Stop Homework

Today’s guest blog­ger, Amanda Cock­shutt, writes her thoughts on a Mid­dle­town, Ohio, edi­to­r­ial, which opposed a school board’s pro­posal to elim­i­nate the grad­ing of home­work. Amanda, who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, was instru­men­tal in get­ting her local ele­men­tary school to reex­am­ine its home­work pol­icy. Her school now has no home­work on nights of major school events and there are two weeks per year where there is be no home­work other than reading.

Mud­dled Think­ing in Mid­dle­town, Ohio
by Amanda M Cock­shutt, PhD

I read with inter­est the edi­to­r­ial by the con­cerned folk of Mid­dle­town con­cern­ing the school board’s pro­posal to stop the grad­ing of home­work. I think that the pro­posal is pro­gres­sive and clearly attempts to pre­serve stan­dards rather than lower them.

The authors of the edi­to­r­ial seem absolutely con­vinced that stop­ping the grad­ing of home­work will lower stan­dards and ruin their children’s chances of suc­cess. Hav­ing not seen the pro­posal I can’t be sure, but I would be sur­prised if the low­er­ing of expec­ta­tions was a stated pol­icy of the school board’s initiative.

Rather, it seems, that the board wants to level the play­ing field. I would inter­pret this to mean that all the same bench­marks of stu­dent per­for­mance will be used, except the grad­ing of home­work. In other words, tests and exams will be as difficult.

All teach­ers, pro­fes­sors… know that when stu­dent work is com­pleted out­side of the class­room there is a very good chance that oth­ers have “par­tic­i­pated” in that work. If that work is graded, then the stu­dent has been rewarded for work they have not com­pleted alone. If the work is not graded, then the con­tri­bu­tions of oth­ers are either neu­tral or actu­ally serve to help the stu­dent under­stand how the work should have been done. It’s a win win situation.

I can­not under­stand why par­ents would oppose the elim­i­na­tion of grad­ing of home­work unless they are par­tic­i­pat­ing a lit­tle too actively in the home­work process. If they are strong in their con­vic­tion that home­work improves the aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment of their chil­dren (a posi­tion that research does not sup­port strongly), then they should feel con­fi­dent that the time spent on home­work does in fact con­tribute to their children’s per­for­mance on tests, exams…

The authors sug­gest that the new pol­icy will be a bur­den to teach­ers. I can’t exactly see how elim­i­nat­ing masses of mark­ing is going to bur­den them. Per­haps the time teach­ers would pre­vi­ously have spent mark­ing will now be devoted to design­ing more thought­ful and use­ful home­work assign­ments. This is some­thing that will ben­e­fit all students.

Kudos to the school board of Mid­dle­town! Edi­to­r­ial authors, please think hard about what is moti­vat­ing your reac­tionary position.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers on June 6, 2007 at 9:26 am
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