Weighing in on Homework: Is the Load Too Heavy?
Homework
Norwalk Hour
Jamie Hammon
Boston University Washington News Service
11-7-06
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7–Fifteen questions for Algebra. Three chapters for English. A worksheet for French. Oh yeah, and a History test.
That list reads like a nightly homework load for a typical high school student. But is it too much?
That is the question that has recently been on the minds of researchers, authors, the media – and the Norwalk school district, which is evaluating its homework policy. In light of recent research that has shown much of homework to be ineffective in helping students learn, all are asking the same question: how should homework policies be changed?
Education experts like Ron Wolk, founding editor of “Education Week” and “Teacher Magazine,” and Jay Mathews, author and education reporter for The Washington Post, debated last week at The National Academies, a group of research and advisory organizations in Washington.
“Do I think homework is too onerous for most kids? For most kids, the answer is a very strong ‘yes,’” Wolk said. “If I were the Imperial Wizard, I’d be tempted to ban homework, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I might relent if I could be convinced the schools would be thoughtful about it.”
Dr. Salvatore Corda, superintendent of Norwalk public schools, said that the district is considering the issue and evaluating its current homework policy.
“We are looking into [questions like] what should homework look like? What should the length of homework be? What’s appropriate for elementary, middle, and high school children? If every high school teacher gives half an hour of homework, kids could have three hours of homework each night – is that reasonable?” Corda said.
Karen Lang, who is assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for the Norwalk schools, chairs a committee looking at the district’s homework policy. Lang said she met with a group of administrators over the summer and they looked at school systems throughout the state. The committee’s preliminary recommendations are now in the hands of principals, who will review them with their faculties, but Lang said the process is quite long and controversial.
“We believe there is a place for homework, but there are very strong differences of opinion about what that should look like,” Lang said.
Mathews said last week that the notion that students are getting buried by homework is largely based on myth. Though there are regions – particularly those with very good high schools – where some students do four and five hours of homework each night, he said those heavy loads are the result of demands students place on themselves.
“Why do they have stressful lives?” Mathews asked. “Because they think stressful lives are fun! Many of [those students] are looking at parents who have stressful lives – overscheduled, doing everything at once – and they want the same kinds of life, so they sign up for five AP classes.”
According to the latest survey by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the average 15- to 17-year-old spends about 50 minutes a day doing homework – not an oppressive amount of time when compared to the two and a half hours a day the group spent watching television and at the computer.
“There is always going to be a difference between the student who takes three or four honors classes and the one who isn’t taking a deeply enriched track,” said Lang. “That said, there should be some guidelines to how long each student should be spending.”
But Wolk said it is not the time spent doing homework that is the problem, but that the problem is the homework itself.
“What schools do in the six hours they have kids caged in classrooms, they don’t do very well for the majority of the kids,” said Wolk. “And it makes me wonder why we should be any more optimistic that what they do with the kids after school is going to make any more sense.”
Wolk said that kids get bored and frustrated with school because there is such a discrepancy between the school world and the real world, and all homework does is “extend the school world longer into the life of these kids when they really ought to be out in the real world.”
“I am of the opinion that homework needs to be a task that is given to students that challenges them more in terms of thinking about a problem and how one solves a problem, as opposed to, you know, go answer 15 questions as the end of the chapter,” Corda said.
He said that the Norwalk committee’s final policy recommendation will go to the school board and will guide the new way district schools assign homework.
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