Schools are ditching homework, deadlines in favor of ‘equitable grading’
wsj.com
wsj.com
In his words, it sounds all well and good that students have all the time they want to learn the materials. In practice though, you now have no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter. There's no way to actually catch them up, so the solution has been to drop testing standards as well.
Teachers themselves aren't complaining so much about it because it's a lot easier for them - less grading, less conflict with students, and they can stick to their planned curriculum without slowing down for students.
The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing - outside of some grading chicanery there is no reason to believe that it would do anything other than increase the disparity of outcomes between students later in life.
Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive.
Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better.
And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.
Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch.
For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.
If there was a uneven distribution it would pretty easily be explainable as an inverse relationship to social media and screen time.
I suspect we'd have better teachers if school systems didn't have constant teacher shortages. Being able to select teachers on merit would be an improvement over hiring anyone who can fog a mirror.
The whole system is fucked up, and while I might be one single individual who "pulled myself up by my bootstraps," there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young students just like me who either dropped out of highschool or barely finished and couldn't cut it at college and ended up doing unskilled labor. They suffer with no chance for a better life, no shot at a more comprehensive education, and no consciousness of their labor conditions such that they never even think about trying to fundamentally alter the system that has placed them in such an awful social position. I am not a success story, I am the exception that proves the rule.
Military schools. I’m not talking West Point, the other Academies, or VMI and the others. There are military boarding high schools where they do this.
[EDIT] That is, to keep teacher supply & quality roughly static, I'd have expected Baumol-like increases in the cost of teacher labor (because accessible alternative careers are paying a lot more than they used to) but instead wages have stayed fairly flat, or even slowly fallen in many places, once you take inflation into account.
If we want to have a consistent quality of education we either need to drastically increase the quality of teachers, or find a way to increase class size while keeping outcomes consistent.
The US pays their teachers better than almost every other country in the world [0]. So while teachers aren’t the highest paid profession, in the US they make more than other countries. And the US has worse outcomes than those other countries that pay worse.
That makes me think that teacher pay isn’t the problem. Or at least isn’t the biggest problem.
#7 on this list, https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
Have you ever seen Software Engineer salaries in the EU? Way less than America. Probably not much more than their teachers.
So if teaching is making the kinds of income that your top earners are, it becomes a lot more likely people will go into teaching than trying to go earn more elsewhere.
If I'm gonna schlep my ass to another country it had better be for a stark improvement in pay, bennies, and lifestyle -- not corralling brats so they can figure out what a Sin, Cos, and Tan means.
The goal isn’t to convince you, but to convince the many others who would make 2-4x from in their home country (see the chart I referenced).
And pay isn’t shit tier in the US even as it’s above the median salary. It’s not the highest paying, but it pays more than most jobs in the US.
The difference probably isn't as large as it seems, but there is a difference. There is a lot less proper socialization today than previously. My grandparents had to actually talk to people growing up. You had to figure out how to get along with others because there were relatively few options of who to play with. Eventually they phones and radios. Then my parents had TVs, but not a lot of content and not everyone had one. So you might invite neighbors over to watch the game etc. Now we have hundreds of channels, the internet in our pockets (which is not as personal as the phone was), etc. Not to mention the legal and societal barriers to socialization, especially at a young age (helicopter parents, legal liabilities reducing freedom/openness, costing money, etc). Even if you age adjust, the younger generations will still score lower in these skills because less time is being spent in those environments, generally.
Wonder if there are any studies on this besides anecdata
”By relying on text messaging primarily for their interaction, Generation Zers have missed out on learning some vital rules of conversation. This in- cludes how to listen, ask questions, interject in a way that is seen as respectful to others, build re- lationships, solve problems in real time, and resolve conflicts.”
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publicatio...
We would be remiss to ignore the very obvious factor that parents organize their children's social lives until they develop enough agency to do it for themselves. Of course, parenting patterns have a lot to do with the agency of their children to begin with. So how can anyone, with a straight face, assert that kids are somehow lacking when it's the parents that instill these skills and values into their kids?
