Arne Duncan

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Homework: The Elephant in the Schoolroom

Thomas Friedman’s positive review of an Arne Duncan speech in Sunday’s New York Times (“Obama’s Homework Assignment,” January 19, 2014) resonates on so many levels, because it is a cultural critique, not a scapegoating about failures in public education.  At different times students, teachers, and principals have been blamed for the shortfall in the scores on international tests, but the word “homework” captures the space and time in which our culture does not support formal learning.

Friedman cites one teacher who reported that a student explained she could not keep up with assignments, because ” I have two hours of Facebook and over 4,000 text messages a month to deal with. How do you expect me to deal with all this work?” There’s no need to target either Facebook or text-messaging as the root cause of the lack of growth in K-12 student learning, because they are among dozens of distractions that keep students, and especially teenagers, from developing life-long habits and skills for learning.  There’s  online chat rooms and blogs, streaming of movies and TV series, music,  sports-fandom, video-games, automobiles, part-time jobs evolving to full-time, and distractions too numerous to name.

And distraction is good, when it helps divert us from problems and tensions we can’t control, but distraction also keeps us from developing learning habits, such as reading, writing, inquiry skills, problem-solving skills, moral-reasoning and reflection, all of which can not be reduced to compact lessons in the classroom. There are practices that develop only with practice, and there are not enough hours in the school day to turn complex practices into life-long learning. If it were possible for children in the early grades to develop literacies by exposure, it becomes increasingly challenging to acquire more complex habits as they age.

So Arne Duncan’s challenge to parents is more than a shifting of blame for faltering progress in schooling. It points to the increasing limitations of compartmentalizing learning between home and school as students grow in years and sophistication. Parents may honor sacred hours in the day for eating, for praying, for exercise, for a favorite sit-com, for chores, but they need to institutionalize study at home in the same fashion. Or, if there are no sacred institutions in the home, they need to make one or more hours sacred to study, reading, and focus on academic projects. You have no homework? Then what form of study will you engage in between 7:00 and prime time television? You have a project due in one week? How many hours will you allot to it each day from now till then? You don’t understand the geometric theorems you have to solve? Who are your resources, either in school, among friends, or online?  This is how  sacred practices or institutions are formed outside of  school.

Despite being a lifetime educator I have always struggled with the consecrated hours of homework. My parents raised me to make it a priority, but the sacred hours have always been threatened by the baseball season and sit-com manias. It’s all wholesome entertainment, but it stunts the growing edges of literacy, the kind of reading and writing that challenges me and calls for concentration and frequent attention.  My very identity as a teacher depends on making those growing edges expand. And these growing edges surround adults their entire lives.

There is a sense in which homework is forever. Will you study to become a better voter or to accomplish some household improvement you can’t afford to delegate to professionals? Will you study to improve your health or be better-informed about a degenerative illness? Will you study to decide what is the most reliable appliance or automobile to buy? The answer may depend on whether homework has ever been an institution in your home.

The opportunity to learn at home is the least-considered variable when we compare American schools to schools abroad, probably because our public institutions have the least control of that time and space.  The President has exhorted families to take responsibility for their children’s learning since his first day in office, but it is questionable if he has moved the needle on homework. Schools try to rally parents at back-to-school nights, but the parents stay home or at work.  There are powerful economic and cultural tides against the island of homework.

But we are coming to an end of our list of scapegoats for mediocre school performances and need to consider the most obvious one: the hours after school when learning needs to be practiced and reinforced. The time between 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., when learning sprouts need to be cultivated. It takes no more time than the preparation for a family vacation or a spring break odyssey. It takes less time than training for a sports season.  It takes about the same time as preparing for the fantasy football season or planning and sustaining a garden.  Many of us find time for these things, but not for a scheduled interval of homework.

Whether anyone is listening or not, Arne Duncan, President Obama and Thomas Friedman have it right. Homework makes a difference, because it is a commitment. It opens up space we have lately abdicated for education. It keeps us from going 24 hours without learning anything.  If we didn’t have other nations to shame us, that sobering truth should drive us on.

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Duncan and the Virtue of Necessity

Data-driven Duncan, the presiding spirit of public education, has promised us larger classes for the near future. He has  justified increasing class size with research, based on test scores. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (November 17) he declared,

“Up through third grade, research shows a small class size of 13 to 17 students can boost achievement. Parents, like myself, understandably like smaller classes. We would like to have small classes for everyone–and it is good news that the size of classes in the U.S. has steadily shrunk for decades. But in secondary schools, districts may be able to save money without hurting students, while allowing modest but smartly targeted increases in class size.”

Class size may or may not alter performance on standardized tests, but it inevitably affects the quality of classroom interaction as it ascends from a class of twenty. I do not have hard data to justify this claim, only twenty years of high school classroom experience with class sizes varying from twelve to thirty-eight. No one but an experienced teacher can verify what happens when five students are added to a class of 25 or 30 or 35, but the climate is significantly changed. The number of students who do not participate in discussion increases, the number of students who can receive individual support decreases, and the community feeling that promotes collaboration in learning dwindles.  These factors affect learning profoundly, especially for the students in the expanding undifferentiated middle of the class.

Many of the undifferentiated middle are subject to absenteeism and dropping out. Urban schools often count on these students dropping out when they assign more students to a classroom than there are seats. They anticipate attrition like the meteorologist anticipates the hurricane season. Many of these students will never take the tests that measure whether class size affects performance, because they won’t be in school that day.

Many of the undifferentiated middle will be chronically weak performers on standardized tests, so their lack of achievement won’t jar the mean test performance in a school, a city or a state. Some of them will actually be superb test-takers, so the size of the class will not affect their performance, but neither will they have learned anything that year.  Some students will transfer from another school system, where the classes were small. They will bring acquired critical thinking habits to the test and keep the scores buoyant.

Teachers know these stories, the lives behind the numbers  that dance in the dreams of state school administrators. Teachers know that mean test scores reflect very little of the learning climate in their classes, but individual students affect them profoundly. The motivated student whose parents decided to move away to a district where peer pressure boosted learning.  The ESL student who worked harder when the class size expanded, but learned less, because the teacher could not attend to individuals as often.  The bright, but disillusioned student who had not been challenged for years in school, because no one noticed he had skills far beyond his classmates.  These are a few of the casualties of class size.

Secretary Duncan clearly does not remember, if he ever knew, how numbers affect classroom interaction, so he resorts to the last refuge of scoundrels: gross data.  Administrators have cited these studies forever to make a virtue of necessity, but they are obviously administrators who have forgotten the ecology of real classrooms. Whatever the data of test performance reveals, it does not reveal the quality or depth of learning in secondary classrooms. It does not reveal who has disappeared from the radar, because of the unwieldy class size.

Perhaps we must all face the hardships of a depressed economy, and schools may have to shoulder their share.  If so, we should not expect school reform to advance under an increasing burden of enrollment and smaller faculty. Our alleged leader, the Secretary of Education, should deplore the conditions brought on by declining resources, not justify them with superficial data.

If the devil can quote scripture to his purpose, then so can a bureaucrat cite data. It doesn’t mean he should stoop that low.