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Education Math

Assigning Homework Exacerbates Class Divides, Researchers Find (vice.com) 312

Posted by EditorDavid from the society-ate-my-homework dept.
"Education scholars say that math homework as it's currently assigned reinforces class divides in society and needs to change for good," according to Motherboard — citing a new working paper from education scholars: Status-reinforcing processes, or ones that fortify pre-existing divides, are a dime a dozen in education. Standardized testing, creating honors and AP tracks, and grouping students based on perceived ability all serve to disadvantage students who lack the support structures and parental engagement associated with affluence. Looking specifically at math homework, the authors of the new working paper wanted to see if homework was yet another status-reinforcing process. As it turns out, it was, and researchers say that the traditional solutions offered up to fix the homework gap won't work.

"Here, teachers knew that students were getting unequal support with homework," said Jessica Calarco, the first author of the paper and an associate professor of psychology at Indiana University. "And yet, because of these standard, taken-for-granted policies that treated homework as students' individual responsibilities, it erased those unequal contexts of support and led teachers to interpret and respond to homework in these status-reinforcing ways...."

The teachers interviewed for the paper acknowledged the unequal contexts affecting whether students could complete their math homework fully and correctly, Calarco said. However, that did not stop the same teachers from using homework as a way to measure students' abilities. "The most shocking and troubling part to me was hearing teachers write off students because they didn't get their homework done," Calarco said.... Part of the reason why homework can serve as a status-reinforcing process is that formal school policies and grading schemes treat it as a measure of a student's individual effort and responsibility, when many other factors affect completion, Calarco said....

"I'm not sure I want to completely come out and say that we need to ban homework entirely, but I think we need to really seriously reconsider when and how we assign it."
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Assigning Homework Exacerbates Class Divides, Researchers Find More

Assigning Homework Exacerbates Class Divides, Researchers Find

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  • Go ahead and use poverty or racism as an excuse to outlaw it. It should have never been allowed. When the bell rings, school is over. Kids shouldn't be forced to work overtime. It was always wrong.

    • I think you're missing how learning really works in practice. You can't master a subject without spending personal time to truly understand it.

      • Re: Homework should be illegal (Score:5, Informative)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:19PM (#60751384)

        I think you're missing how learning really works in practice. You can't master a subject without spending personal time to truly understand it.

        What you just said contradicts the article: "... especially at early grades, where [homework's] academic benefits are limited or non-existent".

        I was surprised by the article's assertion. The article offered citations to back up its assertion, so I looked them up. I don't think the citations do back up its assertion after all...

        1. Adding Families to the Homework Equation: A Longitudinal Study of Mathematics Achievement
        http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... [psu.edu]
        "This coordinated homework process may be a useful tool for educators seeking more favorable and academically productive home learning experiences for students and their families."

        2. Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987–2003
        https://classtap.pbworks.com/f... [pbworks.com]
        "there was a generally positive influence of homework on achievement"

        3. Relationships among attitudes about homework, amount of homework assigned and completed, and student achievement.
        https://scholars.duke.edu/disp... [duke.edu] [no free PDF available]
        "At lower grades (2 and 4), teacher-assigned homework was related to negative student attitudes. At upper grades, teachers with more positive attitudes toward homework and those whose students performed more poorly on standardized tests reported assigning more homework. A path analysis for lower grades indicated that class grades were predicted only by standardized test scores and the proportion of homework completed by students. At upper grades, class grade predictors also included parent, teacher, and student attitudes"

        4. Homework Practices, Achievements, and Behaviors of Elementary School Students
        https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED3013... [ed.gov]
        "Although findings seemed to be counterintuitive, they indicated that at the elementary school level, low achievement in reading and mathematics, in comparison with high achievement, is associated with more time spent doing homework, more minutes of parent help, and more frequent requests from teachers for parent involvement. Thus the findings serve as a good example of the inadequacy of correlations to address questions of effects on students."