You're going to have to do better than polemics.
You can look at the comment history for context. To simplify, it's the amount of in-person socialization.
"So how can anyone, with a straight face, assert that kids are somehow lacking when it's the parents that instill these skills and values into their kids?"
Polemic? Areyou talking about your own comment, as it makes no sense. There are obviously parents who are not promoting social skills, or where their kids are not living up to their expectations. It's not like they say "make it so" and the kids are all perfect. There are also practical limits to their control and influence due to other societal factors (media, school, peers, lack of time/attention due to various factors).
You're going to have to do a lot better than making a comment you thought was clever but had no logical base.
I'm not debating you, just pointing out how little is said in so many words.
It's a telling sign of the times that even on "rationalist" communities such as this one, such obvious nothing-burgers are considered legitimate talking points.
https://dictionary.apa.org/social-skills
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publicatio...
For instance, some people value "checking in" and "empathetic speech" as regular, proper features of conversation, while for some that can be grating and wholly improper. Some see no issue with talking down to service industry employees, while some consider that a grave sin.
That you've avoided answering what notion of "proper" you're interested in discussing this far into the comment thread is telling that you just want to assert your own viewpoint on this inherently subjective matter. It's intellectually dishonest which ultimately makes it irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Standards differ over time and between people.
You saying that good teachers with robust interpersonal skills are expensive and rare just shows that you haven't stepped into a school recently, or haven't conversed with a teacher for more than 20 seconds.
(We do however, have lots of studies that show grade inflation is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation)
> From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable.
I wouldn't argue that millenials are dumber or meaner (my generation, btw), but I think it would also be wrong to mistake our expressed sensitivity and aversion for conflict as actual interpersonal skill.
And if we are talking about needing to pay teachers more so that we can attract better skilled teachers, what other skill would we be talking about?
> We review these purported characteristics, as well as Millennials’ more positive qualities—they work well in teams, are motivated to have an impact on their organizations, favor open and frequent communication with their supervisors, and are at ease with communication technologies.
Comparing inter generational differences seems like a pointless circus. For as much flack as gen z and millennials get, we are still building rockets to Mars, creating diverse workplaces, advancing medicine, etc…the world is still going onwards!
The reality is that the kids doing the work are overtasked. Right now, Johnny 8th grader is playing school lacrosse, travel baseball or AAU basketball, etc. He gets home at 9pm. Torturing them with busywork doesn’t help anyone.
The kids who aren’t performing aren’t doing homework either.
If you’re 35-55 years old, you’re a child of the 80s and 90s. You’re the old people now, and our perspectives are as out of touch as our 1950s and 1960s parents were.
Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. It's interesting that there are people who worry about the quality of public education being under attack by Republicans, but embrace these non-evidence-based ideas for education reform that ultimately will only benefit the upper class.
The fact that they were really smart was just the table stakes.
Is it actually proven that homework helps with anything? For elementary school at least.
Reading perhaps. Math, when there's no parent at home capable of properly explaining it if the kid gets stuck, doesn't sound like a very productive use of time.
Are you aware of any skill where practice isn’t necessary?
There is research in this area [0] so feel free to check it out.
Of course practicing math helps. Parents help too, but working on problems at home to find areas that need help and then working with the teacher helps as well.
I don’t think you need hours and hours, but the goal of homework is to reinforce the lesson, practice, and show mastery of the material and areas to work on before the exam.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465430760010...
I was under the impression that, before a certain age it was basically a cargo-cult because the assigned work is generally repetitive, busywork or not graded at all.
I still learn a lot as an adult using this antiquated, antideluvian method.
It lets the teacher know how well students understand a concept so they can spend more time teaching it, or get a student extra help at school.
These are kids whose parents and community couldn't care less about education, and if they did, they couldn't learn anything because the classroom is filled with the chaos of those who don't.
Of course, race is nothing more than a proxy for poverty here- teachers in very poor rural areas will tell you much the same- but nobody really wants to hear that either.
