To what extent am I contributing to the achievement gap by assigning homework?

What I knew before I started searching

• November 12 - We had our annual poetry reading and more kids than usual did not want to participate.  There’s always some nervousness and hesitation, but there was more this year. It was making me uneasy.  We had a rehearsal the day before, but I must not have been really listening to what my kids were saying because when I heard the poems read the next day, I was shocked. So many were about disliking school and being sad and depressed. One girl’s poem was so dark that some of the parents that were in the audience later contacted me  and the counselor out of concern for the student.
• The next day at Writing Project, I reflected on my student’s emotions: How can I stop rushing? I rushed through their rehearsal so fast, I didn’t hear how sad some of them were. How can I take something off my students’ plates? They seem so busy with homework and extracurricular activities. Why can’t I stop controlling them? Why do I feel the need to control them all the time? When I assign them homework, that’s a form of control. I’m saying that I control their time even when they’re not in my classroom. Maybe if I could ease up, they wouldn’t dislike me and school so much.
• Could I stop giving homework? How will I stop? What will I say to parents who complain when I don’t give any? After 14 years of teaching, I’ve learned that some parents want and expect homework for their children while others are bothered by it because it interferes with family time and extra-curricular activities.  I know I can’t please everyone, but still I try. Why?
• I dislike grading homework: if I grade it for real, it’s time-consuming. And I don’t know who completed it: student or parent. If I don’t grade it, kids see it as valueless and meaningless.
• Around this same time I received yet another email requesting work for a student who would be traveling out of the country for a significant amount of time. My first thought was, how long is it going to take me to compile all the work? Did I even have this work available to prepare? The absence was still several weeks away. I wondered why this parent was requesting work. If I was going on vacation - the last thing I want to do is school work: I want to be fully immersed in my experience. I thought to myself, what do I want to do when I’m on vacation? I want to read and write about my experience. So instead of working hard to compile the work the student would miss, I sent back this response:
• Read a book that relates to the place you are visiting.
• Keep a journal each day.
• Then I started to think about the normal day-to-day homework I assign in my class. What if my homework was more like that? Reading and writing materials of choice? But if I assign it, would I be schoolifying it? And we all know the contamination a teacher can inflict on something that was once fun. “This is an example of turning something potentially positive into a traditional assignment and thereby reducing its value” (Kohn 176).
• My initial question: Why do I (personally) give homework?
• Parents expect it.
• I feel like there’s not enough time in a class day to complete everything we need to, so I send the rest home
• I feel like I should - that’s what teachers do, right?

The Process

• In January, my students wrote letters expressing their opinion on a topic that mattered to them. Many chose to write about aspects of school that they considered unfair. Here are two letters from students writing about homework. One student addressed their letter to me; the other student wrote to his father. Both students are high-achieving “A” students.

January 13, 2015

Dear Mrs. Tidwell,

Some people think giving out homework is supposed to help children understand the concepts we are learning in school better. This seems to happen because teachers and parents think you learn more when you do homework.However, I believe that homework does not help students.

Teachers and parents think that doing homework helps the child learn more as a student. But, teachers and parents can be wrong sometimes. While doing homework, kids usually run into questions that they can’t answer. When kids run into questions that stump them, they will be forced to guess the answer. Therefore, the students will probably get the answer wrong. By not getting the help they need from their teachers, they will get a bad grade. So the homework that the teacher assigned didn’t help the student.

But I know parents and teachers feel strongly about homework because they think homework makes us grow more as a student. Parents believe the more we study the better we will do. Even so, I will always think that giving out homework does not help students.

Sincerely,

Student 1

January 12, 2016

Dear Dad,

I think you should understand that students get stressed when teachers give us work to do. Yes, students DO get stressed doing work! Surprise! Because I come from a family where the pressure is unreal to do well in school, I think you and my teachers need to lay off the amount of homework given to me.

You don’t know how much work I get from you, too. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Although it’s not even that much, it is very, very hard. I can’t take it. Let me do my work from school. I don’t need any additional work from you.

I know I need to do well in school. And believe me, I try. But I don’t need to do, like, high school level math NOW. Since I, along with so many other students in America, hate homework, we feel like we need less. If you wonder why I’m so stressed out, this is why.

