Homework Doesn’t Count!

In the last decade, an educational trend has taken root: no more graded homework. This change has occurred for several reasons, which I’ll frame as the arguments I’ve heard:

1. Students are burning the candle at both ends with extracurricular activities in an effort to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive college market, while other students may have work jobs to help pay family bills (or both). They have a lot less time to get school work done. Somewhat related: student stress is at an all-time high level. Removing the stress of graded homework and the amount of time spent will help.
2. Grades should come from the achievement of mastery or proficiency of skills. Homework is the practice (formative assessment). Only summative assessments (tests, essays, etc.) should be assessed. Grades should not be derived from effort and compliance.
3. If homework is used to introduce a new skill or new content, a student hasn’t had a chance to ask for help when they are struggling. We shouldn’t be evaluating them based on whether they understand something the first time. They should be given the opportunity to consult with the teacher before work is evaluated for a grade. Related: some students have a family member who can coach them through something they are struggling with, but others do not. It is not fair to punish the latter group for the lack of resources.
4. It is difficult to know who completed a homework assignment. Cheating in one form or another is rampant. Students share answers with one another and parents sometimes do work for their children.
5. A student who has mastered the material and can ace a graded assessment shouldn’t be punished if they don’t do a homework assignment that is unnecessary for them to demonstrate understanding. Other students who struggle with getting work done for whatever reason (laziness, busy schedules, challenging situations int he home), shouldn’t have their grades depressed because they have low homework grades.
6. Using the threat of lowered grades is an unacceptable means of developing good habits. We should seek to develop intrinsic motivation instead of using threats.

Now that I’ve fairly represented the arguments, I can say that I was opposed to this change from the start and I still think it’s a mistake for a variety of reasons. I do not question the intentions of the educational reformers who have advocated for this change, but I do question whether what they’ve proposed is good for the majority of students.

Over the course of a few years we were given a series of articles from one-sided educational journal articles excoriating graded homework (never mind the distinct lack of data in the articles) and worked over by administrators trying to convince us of the error of our thinking. To be fair, some teachers bought in pretty quickly. Some of the arguments at the top make sense. Actually, they all make some sense, but they aren’t the complete picture. One by one the various departments adopted the no graded homework policy. The last one standing was Social Studies. While many of us resisted, we finally were told “This is what the district is doing.” They tried really hard to get the buy in, but it led to a lot of resentment. Frankly there was an attitude that administrators knew better than those of us in the trenches. Ultimately they have the authority to make the big decisions and we have to do our best to work within (and around) the restrictions.

Before I get to the impact of the policy change, I do want to address the various arguments:

1. Student stress is a significant problem. The pressure of needing to finish a ton of graded homework can be a cause of it, and if multiple teachers were giving huge amounts of homework, that would be an enormous big problem. But undue amounts of homework could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and historically had been. Or schools could get creative and restrict certain departments to particulars days for homework if they thought this was necessary. In addition, just because homework isn’t graded doesn’t mean it isn’t assigned, and students — at least in honors and AP classes — know that they have to do the work in order to succeed on graded assessments. So you might take away some stress about getting homework done for full credit on a particular schedule, but there is still pressure to do the work… and even more pressure on the fewer number of assessments that get graded. In the case of the students who don’t make the connection, their overall understanding and performance will plummet. In another blog entry I’ll talk about my perception of the arc of student work over the last decade and the sinister role of rubrics.
2. Only summative assessments should count – the problem here is that this educational reform is part of a larger movement towards standards based assessment. There is a pretty compelling argument to make about SBA, but trying to impose such an approach on the traditional grading system is extremely problematic. Some have suggested that report cards could have a proficiency/mastery grade as well as a separate notation for effort and compliance, along the lines of what many of us had in elementary school. And maybe that is something worth looking into. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to implement a small part of a gigantic cultural change, perhaps in an effort to gradually move to full-blown SBA. In my estimation it would make more sense to cut out the gradual nonsense and just go full bore — or not at all. More on effort and compliance in my comments about #5 below.
3. Not fair to grade new, challenging work – For the most part I agree with this, although the framing of it isn’t entirely fair. Students in Algebra aren’t given calculus problems on concepts they haven’t learned to solve for homework and given zeroes because they can’t solve them correctly. That’s just not how it works. Now sometimes I might give a chapter reading and a student struggles with an answer to a confusing question. If it’s a single question out of 10 or 15, I might not take any points off. Or I might take one point off if it seems like a fair, straightforward item. Either way, it’s not a big deal. By making a reasonable attempt at doing the work, they are better off the next day when we go over the material or build on it. One of the biggest issues is that not all subject matter is the same and we give homework for different reasons. In social studies, it’s often to give students background about what we’re going to talk about the next day. The work itself isn’t intended to be extremely challenging. The skills that are being practiced are not typically new skills, but the same ones that they practice over and over. The assumption in all the literature is that homework is always skill-based. It is not.
4. Cheating – It happens. And most of us are really good at catching kids who copy off of each other. Once in awhile we catch a parent, and that’s awkward. But it’s not that big of a deal; a small price to pay for having students prepared to learn in class.
5. The square pegs – I was actually the kid who hated doing homework because most of the time I already understood the material. Or I could read a history chapter and hated to have to answer the lame questions. I didn’t really need the practice. (Although I probably did need the discipline; there weren’t too many extrinsic factors that worked on me.) So I had terrible homework grades and high test scores. My final grades were often Bs or Cs as a result. A no graded homework policy would have benefited me as a student. But most of my students historically benefited from the structure of graded homework. I recently wrote about how I didn’t like the school administration using a lowest common denominator policy towards teachers, but here it seems like I am advocating a LCD policy for students. The difference, however, is that I think my kind is a relatively small minority. And when I’ve found such students in my class, I’ve sometimes made alternate arrangements with them. “I know you understand the material and don’t need to do the questions, so instead I’m going to have you do this…” and then challenge them with something that I think will capture their imagination. I don’t always succeed in this approach, but I’d prefer a few students get lower overall grades because of bad homework than the majority of kids not develop good work habits because they don’t see an incentive to doing non-graded homework. As for the second group of students, it’s awful when students have challenging home lives, but I don’t think taking away homework is going to fix that.
6. Threats – Students do need to learn discipline and good work habits, and for the vast majority of them, a reasonable amount of graded homework helps toward that end. It would be wonderful if we could teach students to be intrinsically motivated, and I’ve tried to do that my whole career. But there will always be the question that I heard today when I had students write down answers to questions: “Is this going to be graded?” If I say “yes,” to that question, I know the work will be of a certain quality. If I say “no,” it pretty much guarantees 1/3 to 1/2 of the class is going to blow it off. It seems like a curious time to suddenly say, “Well, choices have consequences” when in so many other areas we give students endless chances to screw up and redeem themselves.

So sure, there are reasons to be careful about graded homework, but once again we have a one-size-fits-all, top-down rule. How about we instead do a better job discussing pedagogy within departments and professional learning communities, and develop our own best practices for what works with our students. There’s always room for reflection and improvement, but when you tie the hands of teachers, it makes it that much more difficult.