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The controversy over homework seems to be the same as the fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Schools countrywide have been warning that “grasshopper” kids who don’t do homework — which studies show is up by more than 50 percent in the last 20 years — may not have the skills they need to survive a metaphorical winter while the “ant” kids will be warm, well fed and secure.
Sometimes, it seems a fable can be just plain wrong. Take the example of the San Ramon Valley Unified School District. For years, parents went along with the work-hard-to-get-ahead plan: lots of homework at night, on weekends and even over holiday breaks. Lots of Advanced Placement classes. Good grades equal a good college and a secure future.
Then, in 2008, came a snapping point. Within a couple of months three things happened that forced parents, administrators and the kids themselves to rethink the whole notion of homework.
A middle schooler, distraught over a poor math score, took her own life.
Filmmaker Vicki Abeles began work on the film, “Race to Nowhere,” which examines the pressures kids are under.
And Danville mother of two Kerry Dickinson, already concerned about the amount of after-school work her middle-school aged sons were doing, read the book, “The Homework Myth.”
“I started talking about it,” Dickinson said. She invited 10 parents to her home to discuss what homework was doing to their lives.
While that led to a broader discussion about what makes a good parent or a good teacher and the amount of stress that kids are under, Dickinson said there was a general agreement.
“What we saw most often was a lot of homework, and homework that seemed to be not of the highest quality — just busy work,” she said.
While many parents would have had a good gripe session and be done with it, that wasn’t the case for Dickinson or her friend, Julie Kurtz. The two approached Kirby Hoy, who was at the time, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction. They came armed with an informal poll of parents, and, according to Kurtz, an email list of 100 parents; Dickinson said she and Kurtz played good cop/bad cop. A week later, the district announced it was forming a task force to look at homework policy, which hadn’t been updated since 1995.
“The old one was pretty vague and open ended. The new one is a little more detailed in terms of suggestions and guidelines about the amount of time to be spent in each grade,” Dickinson said. “It tries to take into account the busyness of the modern family.”
Among other things, the policy discourages homework on weekends and holidays. It lays out the responsibilities of students, parents and teachers, including collaboration of teachers to prevent homework overload and test stacking, when two or three tests in different subjects are scheduled near one another, not giving time enough for students to study for each.
“If every teacher is giving an hour and a half of homework every night and not talking to each other, that has a detrimental effect,” said Kurtz, a marriage and family therapist. Kurtz said she believes in group projects outside the school. She also said she’s not opposed to homework in general, and that it can be useful in subjects like math to reinforce what was taught in class.
“I just don’t think children should be sitting all day, then coming home at night and sitting,” Kurtz said. “You need balance, you need time to build social skills, experience nature. … You need to have free time.”
Dickinson, a former teacher herself, said coordination between teachers isn’t a given.
“It’s going to be specific to the teacher and the school. It’s a suggestion and that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” she said, adding that parents have the fallback they’ve always had: direct talks with the teacher first, and approaching an administrator if that fails.
Dickinson, who writes a homework blog also got to know Abeles and became an advisor on “Race to Nowhere.”
She said the anti-homework movement that’s been gaining momentum across the country won’t apply to everyone.
“Some parents love seeing their kids doing three or four hours a night,” Dickinson said.
For herself and her sons, now both in high school, Dickinson’s new mindset has paid off. The amount of homework they get varies nightly, but Dickinson said, “I’m a much more hands off parent now.”
“Actually, they’re a lot more responsible for their own work and they get better grades now than when I was pushing them,” she added.
While parents and teachers may have taken much of the blame for the amount of homework, Dickinson said it’s often the kids themselves that get caught up.
“There’s a lot of competition in our district. There’s a lot of comparing that goes on. The fact that kids have instant access to their grades is distressing,” she said. “There’s a lot of pressure.”
But neither parents nor kids have to buy into that pressure.
“My son is looking at Cal State schools and I think that’s going to be a great match for him,” Dickinson said, pointing out that acceptance is based on grades or tests, but not both, and they’re less expensive.
After her experiences with “Race to Nowhere” and what she’s learned first hand, Dickinson has some simple advice.
“There is no normal,” she said, adding that parents shouldn’t try to fit their kids in a box. “If you do, you’re just setting yourself up for four years of misery.”
Read this story in the new edition of Views magazine, available for free on July 25.
Read this story in the new edition of Views magazine, available for free on July 25.
Read this story in the new edition of Views magazine, available for free on July 25.