        • but kids aren't *trying* to master a subject. Learning the basics as a kid is very, very different than mastering the subject as a young adult.

          This is what happens when people who haven't studied education form opinions on it. It's part of the boarder disdain for experts in America. As Asimov said, 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'.

          • Really? You don't think kids are trying to master the subject? Obviously mastery means something a little different at that level, but it's still mastery - just like they mastered controlling their bowels, tying their shoes, and eating with utensils. There's even a built-in reward for mastery: the more they master the topic, the easier and faster it is to do the homework, and the less time they have to spend on it. Usually there's greater social acceptance as well, though there's a pretty strong current

    • Learning requires Inculcation. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:54PM (#60751272) Homepage Journal

      The human brain is a trainable neural net. But actually training it requires reinforcement. It is easy to review a math lesson, grasp the concept, and say "Ok, I get it, let's move on." However, if you do that, a few lessons in, you won't be able to use what you have learned to actually solve problems. You will quickly forget prior concepts you have grasped, and even if you remember them, you brain will not be adept at combining the concepts to be able to solve a problem.

      Homework is how this reinforcement is done. Without that practice, the learning does not take place. So, if we want kids to actually acquire these skills, they must be made to do the exercises somehow. We could keep them in school even longer to give them that time to practice, we could reduce the amount of skills we teach them to make room for the practice, OR we can give them homework and let them do the practice in the comfort of their own homes, without requiring the teachers to be there, and with parental support.

      There are SOME kids who are geniuses and get all the reinforcement they need with very little practice. Every kid thinks he is like that. Most kids are not actually like that. If you water this down you are going to get even more graduates who lack the skills they need to be competitive in the working world.

      This article seems to be more about how kids in some social classes don't get the time or parental support needed to benefit from homework, and so that keeps the lower-class kids trapped in the lower-class due to this disadvantage. We could certainly equal things out by taking the advantage away from the upper class, but the net effect will be an overall reduction in competence among graduates, which does not benefit the greater good.

      The wealthy will just send their kids to private schools anyway. You can't enforce equality of outcomes, and there are limits to what we reasonably can do to provide equal opportunity. We should always try, but we should not embrace solutions that wind up making things worse, overall.

      Lastly, if we force our brightest stars to endure an education that is beneath their abilities, we fail them and we deny ourselves the benefit of having well-cultivated top-tier talent in the working world. That would be stupid.

      • and when they do if nobody is there to get them over that wall they're stuck and they fail. That's how learning actually works.

        Yes, drills and repetition are necessary, but if you train the wrong way you just hurt yourself. Schwarzenegger used to lie to his fellow body builders about his training regimen so they'd over work themselves, for example. Hell, when I was a kid I couldn't understand BASIC programming data statements. It just didn't make sense to my dumb kid brain. I had not teacher, limited in

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Mitreya ( 579078 )

          Homework effects your grade. For poor kids w/o parents who can help it's like being sent home with a test every single night. It means their grades will suffer overall, cutting off opportunities.

          I assume you are suggesting abolishing homework while keeping exams and still having grades?
          I can assure you that this is a bad idea, even in college. Most students will not prepare on their own, and homework assignments are the best chance of getting them to prepare for exams.
          You can certainly reduce the weight of assignment grades compared to exams, many of my colleagues do that. But students who don't do their homework will usually fail (or cheat) on their exams.

      • If homework wasn't an effective learning tool (however it happens), then it wouldn't "exacerbate class divisions." This study can be interpreted as "people who do their homework get better at the subject."
      • We could abolish homework, but extend the school day to provide time for students to do what previously would have been homework and not allow work to be taken home. But what of the students who can't finish the work in the allotted time? Some will just need (even) more practice. Others will never get it. Is that ok?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Notwithstanding the element of truth of what you say, the problems we have with homework doesn't come from scientific misunderstandings, they come from sloppy execution.

