CABE Misrepresents Homework Research

In the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE) Policy Highlights email to Connecticut Board members, CABE distorts the results of two research initiatives in the news about the value of homework.

CABE's Policy Highlight cites a 2007 survey on homework by Harris Interactive (for the MetLife Insurance Company) that was released in February. The survey is wholly anecdotal depending upon the opinions of teachers, students, and parent respondents. CABE's framing of the results as supportive of homework practice is pure disinformation, inaccurate, and deceiving to CT Board members.

Here's what CABE says:

75 percent of students said they do at least 30 minutes of homework each weekday.
45 percent of students said they do an hour or more.

Here's what the study actually said:

-- Most students (77%) regardless of grade level, spend at least 30
minutes doing homework on a typical school day, while 45% reported spending
at least an hour.

Here's what CABE says:

90 percent of students said getting homework done caused them anxiety; despite the fact that most students said they had enough time.

Here's what the study actually said:

-- Students who get C's or below are more likely than others to feel
frequently stressed about homework (38% vs. 28% of "A" students).

Here's what CABE says:

25 percent of secondary-school students said their homework assignments were mostly busywork (this was down from 75 percent in a 2002 survey). By contrast, only 16 percent of teachers rated homework quality as poor.

Here's what the study found:

-- Although six in ten parents believe that their child's teachers assign the right amount of homework, fully one-third of parents rate the quality of homework assignments as fair or poor, and four in ten believe that a great deal or some of the homework is busywork and not related to what students are learning in school. Fewer teachers (16%) give such low marks to the quality of homework assigned.

CABE:

Students who had the lowest opinion of homework and spent the least time on it were generally those who earned Cs and below, didn't have college plans, and rated their schools as fair or poor.

Similarly, parents who were the most critical of homework tended to be those who were the most alienated from their children's schools, the most critical of how frequently teachers were in touch with them, and the amount of guidance their children received on homework.

The study:

5. Those who view homework as unimportant or lack time for homework are associated with lower student achievement and other risk factors.

-- Students who do not believe that homework is important are more likely than other students to: get C's or below (40% vs. 27%); not plan to go to college after high school (26% vs. 15%); rate the quality of education that they receive as only fair or poor (29% vs. 13%).

-- Students who get C's or below are more likely than others to feel
frequently stressed about homework (38% vs. 28% of "A" students).

-- Similarly, parents who report that homework is not important feel
more alienated from their child's school, are less likely to have rules
about homework, and are more likely to say that homework is burdensome.

What CABE leaves out:

6. Most students are not getting enough sleep, which has an impact on their ability to get to school and pay attention in class.

-- Nearly half of students (46%) think they do not get enough sleep.
While this experience is more common among secondary school students (57%), 29% of elementary school students also report they do not get enough sleep.

-- Nearly half of elementary school students (48%) get less than nine hours of sleep on a school night, and 60% of secondary school students say they get less than eight hours of sleep.

-- Four in ten students (37%) very often or often have trouble waking up in the morning.

-- One-third (34%) frequently feel tired during class, three in ten (29%) daydream in class, and seven percent frequently fall asleep during class.

-- Teachers seem to underestimate the extent and impact of lack of sleep. On average, teachers report that only 28% of their students do not get enough sleep.


7. Doing homework is a solitary task...but with distractions.

-- Nine in ten elementary school students (89%) and eight in ten secondary school students (81%) usually do their homework at home.

-- While three in ten elementary school students (31%) report that they do nothing else while working on their homework, only one in nine secondary school students (11%) have this habit. In fact, nine in ten (89%) secondary students are doing other activities, or "multi-tasking," while doing homework, including 70% who listen to music and 51% who watch TV.

-- Two in ten students report that they are usually talking on the phone (20%), instant messaging or emailing (20%) or text messaging (17%) while they do their homework.

It gets worse. CABE goes on to cite a second study from the Center for public education.

CABE:

Older students benefit from more homework than younger students. Researchers at Duke University indicated a stronger positive relationship between student achievement and homework for students in grades seven through twelve.

CPE:

Older students benefit more from homework than younger students. Some studies have shown that older students gain more academic benefits from homework than do younger students, perhaps because younger students have less-effective study habits and are more easily distracted (Cooper 1989; Hoover-Dempsey et al. 2001; Leone and Richards 1989; Muhlenbruck et al. 2000).

