A troubling trend (another one) is popping up all over the education system. 60% is a passing grade. Even with such a low bar, it's rare to find a teacher that hasn't been pressured to bump up a student or two or twelve to passing to avoid a lower evaluation. Then when schools had trouble meeting AYP for NCLB, state tests got easier and the focus on test preparation increased to a near-mania. Now, a new policy in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country's second largest school district, states that homework can only count for 10% of a student's grade. Can you hear the students cheering? Can you hear the teachers crying?
The "logic" behind the new policy is that this will even the academic playing field. Students have "varying" levels of academic support at home. They also need more time to focus on extracurricular activities. One Superintendant was quoted as saying "We do not want 50 percent of a child’s grade to be based on collecting notebook papers and keeping a folder all year long. That’s not going to demonstrate the child’s mastery of those standards." Perhaps this goes back to the whole issue of having policymakers ignorant of actual education practices making policies, but does he REALLY think homework is about collecting papers? See, I thought homework was about getting much-needed practice with skills learned in school. Homework is an important part of reinforcing the learning process. We've all heard the Malcolm Gladwell study that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to truly master something. Students don't even get 2,000 hours of school in a year...how exactly are they mastering math, science, reading, writing, literature, social studies, art, and foreign language in that time without some extra practice?
Then again, as some teachers in the article pointed out, my students don't even do their homework when its 30% of their grade. Maybe we should just admit defeat and lower the bar. It is certainly easier than doing our jobs and helping students to reach the bars we set.
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Even in my first grade classroom, homework is a troubling issue. I would say that almost half my students failed to do their homework each night. Is this the student's fault? Usually no. My students are at an age where their homework requires some basic assistance, either from an older sibling or an adult, at least for the beginning of the year. More basically, they are six years old and forgetful. They understandably need someone to tell them to do things or at least provide them with an incentive to remember. For whatever reasons, many of my parents were either unable to or did not help the students. However, do I think that this means that homework should simply be forgotten? Quite the opposite actually. Teach for America has constantly reiterated to the corps members that we need to be introspective when we see problems in our classroom; we must ask ourselves our role in the issue and what we can do to change it. Did I emphasize the importance of homework enough at the beginning of the year? Definitely not. Did I provide resources for students who did not have anyone to help them at home? Clearly not enough. Did I give my first graders incentives to remember to do their homework? Sometimes, but not consistently. Those are issues that I will change next year to make my expectations clear and the task achievable. Why does LAUSD not do the same? Maybe a re-evaulation of student support services could be used to make sure that all students have access to necessary supports at school. Maybe incentive programs, besides getting a good grade, can be established to motivate students further? It seems to me that this is the easy way out and lowers the expectation and support for students who may need it the most.
Kyla and Kelly, I agree with both of you that this decision by LAUSD is a troubling one. We can make excuses for our students all day long, but these kinds of excuses are not going to help kids. It is our job as educators to set high expectations for our students in all realms, and it is important that all kids are taught principles of responsibility and work habits. Homework is not the problem--bad homework is. Teachers need to spend the time and effort to create homework that is meaningful and manageable for our students, work that challenges them to apply what they have learned in the classroom, but does not require resources that will not be available to them, or that would be difficult to acquire. For the younger children, that may mean taking time at the end of each day to explain the homework step by step in case a parent is not available to help them with the directions. For older students, this may mean providing them with time after school to ask for help and use classroom resources. Making homework a priority shows students that their hard work is valued and expected in the classroom and out. Homework gives students the opportunity to show ownership over their own learning, and when implemented correctly, is an essential part of reinforcing the material taught in the classroom.
I actually did not hear about this until driving to class this morning, and the entire time it was being discussed I thought it was a joke. Perhaps some "War of the Worlds" hoax aimed at teachers. Nope, actually real. I listened to the reasons that were given for this change, and the one that stuck out to me is that students are so busy after school with extracurriculars that they do not have time for their homework. Ok, c'mon, let's be real here. Unless by extracurriculars they meant Call of Duty, I just don't see that statement as being true. The scariest part about this to me is not that it's dismissing homework as a valuable part of student learning and teacher tracking, it's that a school district is starting to mandate how a teacher's gradebook is set up. Seems like the beginning of a slippery slope.
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