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The school board approved new homework guidelines for high school students in the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, at its Dec. 9 meeting, in an attempt to balance testing schedules and night-to-night assignments. The new guidelines were recommended by a committee of district administrators and parents.
“Kids should learn what they need to learn and still have a life,” said Trustee Paul Gardner. He said his children often had at least three hours of homework but some of it was busy work.
Students and parents also had complained that students were being tested the same day on different subjects. To address these problems, the language of the new guidelines includes the wording: “the staff should make efforts whenever possible to be aware of homework projects, and testing schedules across the curriculum.”
How to create this awareness and use it to even out homework and testing, given the varied schedules of high school students, is to be worked out by the start of the next academic year. Both existing and new guidelines require the principal and staff at each school to develop and regularly review a homework plan.
The new guidelines continue the policy requiring each school to devise a method whereby “students do not receive an overload of homework one day and very little the next.”
They also change the maximum estimated time for nightly homework from 30 minutes per hour of instruction to a total of three hours. This might appear to be the same thing, but it’s a significant change and would allow teachers to load up one subject area on different nights.
Homework is defined by the guidelines as any work assigned to be completed outside of class. Elective classes – such as drama, speech and debate, and athletics – will require more homework time as will honors and advanced courses, the new guidelines state.
Weekend homework assignments are allowed for high school students if deemed necessary, according to the guidelines, which limit estimated homework to three hours for the weekend.
But present and continuing guidelines state, “Assigning homework over holidays is highly discouraged.”
“Overachievers make family holidays a living hell,” said Board President Bill Clarkson.
The committee did its homework, according to district spokesman Terry Koehne.
“The task force, comprised of various stakeholders in the district, considered the latest research on the topic as well as several student surveys conducted from grades kindergarten through 12,” said Koehne in an e-mail after the meeting. There were no students on the committee, and no student addressed the board on the new guidelines.
The board approved the guidelines by a 4-0 vote and delayed their start to the new academic year rather than from the recommended start at midterm 2008-09. Trustees emphasized that each school site should be working to develop a homework plan.
I applaud your efforts to get the homework assignments under control. Unfortunately, I do not believe the schools/teachers will actually be able to collaborate to make it work. Our kid is in AP or Honors classes and he regularly has over 5 hours of homework a night – and has had 3 – 4 tests on the same day.
I can “ditto” word for word Doug’s comment. My daughter is also in AP and honors courses and had a ridiculous amount of homework during winter break. We had to schedule family time and make her take breaks. And yes, she routinely has multiple tests on the same day. My biggest complaint was the amount of work assigned over vacation.
I don’t have high hopes that this plan will be implemented. Without my child even being in honors classes she has several hours of homework every night and that compounds when one or more teachers assign special projects. Weekly she has 3 tests on Friday, and many times more than that. In all fairness, I don’t know how the teachers can coordinate their work loads and testing with all the various subjects the students take.
It is sad that kids have as much homework as they do, but there are better solutions than are being offered. 1. Kids-don’t take AP courses. I used to teach them and I know how rigorous they are. Pick your strong area (math/science/literature/gov/history) and stay in those fields. APs are OPTIONAL. Maybe the District should make the courses year long. That would also help with the academic load. 2. Within the high schools, have the departments decide which days what departments will test. Ie. Tues-Soc Stds, Wed-Math, Thurs-Sci & Fri- English. 3. Nothing good comes of districts mandating what/when teachers test. It has to be a collaborative effort. It is difficult for teachers when they get labeled as “easy” in such an academic driven district. They are fighting a double edged sword…and then to have the all-knowing (facetiously speaking) District come in is definitely not the answer.
This process of developing these new homework guidelines was a joke. The homework task force was praised for all the “research” they did. Please! It was equal to reading a few magazine articles. I’ve spent more time in the morning perusing the morning papers than these task force members did. Yes, I requested and received all the “extensive” research they were asked to review. It was akin to skimming through the latest issue of People magazine.
And the school board? On this issue, a major disappointment, including Joan Buchanan, of whom I expected much better. The school board rubber-stamped stamped the intellectually shallow homework task force recommendations, and deliberately held the meetings just after school let out in June–when not too many teachers, parents, or students would be arond to raise their concerns.
The task force and the school board knew it was a controversial subject, one that kids, teachers, and parents are tormented over daily, so, yeah, strategicially, they put off the vote to a time when few would be around to weigh in. The fact is, they would have voted to approve the new guidelines for the high schools, had not two high school teachers managed to make it to the sparsely attended school board meeting in June to protest.
This vast majority of homework task force members put in a shamefully shallow amount of time on this project. I practically gagged when hearing the school board members wax poetically about their sacrifice. Please. Four meetings over the course of the year, and some scores of pages. The homework task force didn’t do its homework on the homework policy, and neither did the school board.