This is funny, but also not. At a certain university (NOT the one I taught at) the IT department invested a quarter of a million dollars on a new security system, touted as unbreakable. The instructor in an advanced graduate course in the computer science department made that week's assignment to break the security system, thinking it would be humbling for the students to encounter at least one assignment that was not doable. My friend, a computer genuis, broke in to the supposedly secure system in about an hour, and posted his "how to get around security" assignment on the [open] class website, as per the assignment directions. By the end of the evening, every computer geek on campus (and beyond) had a copy, and the new security system was thus rendered useless. My friend was summoned before the Dean, but simply brought a copy of the assignment, complete with directions to load the completed solution on the open class site, and was pretty much off the hook (though he had to listen to a long lecture on 'judgement' and 'taking initiative against security breaches rather than creating them" and so on). What happened to the prof, I was never told. The morals here are: (1) don't be a wisenhimmer and assign criminal acts to your students, even if you think it impossible or that they will get that it's a joke assignment, (2) don't assume your students aren't way smarter than you are and can't do something just because you can't.
A clear explanation of why homework is stupid and why standardized testing has problems.
I have always opposed homework. Teachers should teach, parents should be family. Asking kids to take work home in K-12 system is wrong-headed because:
Homework Significantly Undermines Equality of Educational Opportunity
Homework greatly increases the disparity between family backgrounds, undermining equal educational opportunity
Some parents work at two jobs to support their families, or work evenings or otherwise are unavailable to help their kids with homework. It is clearly unfair to pit these kids against kids whose parents can do their homework for with them.
Some families speak white-middle-class English; some families speak lower-class English; some black dialect; others speak little or no English at. It is unfair to send home assignments in the expectation that all parents can help their children equally.
Some families need the children to do chores to help with the farm or family business; or disabled siblings, or elder care; or other responsibilites; while other families place no such demands on their children.
Some parents value education and school work; others—having been traumatized by their own school experiences with racial, class, religious, or other biases, and bullying teachers—think, for example of residential schools, to take just one obvious example—do not. It is not fair to demand that kids from these different backgrounds be pitted against each other on homework assignments.
Some homes have resources—computers, books, a table/space to work at, separate bedrooms for each kid—while others do not.
Some homes have the income to hire tutors when kids struggle; others do not.
Homes vary (across all classes, cultures, and backgrounds) in stability. Why are we asking kids to complete work at home when their parents are in the middle of a screaming divorce, or they have bullying siblings, or there are other types of disruption?
Schools are supposed to be safe places for students to learn. Our responsibility is to teach them in schools where we can control the learning environment and make sure it represents a level playing field. Any time we send work home, we privilege some students, undermine others.
Homework Undermines Teacher Accountability
As a parent, it frequently drove me crazy to find that I was expected to teach my child reading, writing, and arithmetic, while my child's teacher devoted hours of classroom time to non-academic activities. For example, I routinely experienced that whenever the family sat down to enjoy a family movie night on the weekend, that my daughters had already seen the film at school. "Thursday afternoons are movie-day," they would tell me. Why do my kids have two hours of homework each evening, but teachers have time to pre-empt family activities? What's wrong with this picture?
I get that there should be some 'fun' times at school, to team-build, to reward diligence, to enhance learning. But what I am increasingly observing is these activities displacing learning. I increasingly see a generation of teachers who are more concerned with occupying the children than teaching them.
To cite just one blatant example from my child's education: my wife was present in our daughter's classroom as a volunteer when, in the last week of school, the teacher announced, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to teach printing this year. I'm going to hand out the printing exercise books now for you to take home. Have your parents teach you printing over the summer because you'll need that for next grade." An extreme example to be sure, but underlying every homework assignment is the delegation of teacher-work to parents, who may or may not be in a position to take on the responsibility.
Homework Encourages Racism, Class Bias, and Victim-Blaming
I hear teachers—and not just my inexperienced student teachers, but senior classroom teachers—dismiss this or that student's lack of progress by blaming the parents. "What can you expect? Ruby comes from ________(fill in the blank with "broken home" or "native home" or "trailer park home" or whatever other unacceptable bias teachers allow themselves. There is no clearer example of blaming the victim than the lowering of expectations for students based on class, race/ethnicity, parental marital status or whatever. What can I expect from Ruby? The same as every other student in the classroom because it is the teacher's job to get every single student to mastery of the subject content. There are no valid excuses for a student failing, except perhaps a doctor's diagnosis of massive brain injury, in which case they are probably not in your class anyway. Homework assignments mask teacher bias by shifting responsibility, along with a high proportion of the teacher's workload, to the family. Instead of taking responsibility for each child's learning, they accept responsibility only for those students whose parents have the social capital to do the teacher's job for them.
Bah, humbug.
Good teachers get the work done in their classrooms; they do not assign homework.
Only slightly off topic of student assessment is the question of how one evaluates good teaching. Just as with student assessment, defining one's objectives and how to measure progress toward those goals is in fact a highly political activity. Why this learning objective and not that one; why is this particular standard considered inadequate, satisfactory, or excellent; why this group's (students? peers? parents? administrators? stakeholders? taxpayers?) perceptions of quality rather than some others? Do we measure excellent teaching against student expectation, student learning, student engagement, student enjoyment, student self-fulfillment; or by employer needs and expectations, graduate employment figures, graduate life chances; by political socialization or active citizenship; critical thinking or ideological conformity; or societal arts and culture, inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, the reproduction or elimination of poverty and injustice... You get the idea.
I'm very pleased to have "Excellence for what? Policy Development and the Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education," appear as a chapter in the just-released Routledge collection, Global Perspectives on Teaching Excellence. The collection is basically a reaction to recent legislation in the UK that attempted to measure and mandate teaching excellence in higher education. My wife and I wrote a critique using my discourse analysis model of the purpose of higher education applied to the new legislation to suggest that the government's definition of 'excellence' might be somewhat problematic from the perspective of students and learning.
A bit off the topic of assessment, but thought I'd mention my paper, "Is Teaching a Profession?". The paper is over 20 years old, but as an historical analysis of the the rise and fall of the idea/model/ideology of 'profession', it still works as a quick briefing on whether educators can claim to be a profession. The paper is still getting cited because people are still debating the question—but turns out, it was the wrong question all along. The paper is available for free download from Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233816024_Is_Teaching_a_Profession
