When schoolers deliver up studies or statistics suggesting homework in any small or large amount is not helpful to children’s learning, my spidey senses tingle. The paranoid, suspicious side of me (yeah, I got one, perhaps) tends to think it is a way of appeasing that part of the parent population who feel their children don’t have enough time in their evenings for the rest of their life. And if not that, then a way of managing expectations (downward) for to better get through days and years in the world of government schooling.
But mostly my spidey senses tingle because very few things of any kind in government schooling are done or decided solely based on “what’s best for children’s learning”… last of all the amount of work that is done or gets done in the course of the very regimented, very much labour-negotiated school day. School hours are designed more to accommodate suburban commutes than “what’s best for kids” (which is why in our town schools on the edge of the city start their day at 8 a.m. while schools in the centre of the city start at 9 a.m…. has nothing to do with the kids, and everything to do with the adults). How long school lasts is more a function of labour negotiations than “what’s best for kids”, with hours of instruction negotiated down to the quarter-hour and school buzzers synchronized down to the minute. What gets included or not included in school curriculum and mandated programming has more to do with politics and preferences than “what’s best for kids”, as what is required, what is optional and what is available vary with administrators, budgets and societal fancies.
With all of that (and more) in play, homework is more a function of “what fits” than “what’s best”. And in a government schooling world whose bottom line of “timely completion” enjoys rates of 70% or less… any study that rationalizes doing LESS instruction or homework or practice… would seem to me to make little sense, is suspiciously convenient, and is immensely beside-the-point as far as how government school days are actually structured or how learning does or does not actually happen on any day given substitute teachers, children’s “unreadiness to learn”, multiple distractions in an increasingly distractable student population and a general disinterest on the part of the “public” as far as what public education is actually about.
Faced also with insights like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery (“Outliers”), studies revealing “time on task” is possibly the number one factor in children’s learning, and the success in the U.S. of programs like KIPP which features materially longer school days and schooling on every second Saturday… arguments against homework in some amount are unlikely to be based on “what’s best for kids’ learning” than what may be best for adults or families or other aspects of their lives. It is undeniably “nice” not to have homework assigned… but is it “best” for learning over a K-12 career? My spidey senses tingle at the notion. There are just too many moving parts, and too much swirling self-interest at play, for such a convenient “truth” as that.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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