        For example it is widely agreed that the amount of homework a student can benefit from depends on the age of the student. This not only accords with practically everybody's common sense, it has strong scientific support. So what nearly everybody thinks should happen is that the youngest children should only get token homework to get them u

      • If it is just for reinforcements, the problems shouldn't be so difficult that adult help is required. Homework should be done by the kid and no one else.

      • Re:Learning requires Inculcation. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @06:23PM (#60752096) Homepage

        We could certainly equal things out by taking the advantage away from the upper class, but the net effect will be an overall reduction in competence among graduates, which does not benefit the greater good.

        This is the Progressive Social Justice goal in a nutshell, and criticisms of it remain as salient now as they have been for decades. If you want to provide extra support to those that need it, that's great, and it helps ensure everyone get a shot at Greatness, but don't punish and hold back others from achieving their own potential.

    • Re:Homework should be illegal (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:57PM (#60751286)

      Personally, I don't have a problem with the option of homework, but the idea that kids should get lectured at during school and then do the work at home is backwards. I really like the Khan Academy model where they flip it and they're assigned readings/videos for home and then they work on problems during school hours.

      The thing is, we need to completely restructure school. We shouldn't group kids by age, and we shouldn't try to group them by ability by testing them and then putting them in "AP" or "CP" or whatever. All classes should have the same standards, but they should be self-paced and you graduate from a class whenever you master it rather than going from one "grade" to another. Everyone starts at the same place, works through the same classes, and graduates when they complete the classes.

      I also think they should have until 21 to complete this process.

      One can dream.

      • So then you end up with some kids graduating at 14, most at 18, and some at 30.

        Even ignoring that, how the material is presented is extremely important. Some kids can be given an extremely dense text and learn it largely on their own. Some need it to be more spread out, explained in different ways, or incorporate more visual or audio methids of delivering the information. Some need a teacher to help monitor their progress and re-package how the information is delivered at times. Others don't.

        Lumping them a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mitreya ( 579078 )

        I really like the Khan Academy model where they flip it and they're assigned readings/videos for home and then they work on problems during school hours.

        I can only speak for university level work (but I am sure students are more organized by undergraduate/graduate time than in primary or middle school)
        The problem with flipped approach (which some of my colleagues really like) is that it relies on students performing assigned readings and watching assigned videos before class. And it works best for synchronous classes (where everyone has to show up at a certain time for the process).
        If the students don't attend or show up unprepared, then that mechanism s

      • Re:Homework should be illegal (Score:4, Interesting)

        by habig ( 12787 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @04:04PM (#60751604) Homepage

        I really like the Khan Academy model where they flip it and they're assigned readings/videos for home and then they work on problems during school hours.

        There's a lot of evidence towards this working well. But: say I assign reading and videos to my students to do.... at home. Is that still "homework", from the perspective of TFA? (or, the perspective of the anti-HW posters in this thread?)

        Also, as a professor, I'm wondering what happens what happens when kids get to college courses having little practice doing things on their own outside a classroom. In college, there is comparatively little time actually in class (which I often do spend on "active learning" rather than lectures), and they're expected to be able to do stuff on their own outside class. Not just do the reading etc to prepare for class, but write papers, work out problem sets, write code, whatever is appropriate for a given class. They'll need some practice at younger ages working on their own to succeed at university.

        Those that don't prepare before class in the Kahn Academy scheme? They're lost in class and get little out of it. The whole thing becomes a waste of their time, my time, and their fellow students who have to cope with deadweight in any peer-instruction.

    • Also, if it was necessary, why not make the bell ring later?
      And if it's better to work at home, why not make the bell ring earlier?
      The problem is that it is too much, and productivity goes down.
      Just like with our work weeks for tasks that require vastly more mental energy than a basic labor job, but where nobody sweats like a pig and literally can't stand anymore, because it's not manual labor.

    • the point of Homework is to extend the school day to 8-10 hours sometimes more without paying for it by shifting the cost of education to the parent.

      At one point in High School my kid was coming home with 6 hours of HW a night and it took a lot of hell raising by parents to get that stopped, the local businesses pushed it because they thought it would get them better employees.

