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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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Schooling on the Ground

“Keep the school open with existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive outside support.” This is what 54% of poll respondents said when asked how to address a poorly performing local school this past June. In a poll conducted by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup,  one thousand Americans responded to this question as they have in the past: preserve the school and reform it.

Paradoxically U.S. citizens always defend their local schools in polling, and at the same time object to national trends and policies in public education.  This is the perennial sky view vs. ground view of public schools. Schools viewed as test scores and dropout rates are called dysfunctional and permissive. Schools viewed as diverse and overcrowded communities are called under-funded and inclusive.

The prevailing view comes from Washington, where Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has sanctioned the sacking of dysfunctional schools and the re-invention of education from the ground up by charter schools and private ventures.  While extreme cases call for extreme measures, the reinvention of schooling is not as simple as the Secretary imagines it to be.

Parents and local stakeholders in the public schools understand this. They know that principals and teachers develop to meet the needs of their communities.  A principal has to learn how to get parents into the building, how get them involved in their children’s education, how to balance academic subjects with athletics. A teacher has to understand the demands on the students, the language barriers, the baby-sitting demands, the neighborhood conflicts that interfere with schooling. None of this can be taught in schools of education. They are adaptations that good teachers make to serve their schools.

When a school is demolished, much of this lore dies with it.  You can build a new school around excellent faculty, but they will have to adapt to their community in the same way that the previous faculty did.  Perhaps they will even be better teachers than their predecessors in three or four or five years, if they stay that long. But if they are recruited by Teach for America or KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) they probably will not stay that long. They will be exhausted by the rigors of school-building and leave after their obligated service. The sky-view reformers should think twice before closing a school.

This is the season when thousands of schools decide how to reinvigorate their programs, their faculty, their curriculum, their disciplinary codes.  They have their work cut out for them. But they should remember that the majority of the parents and stakeholders in their community are pulling for them. They appreciate school reform from the ground view and want it to succeed.  They know that the quality of life in school buildings matters more than the test scores headlined in the media.  They know that schools offer a sanctuary for kids who otherwise learn in the streets.

Here’s to those who choose to transform, rather than demolish, schools in need.