CABE:

Too much homework may diminish its effectiveness, however research on the amount of time students should spend on homework is limited.

CPE:

Too much homework may diminish its effectiveness. While research on the optimum amount of time students should spend on homework is limited, there are indications that for high school students, 1½ to 2½ hours per night is optimum. Middle school students appear to benefit from smaller amounts (less than 1 hour per night). When students spend more time than this on homework, the positive relationship with student achievement diminishes (Cooper, Robinson, and Patall 2006).

Some of what CABE leaves out from CPE:

The link between homework and student achievement is far from clear. There is no conclusive evidence that homework increases student achievement across the board. Some studies show positive effects of homework under certain conditions and for certain students, some show no effects, and some suggest negative effects (Kohn 2006; Trautwein and Koller 2003).

Most disturbing about CABE's and many other spin doctors is the racial overtones assigned anecdotal studies.

CABE:

A 2007 survey on homework by Harris Interactive (for the MetLife Insurance Company) was released in February and shed some light on the status of this much-debated practice: 80 percent of teachers and parents and 70 percent of students said that homework is important or very important - and support was even stronger among African-American and Hispanic parents, who overwhelmingly believe that homework helps children learn more and reach their goals after high school.

What the study actually says is:

The majority of teachers, parents, and students believe in the value of homework, with 83% of teachers, 81% of parents, and 77% of students indicating that doing homework is important or very important.

I cannot find any racial breakout of the findings. [Update: see comment] However, what CABE implies as does the CT State Board of Education is that homework is a silver bullet to success in school, that it is not the discrepancies in income and the quality of education in ghetto schools that is the problem but the laziness of students and a largely poor and uneducated minority population whose belief (largely the result of state sponsored brain-washing) are far more important than the scientific research.

This myth is sold so successfully that most Americans believe that lazy parents and students are the cause of all educational ills and that it is the lack of homework and not quality that ails public education.

This panders to racism at its most vulgar and social belligerence akin to state control of education as practiced in Nazi Germany, communist Russia, and the dwarf-Hitler nations of history.

No Homework Over the Holidays!

I just sent a request to our Board and to the other region Boards to consider the following:

Friends,

Can we add the No Homework over major Holidays policy recommendation on our agendas?

This obviously needs committee and Board airing but I'm wondering if we can take a straw vote before Thanksgiving so that the staff can rearrange assignment schedules. Secondly, I'd like to see this passed to the Primary school BOEs as well.

It would be a giant relief to dozens of families if holidays could be honored as holidays - time OFF! Period. This is really long overdue - it reduces stress, let's everyone chill out, eliminates last minute headaches and so on. It's the right thing to do.

Now, we might suggest that instead of homework, everyone read something interesting or watch an educational program but nothing official. And because we can't vote on it soon enough can we get the superintendents to "recommend" the practice until we can formalize something?

- Frank Krasicki

What's in a Backpack?

This autumn numerous stories have been dedicated to the contents of backpacks and their surprising uses.

First we'll dispense with the security angles. The security conscious, are advocating transparent material for backpacks so that nothing nefarious can be carried around. Of course, privacy disappears as well.

Of course there's always someone trumping the last guy, so a Massachusetts company is selling bulletproof backpacks. Yeah, no utility belt yet but you never know.

It started with the Columbine shooting in 1999. Curran and Mike Pelonzi said that they watched and worried for their own children. They had the idea to hide bulletproof material inside a backpack. They call it defensive action.

"If the kid has a backpack next to them, or under the desk, they can pick it up, the straps act as a handle and it becomes a shield," Curran said.

It's much lighter than a 15-pound police vest. After three years of experimenting, the backpacks that were tested by an outside lab ranked threat level two. It stops an assortment of bullets, including 9-millimeter hollow point bullets.

Cool, huh.

But the best ideas come from those who actually care about kids (and Washington will do their best to stomp them out). Instead of filling backpacks with senseless homework, some schools send food home with kids! And you know what, the kids test scores go up like crazy!

I know, I know - it must be a scam. No federal program relentlessly and mercilessly punishing schools? How could -gulp- "feeding kids" be anything but a left-wing fraud?

Read the article and see if you can figure out the mystery.