I completely agree with this article and wish that the school district would follow their own guidelines. My daughter was a 7th grader last year and her homework load was huge. The teachers obviously did not talk to each other because she was getting projects and homework in multiple classes on weekends and holidays even the Christmas and Spring Breaks. My suggestion is to have the teachers meet monthly and talk about their work load during each month so they do not pile on at the same time. I also think the district should back off on the school loop and have it only come once a week. If you need to check your homework it is always there for you but to get a daily reminder that your child is doing poorly is stressful on them and parents. Unfortunately the kids are expected to turn their work in on a certain date but teachers are not always getting the grades done by a certain date. I also think projects are a complete waste of time and money. My child had four projects in one class and all those projects are now in our garage or filling up the land fill. And I don’t think she learned all that much from them. A paper or small project would have been better served.
Please SRVUSD and Charlotte Wood administrators reread the policy and talk to your teachers about quality homework instead of busy work.
It is utterly and completely out of control. 3 hours per evening for a junior high student? Are the schools completely insane? All we’re doing is turning out little automatons, who memorize (and just as quickly forget) math facts and spelling words.
It is way past time not to just re-think “no child left behind”, but to overturn it entirely. It is another Bush era failure, a poorly thought out knee jerk response like everything else that administration put into place. It should have been called “no book publisher left behind”, or “no lobbyist left behind”.
We are not teaching our kids critical thinking and real word survival skills, or the importance of using their imaginations. All school kids do now is study to pass federally mandated tests, being rushed through every class and every subject with no time to really absorb what’s being taught. Even in grade school I see plenty of what concerned parent mentioned. These poor little kids are not even given enough time to finish a simple artwork in class.
If all our children can expect from their future is wage competition from some cubicle dweller in Mumbai, we may as well teach them how to flip hamburgers now and be done with it.
It is way past time to end this insanity. Harassing politicians is the only way it will get done. That is, if you can get their attention at a time when some campaign contributor isn’t greasing their pocket.
Derek- NCLB was co-authored by Boehner and Ted Kennedy. Yes, you are right, Bush signed it. But it was a bi-partisan act that has been underfunded and misunderstood since its inception. By both Congresses (Repub and Dem controlled).
Homework is supposed to be practice or review of the content being learned in classroom. My child spent over an hour and a half every evening doing mindless work throughout his last school year (elementary school).
As soon as we train teachers to understand that learning is a process and a journey, not a destination (state test), then teachers will go back to teaching and students will go back to learning. Right now we are doing nothing more than teaching our kids “how to pass the test”. It’s disgusting. My child cannot come up with a creative thought without prodding and threats….he is being spoon fed and the content is obsolete. Experiential learning is over (for now) in our public schools. Face it, in SRVUSD, we live in the best of the worst…and it’s not too good. They think throwing tech at the students, without meaningful curriculum, makes our students 21st century learners. It’s a joke and the act of throwing these “tools” at our students without accountability for achievement (i.e. rubrics)and without meaningful instruction (a process to a lesson), we are just enabling mediocre education.
I am a teacher, so please don’t blame me for being against teachers…I blame the district. There is a climate of elitist arrogance by this district that is not seen at other, equally achieving districts. Also-the teachers at my child’s school are so Unionized that during open house-they walk around and shut each other’s doors at the end of the hour, they have told our fundraising board that even though we contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars for “extras” on a yearly basis-that by CONTRACT they are not obligated to do any of it.
I wish we would have known the all show and no go before we bought here.
My comment probably sounded like I was blaming teachers so sorry for that, but my issues are entirely with federal, state, and local school board entities and the entrenched mindset they seem to suffer. In short, what it boils down to is schools having a mandate for test results at levels that insure future funds. This cycle of idiocy has to stop now. As for the unions, I am neither pro- not anti- because I recognize both the good and the hindrance they create. It’s always disgusting when politics interfere with our kid’s school day.
Unstructured time gives children TIME to imagine and create(assuming they aren’t plugged in to some 21st Century technology- like Facebook, ipods, etc.) The current “21st Century” educational sound bite and fad is hogwash. What is in store for the next 89 years of the 21st Century? Certainly neither educators nor educational managers know.
USING the latest and greatest consumer electronics is completely different from INVENTING AND DEVELOPING them. One needs time and portable knowledge to invent.
Fundamental skill sets and knowledge prepare students to adapt. Fact based knowledge provides portable tools for creativity. Provide instruction in a content based curriculum at school and give young people a few hours per day to embrace family when the school day ends.
@ member-
“What is in store for the next 89 years of the 21st Century? Certainly neither educators nor educational managers know.”
That is precisely the crux of it, yet these “leaders” operate on the pretense that they DO know. Sadly, it is all too possible that we should be teaching them a very different skill set – like how to survive in an increasing inhospitable climate.
I’m 83 now and I have worked with scientists, engineers and students for many years. I came to realize that the only thing that too much homework accomplishes is to extinguish all creativity in the student.
OldHenry