Sincerely,

Student 2

• The primary  homework I gave this school year was Knowsys-related (vocabulary). It consisted of short answer responses or STARR-esque essays (expository and personal narrative) that asked students to incorporate Knowsys words. I chose these assignment formats over multiple choice and matching-style assignments because I believed there would be less academic dishonesty. I told myself that the purpose of the homework was to prepare my students for the bi-weekly quizzes they took in my class. Here’s what I noticed: a third of the kids who completed the homework did so perfectly and then scored well on the quiz. A third of the students completed it but did poorly giving them a low grade in the grade book. Some of these students did poorly on the quiz, but some managed to do okay. There was never a consistent pattern. And the final third just didn’t complete the homework at all. They almost always scored poorly on the quiz giving them two low grades in the gradebook.
• The students who consistently completed their homework were for the most part children of families of higher socioeconomic status, (maybe parents are home when they get home from school, parents may have expectations for completing HW, parents may check HW, parents complete the HW themselves, parents may ask about HW), while the non-completers mostly came from homes of lower higher socioeconomic status: single parent families, parents who worked long hours and expected my students  to watch siblings after school, or parents who had no expectations for their students to complete work outside of school. These kids then score a low grade on the homework and on the subsequent assignment. Therefore, their grade in the class is lower and the kids that did their homework, their grades get better: the Matthew effect.
• So now my question was no longer, should I give homework or not? It had become:  To what extent am I contributing to the achievement gap by assigning homework?

What I found

• History of Homework
• The amount and presence of homework given to students have ebbed and flowed over the last two centuries.  Many scholars state that our most recent push for homework most likely stems from the publication of “A Nation at Risk”, an open letter to the American People, published in April 1983. However, this takeaway appears to be an interpretation of the time period.  After deep analysis, I could only find one mention of homework in the whole document. And that one mention was directed specifically to high school students, that they should have more than they currently did in 1983.
• Alfie Kohn: writer and speaker on human behavior, education, and parenting
• Kohn posits that by assigning homework, students are working a “Second Shift”: 
• Kohn’s The Homework Myth is my primary source of information.
• He outlines five themes that are central to the negative impact homework can have on students and families:
• A burden on parents
• Stress for children
• Family conflict
• Less time for other activities
• Less interest in learning
• Kohn also makes some suggestions for rethinking homework.
• Design what you assign
• One size doesn’t fit all
• Bring in the parents
• Stop grading
• Address inequities
• Harris Cooper: professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University
• Negative Effects
• Satiation
• Denial of access to leisure-time and community activities
• Parental Interference
• Cheating
• Increased differences between high and low achievers

• I found that there is not enough data to support that homework is meaningful enough for me to continue to assign it on a regular basis.

What I still want to know

• Is it fair to assign the same homework to everyone?
• Is it possible (and manageable) to assign personalized homework to each student? I think using a technological system would make this possible. Like if there was an online program (which I know they exist) that knew the abilities of each kid.
• Am I dampening personal drives to explore with my writing expectations? For example, I have a lot of personal projects I want to pursue, but I don’t have time to pursue them because I’m always working on school stuff, like grading.

Homework! Oh, Homework!

I hate you! You stink!

I wish I could wash you away in the sink,

if only a bomb

would explode you to bits.

Homework! Oh, homework!

You're giving me fits.

I'd rather take baths

with a man-eating shark,

or wrestle a lion

alone in the dark,

eat spinach and liver,

pet ten porcupines,

than tackle the homework,

my teacher assigns.

Homework! Oh, homework!

you're last on my list,

I simple can't see

why you even exist,

if you just disappeared

it would tickle me pink.

Homework! Oh, homework!

I hate you! You stink!

Jack Prelutsky

Works Cited

"A Nation At Risk:." Archived: Table of Contents. Web. 05 June 2016.

"Alfie Kohn: "Making Students Work a 'second Shift'" YouTube. YouTube, 27 Jan. 2009. Web. 05 June 2016.

Cooper, Harris. "Synthesis of Research Homework." Educational Leadership(1989): 85-91. Web.

DeNisco, Alison. "Homework or Not?" District Administration (2013): 29-33. Web. 5 June 2016.

"HISTORY OF HOMEWORK." SFGate. Web. 22 May 2016.

Kohn, Alfie. The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Life Long, 2006. Print.

"Regarding Homework…." In All Things. 07 Apr. 2015. Web. 05 June 2016.