Food For Kids seeks to provide nutritional support for children without turning them into "breadwinners." It is designed for children whose parents won't or can't access traditional food relief programs. In many cases, schools let parents know that food is being sent home so that children can concentrate better on homework and school work, but in others, the parents are not notified. Sadly, some parents will withhold food as a form of punishment or eat the food so children still go hungry, and some will even sell the food for drink or drugs. In the worst cases, students are fed at school at the end of the day because it isn't safe to send food home with them.

"We do not recommend sending notices home to all parents regarding the availability of the Food For Kids program because too many parents will sign up for any free program," reported Rhea. "We prefer that all teachers, counselors, school nurses, and office personnel be informed about the program and asked to refer students to the school coordinator if they suspect there is a lack of food at home. The coordinator will then talk to the student and determine if there is a need."

To meet the criteria for this backpack program, a student must have physical, educational, or emotional problems in school due to hunger at home. The physical signs students often exhibit are headaches, dizziness, stomach aches, weight loss, or low weight. Educational problems may include poor grades or falling grades, lack of concentration in class, and falling asleep in class. Typical emotional problems include being disruptive in class, low self-esteem, fighting, and stealing food.
THE YOUNG FACE OF HUNGER

Principal Bess Scott has seen the effect of hunger firsthand in the countenance of a beautiful, vibrant kindergartner who became quiet and sullen, and sometimes withdrawn, in the afternoon. "Even her face looked different," Scott observed. "Her teacher finally diagnosed the problem. She was storing chewed food in her cheeks to take home at night."

As her teacher developed a relationship with the child and her family, she learned that until the age of five the child had been homeless and had at times lived in a car. This child truly feared that there might not be food at home. Scott and her staff at McPhee Elementary often found food in the girl's locker that had been partially eaten or salvaged from another student or the trash. While they finally convinced her that food would be available to her at home, she reverted to that behavior when she was under stress.

Issues related to hunger are not unique at Scott's school. Because 85 percent of its students receive free and reduced lunches, it was invited to join in a backpack program sponsored by the Food Bank of Lincoln (Nebraska). McPhee is a Community Learning Center school with a very strong partnership with First Presbyterian Church, which supports the program with both labor and money. The food bank, the Lincoln Public Schools, and many partners supply the food. In the last school year, the food bank's backpack program came to the aid of more than 500 students in various local schools.

"Hunger is a significant issue in our relatively affluent community," explains Scott Young of the Food Bank of Lincoln. "During the 2006-2007 school year, 4,551 children, or 30.7 percent of our community's elementary-age children, participated in the free lunch program. Many of those children and their families are in need of food support."

OMG! IT'S NOT A SCAM!But is is a threat to dumb-ass federal mandates like NCLB. And the threat is growing...

The Arkansas Rice Depot and its president Laura Rhea realize that a family that can't afford food probably also can't afford personal grooming items. So, in addition to backpacks full of food, the organization provides "health kits" which include toothpaste, a toothbrush, soap, a comb, and often deodorant, shampoo and conditioner, fingernail clippers, and band-aids. The kits sometimes also contain a washcloth and towel or hand towel. These items are sealed in plastic bags and can easily be added to backpacks as needed.

"We have a children's disaster kit that includes a small stuffed animal, a coloring book and crayons or colored pencils, and a toy police car, ambulance, or fire truck all in a zip-lock bag," says Rhea. "These kits are given to children when a parent goes to jail, their house burns, or a parent goes to the hospital, or if a child and parent have to leave home quickly due to abuse."

There are kits with basic school supplies, and the organization gives out new blankets in the winter. Coordinators get to know students and usually discover when the gas is turned off and there is no heat or when a family is temporarily living in a tent, a car, or has only a space heater at home. Rhea remarks that students who can't sleep due to cold are as ill-prepared to reach their full potential in class as those who are hungry.

"When we discovered that more than 500 students in our Food For Kids schools were either pregnant or teen moms, we decided they needed special attention too," Rhea added. "We heard of students not eating properly during pregnancy and students dropping out of school because they couldn't handle school, a job, and a baby."

This country needs an expose about this stuff before it's too late.

An Indictment of Homework

I just came across a great essay on homework that I've recommended to all the Boards of Education as well as teaching staffs. This isn't a new topic here but its an important one.

The essay expresses many of my own observations and certainly observations from local parents as well. I'm going to extensively quote a few parts that would lose their context otherwise. This is a great read so use the link.