      Schools aren't there to make society better or to educate your kids. They're there because businesses want them to be. Going

    • The "teacher at school lectures, parents at home tutors over homework" model inverts what parents and teachers are good at. Parents should play lectures on TV at home, and teachers should help students do problem sets in the classroom. Since most parents probably don't remember math at all.

    • ... When the bell rings, school is over. ...

      All your idea would change is that they will ring the bell later or stop ringing it entirely.

      They'll never let you get off easy. You better think of homework as a halfway house and school as a prison.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I've often thought that the school day should correspond to an adult work day -- 8 hours per day -- but have the same amount of class time as they do today. The remainder extra on-campus time should be spent on out-of-classroom work ("homework"), enrichment activities, and breaks. Paraprofessionals , volunteers, and older students (paid a small honorarium) can students with out-of-classroom assignments. After their parents pick the kids up, they should do what adults do after their work day: unwind.

      This

  • This won't stop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:42PM (#60751230)

    Next they'll find that pencils and pens cause social divides.

  • My family was decidedly working class in an affluent city. From an early age, I didn't even have the basics, paper, pencils, crayons, and I had no way of knowing what was needed or a way to get them and it was counted against me. My teachers would keep me inside during recess to work on homework, which probably ultimately was helpful, but it sucked. But my home environment was not conducive or helpful with homework at all. From my parents perspective it was my own moral failure that I didn't come home and d

    • Re:Absolutely true (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:36PM (#60751464) Homepage Journal

      being more flexible with grades and standardized testing

      If by this you mean abiding incompetence, then I must disagree. It is tremendously wasteful of resources to provide an advanced education to someone who does not have the mental ability, self-discipline, and/or available free time to actually be able to learn it. It is unfortunate and unfair that some people don't get the prepatory education they need in their youth to be able to succeed at the advanced education in their young-adulthood. But we can't fix that by just giving them that advanced education anyway, for free.

      If by this you mean, make available the necessary remedial education and opportunities to prove competence, then I agree completely. Learning is a lifelong endeavor and it should always be available to everyone, at a level that is appropriate to their current state of achievement and opportunity.

      taxing billionaires more

      The world does not owe you a living. Those billionaires don't owe you their money. If they are to be taxed to provide for your needs, then there must be some mind of reciprocal benefit to justify it (similar to how we use taxes to pay for the military, and in turn we all benefit from the protection the military provides). If the educational taxes you propose actually result in a population of workers who actually have the skills that employers need, then that may be the justifying reciprocal benefit. If it results in career students who keep spending taxpayer money to study subjects that do not make them employable, then that would be wasteful and abusive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      We really need to create more pathways for upward mobility in the US even if it means taxing billionaires more and opening up admissions by being more flexible with grades and standardized testing.

      This is where you lost me. I get the problem but I am really afraid of the implied solutions.
      I get that grades/standard test are not perfect and have biases.
      But the alternatives here are 1) abolish grades, which gives few metrics for admission (go by their essay only?), 2) prioritize applicants with lower grades over students with higher grades, which is even less fair IMHO.

  • Education Is Inherently Racist (Score:4, Funny)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:52PM (#60751262)

    This is more proof that education is inherently racist.

    Pink Floyd was write!

  • Just, wow! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:55PM (#60751274) Journal

    Oh boy, what's next? a declaration that grading a student's academic performance as unfair to children who are disadvantaged by lesser socioeconomic conditions and attentive parenting.

    Homework is not evil... it is a way to teach children how to be self-starters. Parents, even good ones. are seldom ever leaning over the child's shoulder every night to ensure that assignments are complete.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      Oh boy, what's next? a declaration that grading a student's academic performance as unfair to children who are disadvantaged by lesser socioeconomic conditions and attentive parenting

      You've missed a few episodes if you think that will be "next" rather than "a constant complaint we're all sick of hearing".

    • I mean, the way most grading currently is done is unfair to children, yeah. I'm not saying we shouldn't have grades, just that basing a large percentage of it on at-home work with differing levels of help is a stupid way to do it.