I grew up in a relatively poor rural area, and you’re right, poverty and ignorance drives the same outcomes.
Either way, homework as I had it in the 80s was more about the parents commitment to their child’s discipline than the kids.
"no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter."
Yeah, if you don't know who is behind or on what area, then how could you possibly help them?
In the previous methods where kids actually got credit for doing the work every day, you would have some sense that students were learning order of operations before you moved onto linear equations. You can generally build off of the ideas.
Note that I do not know if said studies already exist. If they do, I'm curious to read them; but I'm not clear on how to find studies of note.
I'll also ack that the latest story on phonics that was going around last week has me in a fairly antagonistic view to things. And that is its own form of unhealthy right now. :(
If we actually care about going off of studies than we already know that the best models for education is Direct Instruction and charter schools. But unless a hurricane literally destroys your city and you have no other option (like it did New Orleans) there is almost no political willpower to actually do it.
This way the top of the class can still perform with liked skilled people and no one gets left behind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_th...
Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).
Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.
AKA one of the biggest adjustments I've had to overcome in working with teams.
The teachers I know who use this policy also have a sort of "bad faith" exception, where students who are clearly abusing the system and not trying are given an ultimatum. But others are allowed to keep trying.
I don't know if inserting teacher discretion is a "good idea" in cases where we're talking about "equity" - it could just as easily result in some students being graded worse/better with no respect to the work done.
No, actually.
> I don't know if inserting teacher discretion is a "good idea" in cases where we're talking about "equity" - it could just as easily result in some students being graded worse/better with no respect to the work done.
It's a fair criticism. But keep in mind that grading already involves a lot of teacher discretion, to the point where I'm not convinced that a significant amount is being added here.
Also, I'm not sure these teachers would necessarily say the policy is specifically intended to increase equity (as much as that is a priority in general). As one of my professors explained it (I'm a graduate student working towards a teaching degree, so my professors are also K-12 teachers), giving a child a bad grade means they did not master the learning objective. Allowing the child to retry the assignment at least provides an opportunity for them to go back and learn the material.
(For what it's worth, when I become a teacher I don't think I'm going to allow unlimited retries in my own classroom. I'm not sure though—I like some aspects of the idea.)
You will find mostly three types, with a percentage that change depending on the area: Those who want to get involve but do not know how, those who want to get involved but do not have time (single moms are a part of that, but poor working class nuclear family too), and those who don't care. Luckily the third type is not that common (but it exist).
On way of involving the parent is sending them a mail with what was aborded in class and the two-three main points their children should know about. Cc the child. One hidden benefit is that if you're a new teacher, you will have to do that anyway to understand the notions you're teaching better (at least that's waht my teacher friends do).
The children do not have to know those point perfectly, and it has to be clear for the parent. You don't want to be the cause of home dissension. a rough idea is enough, because the next ideas will refine the first one, that's how learning work.
Then improvise on that. I have a friend who started that this year, it's a method that was tried like 5 years ago and that's slowly gaining ground in my country. My friend added "Email hour" where he garranteed to be on his computer between 18 and 19 four days a week, and try to respond as much as he could. He also changed from putting both notions and explaination in the body to notions in the body and explanations in attachment. There is a lot of details to be ironed out, and he also do not want to take too much time from the parents. He likes his job better since he started doing that, and the parents are grateful.
But now my government want him to participate in clubs and other stuff to have his augmentation, so i guess that method might be in jeopardy.
A student in the US who is struggling usually comes from a home that does not give a crap about education in general. Involving the parents just results in them not caring, or blaming you as the teacher. Your admin will then side with the parent, because they also DGAF, superintendent is usually not a merit based position.
There is some cases where yes, the parents shouldn't have had kids, and disengage because they don't care. I do not believe this is the majority (my friend teach in middle school, but the technique cale from a high school teacher BTW).
I imagine there is less 1-on-1 feedback, but if the student had questions, I imagine most teachers would not mind assisting a student at that point.
