home­work unless it was on work that wasn’t com­pleted in the class­room after ade­quate instruc­tion and prac­tice. Stu­dents were expected to read a min­i­mum of 20 min­utes every night (Mon-Fri), and get their daily agenda signed by a par­ent. If they had an upcom­ing test parents/students were given at least a week to 10 days notice with infor­ma­tion about the con­tent of the test for study guide­lines so stu­dents could study as they had time around fam­ily activ­i­ties. We would also spend those 7 – 10 days before the test in class reviewing.

    Some teach­ers go over­board with home­work think­ing “gifted” stu­dents or low per­form­ing stu­dents need more. Some par­ents liked hav­ing their child bring a lit­tle bit of home­work home because it kept them involved in their child’s life, while there where other stu­dents whose care­givers could care less whether they had home­work or not.

    Home­work has its place, but there needs to be a bal­ance. I agree that the learn­ing styles of chil­dren need to be taken into account, and time spent with fam­ily is just as impor­tant (if not more impor­tant these days) as the work brought home from school.

    The issue of home­work is a hot topic these days. Good luck.

    February 16th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
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  10. Ct Pest Control says:

    I think the teach­ing style should be addressed too and not just the home­work. It’s hard to keep kids inter­ested in learn­ing so teach­ers should make learn­ing inter­est­ing. And prob­a­bly make home­work an inter­est­ing activ­ity as well that kids will look for­ward to answer­ing them. Par­ents and teach­ers should work hand in hand to achieve this.

    February 18th, 2010 at 8:48 am
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  11. April says:

    @ Lit­er­acy Lady
    Per­son­ally, I wouldn’t have as great an issue with home­work if I felt it was meet­ing those stan­dards. But requir­ing a dio­rama for a book report? That’s just ridicu­lous. I was told by the teacher that it’s sup­posed to be “fun” for us to do together. I have my own ideas for what fun projects I’d like to do with my kids, thanks!
    My 8th grader has been given these stair­case assign­ments for her vocab­u­lary. Here’s an exam­ple:
    exam­ple
    e
    ex
    exa
    exam
    examp
    exampl
    example

    And that’s for 25 words. It takes her over an hour just to com­plete that! She hates it, and I hate it.

    She once had a teacher that assigned one com­po­si­tion page per night of free write with maybe a theme thrown in. She loved it, and I loved it. But that was only one year. Unfor­tu­nately, most of my daugh­ters’ home­work is more of the rote mem­o­riza­tion variety.

    February 18th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
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  12. FedUpMom says:

    April, what could pos­si­bly be the point of the stair­case assign­ment? Have you talked to the teacher about it? Have you told her it takes your daugh­ter an hour of her pre­cious time?

    If a teacher gave my daugh­ter that assign­ment, I would tell my daugh­ter not to do it. Then I would explain to the teacher that my daugh­ter doesn’t do home­work unless it meets my stan­dards. The stair­case assign­ment is both point­less and time-consuming, which I don’t allow in my home.

    I really see this as an issue of parent’s rights. These are our chil­dren, in our homes! We have a right to deter­mine how our kids spend their time with us.

    February 18th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
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  13. Matthew says:

    April, FedUpMom…we had a sim­i­lar “spelling” assign­ment in either 3rd or 4th grade for my old­est son, but it was called Sail­boat Writ­ing (i.e. it formed the shape of a sail). He did it once and then I wrote a note to the teacher and said never again. My youngest son is get­ting “spelling” assign­ments where they’re sup­posed to find their spelling words out of a code sup­plied by the book (A=7, B=8, etc.). I could almost see some­thing worth­while in that if it weren’t so tedious, so again I wrote a note after the first time say­ing we wouldn’t be doing that anymore.

    Gen­er­ally, when I write notes for this type of work I tell the teacher I see no edu­ca­tion value in the work giv­ing them the oppor­tu­nity to quote some research that sup­ports the assignment.

    No teacher has ever done so.

    February 19th, 2010 at 7:43 am
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  14. Sara Bennett says:

    April – I thought I’d seen exam­ples of pretty much every kind of bad home­work, but I’ve never seen that stair­case spelling assign­ment before. I agree that it’s time for a polite note to the teacher.

    February 19th, 2010 at 9:28 am
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