    • Strong and persistent efforts to eliminate grading are already underway. So far, in some neighboring counties, these efforts have already succeeded (1) in eliminating class rankings by GPA in high schools, (2) changing the admissions process for magnet/gifted&talented programs from an achievement-based model to a lottery, and (3) changing grading criteria for many classes from letter grades to pass-fail. They are not done yet.

      We have fully moved from a "no child left behind" model to an "every chil

    • Re:Just, wow! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RalphSlate ( 128202 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @05:33PM (#60751948) Homepage

      It should be obvious to anyone who has younger school-age children that results from homework and after-class assignments depend mostly on the parents, not the children or teacher. All schools stress "parental involvement", and many of these assignments need much of that to be completed. "Parental involvement" is one of those gatekeeping things that many charter schools require to keep out "those kinds" of kids - the ones they know will lag behind.

      I can't tell you how many hours I spent with my children, at the kitchen table, helping them understand and practice their assignments. This probably occurred through about 6th grade, when they were then able to handle the task on their own.

  • Homework (Score:5, Informative)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:55PM (#60751278)
    When I was teaching I used homework as a measure of student responsibility. I didn't care if it was done correctly, I already knew which of my students were struggling with the material and I tutored accordingly. Homework indicated to me whether a student was responsible enough to perform tasks they were asked to complete outside of the classroom environment. I used this to judge their proficiency and conduct. I always reminded my students that if they wanted a career in Information Technology they would need to be responsible for the work assigned to them. Those that refused to perform outside of the classroom were setting themselves up for failure later on.
    • Very likely you only measured their parents engagement and sense of responsibility.
      • That was one of the factors that I pointed out in parent/teacher conferences. Getting the parents involved was sometimes a struggle but something I always followed up on.
        • Unfortunately, it is really not possible. Even today with my successes my parents wouldn't lift a finger to invest in my future success. (But, sadly they will gladly claim credit.)

    • Cool, you taught a personal responsibility course? It was focused on action plans and organization? Oh, no you taught math or science or something else.

      • I taught a high school CompTIA A+ and Cisco CCNA two year course with a focus on getting the students prepared for the IT work force.

        • So, again, you didn't actually teach time scheduling or management, and subscribed to the belief that students shouldn't learn about work-life balance.

          • Yes, time scheduling and management were built into the curriculum. *sigh*

            • "I didn't respond to the point being made, that I'm judging students based on something I'm not teaching, by bothering to inform the other party that I do in fact teach it. Why didn't they didn't read my mind *sigh*"

    • Looking back on my school education, I just wish that some of my teachers had been more engaged. It was quite clear that some of them (mostly liberal arts teachers) were not interested in pupils that were not good at sports.

      • Yes, unfortunately, I worked with educators that did this as well. They were usually coaches, or former coaches. The worst outcome is when a former coach became an administrator and tried to administer teachers using the concepts learned bossing children around on a playing field.

  • From the study:

    If math homework operates this way, then its use—especially in early grades, where its academic benefits are limited or non-existent (Cooper et
    al. 1998; Cooper, Robinson, and Patall 2006; Epstein 1988; Van Voorhis 2011)—should be questioned and perhaps avoided entirely.

    I spend about an hour or two a day with my 2nd grade daughter. I'm particularly keen on maths. I've been doing it all kinds of ways - fun jumping jacks to do as many jumps as the long addition she just did; teaching her roman numerals because she saw a joke about them and she likes jokes; doing electoral college long addition and subtraction because it was on and she was interested; bolstering her confidence by highlighting her successes and reinforcing her self-image as someone who is capabl

  • Remove class divides by not educating kids? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:01PM (#60751304)

    Following from this paper, the best way to remove class divisions is to not educate kids at all. That way no advantages will accrue to the rich and well-off.