My university used software like this over a decade ago. I honestly preferred it for some classes. For example, I had a Calculus II class where we could take every test three times. I would take each test once, see what I did wrong, ask the professor, take it again, then repeat if I was unsatisfied with my grade the second time.
I honestly felt like I learned more via this trial-and-error approach than I ever did studying for one-and-done kind of examination because I was able to actually learn the material vs. trying to memorize as much as I could just to pass the test.
I have pretty severe ADHD (didn't know it at the time), so this methodology was extremely beneficial for my "not built for school" type of brain.
I didn't have this option but I crammed for tests rather than spend time over a longer period actually learning the material. I passed, often with As, but I don't remember a bit of it today.
Sounds like one of my coworker's PRs
Ok, let's give students a test at the beginning of the year to see if they test out. Then the same test at the end of the year to see if the people who didn't test out pass. Would work pretty well to see what improvements were made to their knowledge during the course vs what they came in with. As is mentioned in the article, there are other learning related areas this approach misses.
Devising a good system for evaluating actual domain knowledge in a diverse and complex cohort like a million 3rd-graders is incredibly difficult! But the more thought put into it the better because it's really important.
I loved CLEP exams and stuff where you just study, take the test, and demonstrate mastery. I wish schools did this more, but I think they want to keep you there.
I had a year where I was really independently studying where I would check in each day to show off homework and tests and then just run around outside for the rest of the day. I would have about 15 minutes of “school” each day and then just play. Or I would do the whole month or semester in a day and then run around.
It’s hard to know how effective it is. I had fun. And I still remember fractions and George Washington and stuff covered that year. And I did well in “regular” school after that.
It’s just a big risk to run with kids so I don’t think schools want to do it at scale.
Looking back, only math is a useful class in high school (of which I only liked Geometry at the time). The other classes are too low res to be deeply engaging if you're really curious.
Traditional schooling also has a terrible model of punishing curiosity in that if you demonstrate a passion for the material it likely just ends up with more work/homework (AP classes, special credit) instead of acceleration to the next tier of education on that topic. The grade school education system does nothing to reward academic excellence, literally nothing. If you get an A then thats it. You're still locked in with everyone else, so whats the point?
- The rich media execs that push this idiotic bullshit
Maybe in the gen-ed soft science stuff like English or History, but math is math; you either get an answer or you don't. Ditto for many engineering / STEM fields -- the code compiles and runs, or doesn't; nothing to soften.
Homework wasn't really supposed to teach the subject per se. It was supposed to instill some discipline and personal responsibility.
When I homeschooled, chores replaced homework for purposes of teaching those lessons.
We seem to have forgotten why we did things the way we did things.
Homework to me is just reps, which are only useful because of how things are tested, which aren't terribly useful, but at least if that's explained up-front then you learn that reps are sometimes kind of useful.
People who succeed at homework were raised in a way and lucky enough imo (in that specific context) to be imbued with a sense that everything depends on perfection
Chores had to be done because chores had to be done, not "because mom said so." If the trash didn't go out, it piled up and became a problem.
At first, I would get "Can it wait until the next commercial? I'm watching TV." I would say "Yes."
The result: I nagged for hours without results.
Then I started saying "No. You can never remember to do it on the next commercial. It's taking too much of my time and energy to keep asking you to do it. Do it now."
The result: After a few days of having his fun interrupted, he proactively took trash out before his TV shows started and then asked if there was anything else he needed to do because he didn't want his shows interrupted.
But the folks who hate homeschooling and decry it as the work of the devil don't want to hear that chores are a good substitute for assigned homework.
However we do it, taking ownership of a task is something we need to instill in kids.
Kids spend ~7hrs/day, ~180 days/year in school. Deducting 8hrs/day sleep, kids spend 22% of their awake time in school. Aggressive 3hrs/day before&after school programs gets that up to.. 30%. Add a 30hr/week x 10week summer program and we are at.. 35%. Add a half day weekend program while school is in session and you barely hit 37%.