What Are the Costs of Homework?

Homework wrecks families. That's not a joke, that's just a fact. For an alarming number of kids of all ages, their entire relationship with their parents has been turned into a war over homework.

An Endless Cycle. The first thing the parents say to their kids after school is, "Do you have any homework?" That's not a parent-child relationship, that's a foreman-millworker relationship. What's your task? Let's stay on task!

So the kids aren't actually coming home, are they? School isn't over. It's just going to go on and on, in their own homes. They can never, never, never get away. Not on weekends. Not on holidays. Not over Christmas. Not over summer vacation. There's always some assignment from school.

What do you think that does to kids? To have not even a day when they can say, Whew, I'm done with that, I can have a break!

Would you put up with a job that was like that? Sure, some people with Type A personalities do live like that -- but most of us don't even consider that a life. We want to have days we can count on not belonging to our bosses. Shouldn't kids have that too?

Childhood Obesity. In all the concern about the hours our children spend playing videogames and watching television, has anybody noticed that time spent doing homework is also not physically active? Maybe if our children didn't have to spend even ten minutes a day, let alone hours a day, on homework, they might get enough exercise to shed a few pounds.

Parents As Drill Sergeants. Parents are told to make sure kids have a regular, well-lighted, quiet place to do homework. The funny thing is that there is no study indicating that this actually helps homework get done.

What parents really do is set up rewards and punishments. Do your homework first, and then you can play. No television till homework is done. Get it out of the way first!

This is such a horrible mistake. No wonder so many kids end up in tears over homework. Why can't they have a couple of hours, right after school, to be themselves?

Think about it. They've spent all day at school where people tell them when to stand, when to sit, when to talk. Hold still. No, you can't go to the toilet. No, you're wrong. Pay attention! You can't eat that in here. Don't cross that line. Stay where I told you! Hurry up! Stop that!

And their parents don't let them have those precious late afternoon hours to run around and be free. Why? So they can get into a better college? What good will it do them to get into a better college if they hated their entire childhood?

So they go to UNC-G instead of Duke because of that four percent difference -- but they have a childhood. An adolescence. What do you think will make more of a difference in their lives? What will make them happier human beings? That's the goal, isn't it? Not the job that makes the most money, but the life that has the most happiness -- right?

Of course, a lot of parents don't make their kids do homework during that late afternoon period, because both parents are working and don't even get home till after five o'clock.

You know what that means. When young kids have rational bedtimes -- eight o'clock, for instance, which gives them the minimal 10 to 11 hours of sleep that children need -- the parents have only three hours between getting off work and the kids going to bed. Somewhere in there will be dinner, bathing, whatever chores the kids might be expected to do (you know, the part of child-rearing that parents do) -- and ... homework?

When did we parents decide to give the schools the power to take even a moment of those precious hours away from us and force us to be proctors supervising our children in their schoolwork?

The high school kids go to bed later -- but they also want a social life. They have friends. They want to talk on the phone, go hang out together. And what about the things they actually love to do -- the plays? The sports? The dance lessons, the music lessons?

Is there any time left for parents to be anything but chauffeurs and homework sergeants?

Homework Kills Students. I knew a girl who, when she was a rising junior in high school, was assigned to keep a "reading log" over the summer. This was a girl who had always been a voracious reader, consuming books well above grade level since she was five. But the moment the teacher intruded in her reading, requiring that she answer questions, make comments, and analyze, every time she set the book down, she stopped reading entirely.

Because her joy of reading had been stolen from her. It had been turned into an assignment. It was now work, forced on her by someone else. That summer she read exactly one book -- a girl who ordinarily would have read at least twenty. And from that moment on, she was hostile to the entire enterprise of school. She hated it all. That summer assignment had turned her into an enemy of the educational system -- she who had been the favorite student of many an English teacher.

<-snip->

There are plenty of teachers who hate homework, too.

Why Teachers Hate Homework

When a teacher assigns each of five classes of 25 students to do 50 math problems overnight, then the teacher has to look at 6,250 math problems. That's in addition to the time the teacher spends grading their in-class work -- like quizzes.

And you know the teacher regards those homework results as nearly worthless, because the teacher doesn't know who really did the work. Was it the student, or the parents? No way to be sure. Maybe the student with a dozen mistakes is actually doing better than the student with perfect homework because the student with mistakes is actually doing the work himself.