    Or instead, maybe schools could actually teach kids how to do things like time management and homework, which would help the poor and disadvantaged kids to catch up with their wealthier and advantaged "peers." That would, however, require seeing the process of education as one that lifts the disadvantaged up instead of one that's supposed to drag the advantaged down.

    More generally, equalization can mean "bring up" as well as "drop down." The author seems to be using the idea of equity the way it was practiced in the former communist countries: if everyone has nothing then everyone is equal.

  • Spoiler alert! (Score:3)

    by chrism238 ( 657741 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:04PM (#60751318)
    "the authors of the new working paper wanted to see if homework was yet another status-reinforcing process. As it turns out, it was"

    Yet another. Warning, the SJWs are out in force today.

  • The only homework that should be assigned is to watch a video lecture. Then students can work on problems in class.

    Oneof my math teachers did something I've never seen anywhere else. She split up the homework problems and had students work on them in groups on several blackboards. I don't know if that's the best way to do homework, but it's pretty good.

  • "Education scholars say" (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:05PM (#60751328)

    i.e. No actual science behind it, just some silly opinions backed up by unreproduced research.

    Until you have science to report, STFU

    • For what it's worth, there's very little scientific research that is ever reproduced.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        For what it's worth, there's very little scientific research that is ever reproduced.

        Guess you work in the soft sciences then. I assure you that everything we use from chemistry on up (physics, cs, etc) is reproducible. Are you sure what you do is really a science?

      • "For what it's worth, there's very little scientific research that is ever reproduced."

        That is a simple lie.

  • One of the warning signs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:05PM (#60751330)

    Homework is one of the places where warning signs of abusive homes appear. It's cruelty on top of cruelty to write off a student who couldn't focus on math because last night, their door was getting kicked in by a raging pseudo-adult male, and their mother was rehearsing them in how to pass off bruises as "an accident".

    Cue all the ones who assume that saying that this is a problem is saying that kids from good homes shouldn't get quality education. Quite the reverse; why aren't we making sure not to make things yet worse for battered children?

  • The belief leads to the conclusion (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:07PM (#60751344)

    I never had any help from my parents. They worked all the time. I did or did not do my homework on my own. I took a bunch of AP tests and did well on all of them. My parents wouldn't have been able to help with math questions, even if they had the time to help. I'm tired of people who don't work and then have a million excuses why nothing is their own fault.

    How does the data fit all the kids from China and India who mostly grew up dirt poor and now fill countless positions at Oracle, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. Not only did most of them not have access to computers in grade school, they often didn't even have AC or heating at school. Didn't slow them up.

    • I mean, you're projecting your situation on others without any understanding or qualification. I ultimately had great success in college and my career, but I had abusive parents. I knew I would regret not doing my homework, but my home life was focused on feeling ok and not poking the bear.

    • Re:The belief leads to the conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @04:32PM (#60751756)

      I never had any help from my parents... How does the data fit all the kids from China and India who mostly grew up dirt poor and now fill countless positions at Oracle, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc?

      In other words: "outliers exist, therefore how can you say that the mean didn't shift?"

  • Expectations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by senileoldfart ( 1146807 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:13PM (#60751366)
    1968 in a concrete block house with a dirt floor in a tiny village in Vietnam, a 4th-grade girl was working on her homework. I looked to see what she was working on. It was set theory. The same thing my brother was working on in High School back in the USA.

  • pandering to the lazy and useless, the new norm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:20PM (#60751388)

    What a disgrace, assigning homework helps instill self-discipline and hard work to achieve. We are now in the era of pandering to the useless, the lazy, the criminal thug in training.

    • What a disgrace, assigning homework helps instill self-discipline and hard work to achieve. We are now in the era of pandering to the useless, the lazy, the criminal thug in training.

      I don't disagree. I think its pushback against the practice of when my son was in school of assigning around 5 hours of homework every evening. Parents were complaining that their kids weren't getting enough sleep.

  • Class divides? (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:29PM (#60751428)

    15% have an IQ of 85 or less, 15% have 115 or better, plus the ones in the middle, what more dividing can you get?