For a middle/upper middle class kid, they go home to a structured enough environment, get food, shelter, attention and discipline. So the other 70-89% of the time is neutral to beneficial.
For disadvantaged kids, their home life may be mayhem and actively detrimental to their development. I'm not sure what you can do with 20-30% of their hours to counteract the other 70-80%.
I'd wager most of the marginal improvement you can get is less about making the in-classroom hours X% better, but, sadly, minimizing the % of hours spent in troubled households. So focussing more on redirection of after hours & weekends to Boys&Girls Club, academic clubs, in-school after school programs, mentorship, etc.
This is of course much more expensive, and morally, potentially brings in problematic conflict between the state & parents, etc... in terms of who is ultimately responsible for raising a child. The number of dollars & hours to substitute a stable household is staggering, and the parents may not ultimately want it.
Math requires practice. Math homework gave you the repeated practice necessary to encompass the subject. History homework was often a reading assignment, so the classroom time could be spent on discussion instead of variable reading speeds. The same for sciences, where instead of reading, the classroom time could be spent on discussion and experiments.
Even grammar homework had its point in the learning process. So no, it wasn't just about learning discipline, it was often about the practice.
We homeschool. Finding suitable practice books was a large part of the job.
My oldest son brought his classroom math work home for a year, lied to me and told me it was homework because he wanted to understand and the teacher couldn't explain it in a way he found helpful. Then he would fight with me for an hour until he was in tears.
Different kids have different strengths and weaknesses.
Wut. Not at all. Studies have shown you need to touch / interact with / refresh something at least 3 times for it to stick. The point is that you do the lesson at school, touch it again, later, at home, and then ideally once or twice more before a test. Maybe many more times, like running through problem sets or flash cards.
It also serves as a way to see how well lessons are sinking in. If Lil Timmy ain't scoring well on math homework but does okay on English then maybe he needs someone to explain it differently, push him a little, try different approaches, etc.
Chores are a fine way to teach responsibility, but that ain't why 8th graders get math homework or college students write term papers.
When I have kids I hope I can do the same. Why would I want them to go through this kind of lunacy lol..
Here he is giving an engrossing explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s
A text article: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect...
e.g straight from the article: "Homework, in-class discussions and other practice work, called formative assessments, are weighted at between 10% and 30%. The bulk of a grade is earned through what are known as summative assessments, such as tests or essays.... extra credit is banned..."
This just sounds like what college-prep schools have been doing for a long time, rebranded. I don't think it puts any students at more of a disadvantage than they already were.
Grading based on busywork is for mediocre kids.
Isn't this the most reasonable solution schools can implement?
I mean, it's not ideal. Not at all. But the incentives and support to do otherwise are not there.
Oh, and more controversially, we can't lay parents' attitude and child rearing directly at the hands of the baby boomer generation. The parents of current school-aged children were largely born after the 1980's now.
Yes, people born '40 to '80 are shaping school budgets and curriculum. But they are not shaping how children or their parents behave.
What is the difference between multiple choice tests
and
Thinking process testing?
What is thinking process testing?
Some essay tests indirectly measure it...
Knowledge skills comes not from multiple tests but from seeing specific groups of things as meta mind-building blocks that we assemble as humans in our brains.
For the student, it would significantly reduce stress, and so if a student was so inclined to learn, they would likely learn more/better. For the the non-inclined to learn student, yeah, not good, but then again, the non-inclined-to-learn learner probably is going to do well anyway.
What i do think it would do is cut significantly down on the "i hate school" emotion, and "i hate learning" action. Kids probably would like learning more. And to me, anything you can do to get people to enjoy learning, even just a little bit, is a win.
Sometimes I think teachers are out of touch with the rest of the world.
You most certainly can pick and choose only to do the big jobs. Companies certainly want you to focus on the big jobs over the smaller ones.
Who hasn't heard of projects being completed past the initial deadline? I think it'd be a bit better to have students root-cause why they couldn't complete the deadline on time but the real world misses deadlines all the time.