So the teacher only takes seriously the work the students do in class. So any time spent grading homework is actually wasted time. Mostly teachers look at it just to make sure it was done, not to take it seriously as an evaluation tool.

Remarkably, there are even teachers who actually demand that parents proofread their children's homework. If the student turns in homework with spelling and punctuation errors, the parents actually get a snippy little note telling them that they're supposed to proofread their child's work! (Though I'm sure that never happens in Guilford County.)

Here's another reason some teachers hate homework -- and stop assigning it: Their own kids reach school age and start having to spend hours a night doing meaningless assignments. Both books record this phenomenon. Teachers who are also parents become quite skeptical of the value of homework when they see how it steals time from and ruins their relationships with their children.

Bad Homework

Even admitting that there is some conceivable value to homework in the upper grades, let's keep in mind that not all homework is equal. Some kinds of homework are utterly worthless even for seniors in high school.

Art Projects for Academic Classes. I remember when my oldest son entered chemistry class at Page High School. During the open house, the teacher proudly told us that the highlight of the year was her requirement that the kids all create a three-dimensional model of the periodic table of elements. It could be a poster or a t-shirt or a sculpture or ... oh, whatever their creativity suggested.

I raised my hand and pointedly asked how much of the grade would be for art and how much for science? She didn't understand my objection. It was so fun

for the kids.

Nonsense. It was time-consuming and expensive and a complete waste of time. Were they going to treasure these models for their whole lives? No. Did it help them actually know more about the periodic table? Not a chance.

This is one of the few cases where rote memorization would have been more worthwhile. They might actually have remembered some of the more common elements' names, abbreviations, atomic numbers, or weights. They might have memorized all the gases, especially the inert ones; all the elements that combine easily; all the radioactive elements; all the elements that only occur in the laboratory.

Instead, they made t-shirts.

Or rather, their parents scrambled to figure out how to do it.

There's an astonishing number of absolutely useless "projects" that are assigned which are really done by the parents anyway, and even if the kids do them, teach them absolutely nothing about the subject matter.

Exactly what does a child learn about astronomy or physics or aerodynamics by building a scale model of the space shuttle?

Once upon a time, science fairs consisted of displays of voluntary projects done by kids who were really gung-ho about science. The kids who couldn't care less didn't have to bother. But somebody thought that science fairs were so wonderful that all children should be required to do them.

Did this make the kids who never cared about science suddenly become more interested? No. It was just one more tedious assignment that they postponed until Mom and Dad finally helped them put some stupid thing together at the last minute.

Every now and then, one of our kids actually had a project they cared about and learned something from. Oddly enough, they were precisely the kind of thing they probably would have done on their own, without anybody requiring them to do it at all -- provided, of course, that they had had any free time.

In other words, the real projects, the ones that kids love, are replaced by the fake ones assigned as homework.

Meaningless Repetition. Some claim that kids need to do repetitive homework to "nail down" the things they learned in class. But how many repetitions are needed to "nail it down"?

If a child has mastered the process, then surely five examples, done in class, will demonstrate the child's proficiency. And if the child has not got it right, then what really happens at home when twenty or fifty problems are assigned? Either the student does them all wrong, thus "nailing down" the wrong process, or the parent has to try to teach the child what the teacher failed to teach in class. Is that how homework is supposed to function? In that case, it's really just home schooling -- with less time to do it in and only exhausted children to work with.

Fun and Games. Here's a good idea. Let's take from the internet a word-search puzzle with terms from the constitution hidden in a 39x39-letter grid, and make our seventh-grade students play the "game" of finding the important words.

Never mind that a 39x39 word-search grid is monstrously large, that you can get a headache from searching it. Never mind that the puzzle isn't even clever -- no two terms from the list actually intersect. None of them shares a letter. So the puzzlemaker didn't bother to take the time to make a tight, interlocking puzzle.

Nor are the terms themselves useful. Some are, but some of them are simply not used by grownups in discussions of anything.

And when you've finally gotten your headache by finding every one of these 29 terms in a huge grid, how much more do you know about the Constitution than you knew before you started?

Maybe, just maybe, those terms will be marginally more familiar to you. If you had been assigned to memorize them as spelling words, you could have done it in less time.

When did we actually have any fun? And when was any of this actually educational?