In our current muddled and contentious state of play when it comes to education, it seems that anything can become a battleground for competing ideologies and strongly held opinions, whether or not those opinions can be backed up by solid evidence or data. So I have found it fascinating to follow recent controversies regarding homework—a seemingly benign topic that has lately given rise to passionate if not necessarily well-informed arguments.
A recent article in the New York Times opened with a bit of domestic drama:
After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?”
asked. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge.”
It so happened that Ms. Cushlanis was a secretary at the suburban school district of Galloway, New Jersey, and she spoke of her qualms about her second grader’s homework burden to the superintendent of schools. The superintendent assured her that the district was already in the midst ol reevaluating its homework policies, and was considering new guidelines limiting homework to ten minutes for each school grade; that is, ten minutes a night for first graders, twenty minutes for second graders, and so on. This approach, at the very least, seemed tidy and systematic… but what was it really based on? W hy should teachers and administrators feel confident that this was the right amount of homework?
What is the right amount of homework? This seems like a simple enough question. It isn’t. So let’s let it simmer awhile while we pursue our discussion.
The homework battle that was going on in Galloway, New Jersey, seemed to summarize a controversy that was brewing everywhere. For every parent like Ms. Cushlanis, who believed her child was being unduly and unhealthily stressed, there was an equally caring parent who felt that her child’s education was inadequate and lacking in rigor. “Most of our kids can’t spell without spell check or add unless it comes up on the computer,” said one such mom, quoted in the Times article. “If we coddle them when they’re younger, what happens when they get into the real world?”
Some Galloway parents claimed that excessive homework constituted a sort of “second shift” of school, an unreasonable preemption of time that should be used for playing, socializing, finding pollywogs. Against this viewpoint, one adult voiced the somewhat dated but nevertheless sincere conviction that “part of growing up is having a lot of homework every day. You’re supposed to say, ‘I can’t come out and play because I have to stay in and do homework.’ ”
As it was in suburban New Jersey, so it was in school districts around the country and the world. Some people argued for more homework, some for less. Various experimental programs were put in place. Some schools made homework “optional.” Some schools put aggregate limits on homework, which created a nightmarish chore for teachers who had to coordinate how much they assigned. Some school districts essentially played semantic games, now calling after-school assignments “goal work” rather than homework. Other schools banned homework on weekends or before vacation breaks; some took the interesting step of forbidding homework on the evening before major standardized exams, perhaps sending the message that it was okay for kids to be stressed and exhausted except when taking tests that might reflect on the performance of the school itself.
Nor was all this angst and uncertainty about homework restricted to U.S. schools. At a time when test results are compared globally, and cross-border college and even prep school applications are at an all-time high, the anxiety and contention were contagious. In Toronto, an edict banned homework for kindergartners and for older kids on school holidays. The controversy reached as far as the Philippines, where the education department opposed weekend assignments so kids could enjoy their childhoods.
Nor was all this angst and uncertainty about homework restricted to U.S. schools. At a time when test results are compared globally, and cross-border college and even prep school applications are at an all-time high, the anxiety and contention were contagious. In Toronto, an edict banned homework for kindergartners and for older kids on school holidays. The controversy reached as far as the Philippines, where the education department opposed weekend assignments so kids could enjoy their childhoods.
Interestingly, students themselves seemed to disagree as virulently as their parents and teachers about the proper amounts and uses of homework. The New York Times education blog, “The Learning Network,” invited middle-schoolers and teens to weigh in on the subject. The preponderance of the posts, not surprisingly, were complaints about having too much still to do when the school day was over. Yet even allowing for some adolescent overstatement and melodrama, a few of the comments were disturbing if not heartbreaking. One ninth-grade girl wrote that “I came home at 4 pm and finished homework by 2 am. We couldn’t go to dinner because I had too much homework. I couldn’t talk to my Mom, Dad, or sister— So yes. I think I have too much homework. And no. It doesn’t really help…I just copied everything I saw without any of the actual information being absorbed just to be done with the work. Homework ruined my life.”
Distressingly, a recurring motif in the student comments was the subject of sleep deprivation. One seventh grader reported that she was routinely doing homework “until at least midnight. It’s just too much!.. .It’s just not healthy to get 6-7 hours of sleep each night.” (Children up to age twelve, according to the National Sleep Foundation, should have ten to eleven hours of sleep per night. Teenagers require around nine and a quarter.) Another middle-schooler complained that “the whole year, our LA [language arts] teacher has taught us how to get by on 6 hours of sleep [and to] drain our brains dry of creative [thinking] .” It’s a little difficult to imagine what pedagogical purpose is served by having a generation of kids sleepwalk through their preteen and early teenage years.
Not all the student respondents were clamoring for less homework. Some were asking for better homework—challenging, meaningful assignments rather than the “busywork” that was often handed out. If the initiative shown by these students was heartening, it also pointed out a little-discussed deficiency in our traditional way of training teachers. According to a journal article called “Teacher Assessment of Homework,” by a researcher named Stephen Aloia, the rather surprising fact was that “most teachers do not take courses specifically on homework during teacher training.”8 Lesson plans, yes; techniques for guiding classroom activities, yes; homework, no. It’s as if homework is an afterthought, some strange gray area that is still the responsibility of students but not so much for teachers. According to Harris Cooper, author of The Battle over Homework, when it comes to crafting homework assignments, “most teachers are winging it.” No wonder homework is sometimes seen by students—and parents— as a tedious waste of time.
On the other hand, when homework is demanding and meaningful, some students, at least, appreciate the difference. One high school junior commented in the Times blog that “at my old school, I got a lot more homework. At my new prep school I get less. The difference: I spend much more time on my homework at my current school because it is harder. I feel as if I actually accomplish something with the harder homework.”
This sentiment was echoed by the same seventh grader who complained about being up until midnight every night. “We should be getting harder work, not more work! ”