Homework Assignments

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.

Meme: ESL Test Answer

Another stimulus from the internet. So two principles here:

First is, "you can't mark it wrong if it answers the question asked" so, the solution here is to you congratulate the student on her imagination and authenticity and then ask the student to read you the answer in English so you can tell if they have the concepts you were actually testing for. And then you ask her if she'd care to share the (translated) answer with the class because she probably has a better sense of the actual answer than you do, especially if she asked mom about the family's stories handed down from great-grandmother.

Second, it is a good reminder of an assessment technique to use with ESL students in your classroom (though in this case, the student was obviously bilingual since she is taking the exam in English): it's vital to give the ESL students in your class the opportunity for success. If they are constantly struggling to express themselves in English, the quality of their responses will obviously always be less sophisticated and more error-prone than their native-English peers. So, whenever possible when doing this sort of written assignment, get them to write it in their own language, and have their parent or another adult fluent in their language grade it for content. Because, if they're writing fabulous poetry in Chinese or Italian, you don't want to give them a grade in the poetry unit that says they don't understand poetry. That's just incorrect assessment. English Literature and social studies instructors can make good use of portfolio assessment strategies that allow for the inclusion in the portfolio of pieces in the student's own language, alongside pieces that show the students progress/improvement in writing in English. The inclusion of work in their own language is a huge moral booster for the student—that says, in effect, "I may not have mastered English yet, but I'm still a pretty damn good poet!"—which, if one's purpose is to teach kids an appreciation of poetry, is kind of the whole point of the exercise. Without occasional success and reinforcement, what we are teaching the student is that school is a horrible experience to be avoided whenever possible; that they are a failure at our subject— that poetry, or whatever is not for them; and that they are failures and unworthy generally. I don't know a lot of teachers who signed up so they could oppress and discourage kids, but I have met quite a few who think their job is to enforce English instruction to the point of tears and beyond. Yes, let's have assignments in English, but let's make sure we have some parallel assignments in their own language to remind the student—and frankly, to remind us, the instructors—that these are talented, motivated, and hard-working kids. The reason they only put two line answers to that essay question is that writing two lines in English took them as long and five times the effort as the native-English speaker who wrote three pages. Seeing their eight-page essay in Italian or page in Chinese (Chinese characters are words, remember) with an "B+" from their Uncle reminds everyone that this is not a lazy or inferior student.

It should go without saying that the native language assignments must be optional for the student...at some point, asking a student to do any work in their mother tongue becomes the layering on of unnecessary additional work, which would be both dysfunctional and maybe a little racist. But it should remain an option in every teachers' toolbox.