  • I really donâ(TM)t understand this push to get rid of programs like GT for those children with âoeperceived abilities.â

    Differences in ability are real, not just âoeperceived.â

  • Homework is to use repetition to train the brain. If you do away with homework you need to make up that time with longer time in school. Either longer school days or shorten the amount of time students take off in the summer. It is simple.

    All that happens if we dumb down the education system is we increase the divide between the motivated and unmotivated. Unfortunately those that are motivated will have to spend the rest of their lives paying to support the unmotivated who just coast. The world only ne

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmahan ( 80459 )

      And to clarify "motivated" -- that is the students who want to learn and go beyond the minimum that school requires. Motivation doesn't know financial status or skin color.

  • There are other factors (Score:3)

    by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:41PM (#60751492)

    I lived out in the sticks. It took me an hour to get to school (arriving slightly after school had started but before lessons had commenced), and 90 to 140 minutes to get home again. The 110-140 minutes applied two days a week when the bus was reliably 20-40 minutes late, sometimes worse than that. Since the timetable was the same as for the other three days, I was not permitted to leave 5 minutes earlier which would have saved me at least an hour those Tuesdays and Thursdays.
    Of course I tried to do some of the homework on the bus but reading was difficult with the background noise and writing an impossibility with the bus bouncing around on those disastrous roads. I'm occasionally in the area now and writing mails or messages on my phone is still really fraught, the roads have not improved.
    I set priorities, abandoning some subjects as "do if I ever get the time" and usually failing them.
    As for my parents, it never crossed my mind to ask them for help - for good reason.
    Still it worked out for me in the long term, College - way before they ramped the fees up - and a succession of decent jobs. The trick was to study something which virtually no school offered back then - computers - and establish myself there.

  • What Makes The Biggest Difference? (Score:3)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:41PM (#60751496)
    Out of curiosity, which makes a bigger difference: having kids do math homework, or having a great math teacher?

    When I started my Math classes as a Senior, our school hired a new teacher, who would take my class through to 12th Grade. My entire class struggled, something made worse by the fact that what we were supposed to be learning in her class was needed in other classes, primarily physics, but to a lesser extent chemistry and so on.

    It was only when the results started to show that the school had made a terrible mistake [grades for her students fell through the floor] that the school had a panic attack and made changes [she was reassigned to teaching simpler math to younger students. All well and good, but what about those students whose academic careers were blighted as a result of poor tuition?

    Looking back on that time, I realize that even though I struggled with the all the homework that was set - and did 4, 5 hours or more study every night - none of that could make up for poor tuition.

    Oh, and if you or your kids are wondering if you're getting good tuition from a teacher, here's a great "tell" for a bad one: after explaining a new topic to a class and getting a room of blank or frowning faces, a teacher who says, "Honestly, there really isn't any other way to explain this to you: you just need to pay attention and understand..." is probably a sign that you're not in a good class...

    • Out of curiosity, which makes a bigger difference: having kids do math homework, or having a great math teacher?

      When I started my Math classes as a Senior, our school hired a new teacher, who would take my class through to 12th Grade. My entire class struggled, something made worse by the fact that what we were supposed to be learning in her class was needed in other classes, primarily physics, but to a lesser extent chemistry and so on.

      That rang a bell for me. My first Algebra teacher was so damn awful that I managed to go form middling to stupid in a few weeks. She was boring, she was mailing it in.

      In a really weird and lucky happenstance, my best math teacher was my Electronics instructor. I was in the last class that learned how to use a slide rule. As soon as I started with that, things clicked, and they clicked hard.. It was difficult to explain, so I invented a word for it. "Mathemechanical". It stuck even if not using a slide r

  • Just give everyone a Doctorate degree and a participation trophy. They'll all be living their best life then. No Homework, no tests just givem 'em an award, and that way every child will be a genius.

  • Yeah my younger self wouldn't imagine me saying it .. but maybe we should increase the number of school hours and include study/practice/homework time within that. There should be more practice and interactivity during the class. With computers that becomes more feasible. Instead of watching a teacher explain stuff on the board .. students should be able to play and practice with interactive models on their computer after the teacher explains something.

    For example, if the teacher explains that Washington cr

  • You can't eradicate homework (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Voice of satan ( 1553177 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @04:01PM (#60751588)

    I refuse to give a click to TFA, VICE is not worth more than the New York Post.

    Of course anything that trains students will exacerbate differences between them, you don't need a dumbass "educator" to tell you that. Grading will do that too. The ones doing more effort are graded better. Shocker. Homework is what was used as reinforcement and a way to train myself at my pace, pace that was slowly accelerating to prepare us for university and the entrance exams. I am also thankful for my parent who pushed me to study.

    I am also thankful for their wariness in face of modern "egalitarian" schools with low standards. They put me on an "old school" school. Thankfully at my young time, that kind of choices were not reserved to the rich.

    If you outlaw (or gut to the point they make very little sense) homework you will see the rise of a "classical" private education that will simply ignore your reform and whose students will perform better, go to more meaningful pathways and a second tier "play by the rules" public ones where the students will add up a lower social and economic background and a watered down education. Their graduates will end up in participation degrees to do hamburgerjobs later.

    If we still need people for hamburgerjobs at this time, that is.

    Besides, education ALWAYS needs the engagement of your parents. If your parents can't educate you by themselves you are already screwed. That is a normal thing. Unless you consider immoral to make children and make choices for them. School is not a substitutes for family education. Teachers won't tell you how to pee straight.

    We already have bad standards of education in the U.S.A. The more you lower the standards the more education will come from the background of your parents and not from school. And engineers and physicians will be mostly the children of engineers and physicians.

  • This will only worsen inequality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Saturday November 21, 2020 @04:01PM (#60751590)

    Calarco and her co-authors found multiple instances of students’ socioeconomic statuses impacting their ability to complete homework: one wealthier parent said she hired a tutor to help her fourth-grader with the homework, while another parent from a lower socioeconomic background explained that she barely passed math while attending community college and felt “stupid” that she wasn’t able to help her fifth-grader.

    Citing this as a problem is idiotic. There is nothing, literally nothing you can do to defeat the near tautology that students who have more resources... benefit from having more resources.

    But you also can't turn a child of mediocre intellect into a genius by overtraining them. Standardized testing, challenging coursework, independent study, gifted programs - all evaluated on merit - have been ways for apt students of poor backgrounds to far outpace those better situated. In fact it's the easier courses (e.g., grade inflated, softer subjects at Harvard) which have been used to rubber stamp educational attainment for the wealthy and powerful, who can then shift to using their other advantages.

    In the one-dimensional thinking of the authors, we need to handicap learning until the point where no student has the sort of proficient mastery of the subject which they believe could only come from having had an unfair advantage. In reality, the wealthy will pull their children out of the school system altogether, correctly identifying it as a sinking ship which they don't want their own children's future to be fastened to. Meanwhile the prodigies from less-advantaged backgrounds will be stuck in a system that won't let them reach the heights of their abilities.

  • Math _is_ a divider (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday November 22, 2020 @02:06AM (#60753010)

    At least if taught right. Aptitude for mathematics varies widely. Trying to get everybody in the same level would necessarily include demotivating and hampering those with a higher aptitude. That would be about the most stupid thing one could do.

  • Assumes a false base state (Score:3)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday November 22, 2020 @05:49AM (#60753380)
    They're assuming that "advantaged" and "disadvantaged" students will perform the same in the absence of any difference in treatment. I think you'll find that if you did absolutely nothing, "advantaged" kids would perform better simply because their parents push them harder to learn (and have the resources to do things like hire tutors). That's the correct base state you need to compare against. Does homework exacerbate this difference? Does it reduce it? Or does it have no effect on it (i.e. you get the same difference between advantaged and disadvantaged kids as when there is no homework)?

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