We Need to Put a Pause on Eliminating Homework

As a special education teacher and now in a middle management role, I field a lot of complaints from parents, not usually around my own teaching but around the state of the kid’s whole education. I’ve worked in three inner city, Title I, >95% free and reduced lunch schools. My first two schools were predominantly Black, while my newest school is also predominantly Black but has a sizeable Hispanic and English Language Learner population.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard from parents is: “why does [my student] never come home with any homework? How am I supposed to support their education at home if none of their teachers give any homework?”

These complaints happen at IEP meetings, as well as in individual correspondence with parents and guardians. There usually isn’t a very strong response. Everyone gets a bit flustered and says something like, “uh, since everything is so digital now, we post the assignments on Google Classroom.” Google Classroom is the online platform where we post assignments in case kids get sick, can’t come to school for any reason, and was the main platform during virtual learning.

I admit the response is a bit of a cop-out, and I’ve been mostly on board with the push to get rid of homework for equity reasons. In my first year of teaching, my school district got rid of the homework grade entirely and replaced it with participation and classwork. It was widely celebrated by educators because of the research-backed notion that homework disproportionately disadvantages low socioeconomic status, Black and Brown students. Homework, especially in pretty left-leaning school districts and urban areas like mine, has been seen as classist, systemically racist, and just not good for equity.

But in my third year of teaching, I started to have some questions and see eye to eye with these complaints from my parents and guardians, whose students may have been disproportionately impacted by homework. They wanted to desperately support their kids’ education more at home, and not giving homework was, in effect, not giving them the opportunity. I would say about 30% of parents had this complaint — others never mentioned it, and some parents we were never able to get in contact with.

Last year, I made a middle ground. I assigned fluency homework where kids had to read aloud to their parent or guardian and the parent had to circle every word the kid didn’t know how to read. I didn’t make it mandatory, but to acquiesce to the demands of a vocal minority of parents, I gave homework, made it optional, and gave kids extra participation and classwork points if it was completed and signed by the parent.

Some people might also think there are plenty of cons to this approach, which there are. I was rewarding students for something completely outside their control — whether their parent or guardian had time to hear them read to them at home. But as educators, a parent who wants to be involved in their kid’s education is never a bad thing — and I compromised with the lesser evil to give parents at home an opportunity.

My regret is I didn’t give homework that consistently. There were entire weeks where I didn’t have time or completely forgot to print fluency homework for kids who were multiple grades below grade level in reading. I struggled to take advantage of parents who really wanted to support and be involved at home.

Sometimes, I assigned homework and some kids would admit to forgetting to do it or just not wanting to do it. Sometimes, a kid would have a bad day and ask to do an assignment at home. Students would sometimes complain I was the only teacher who gave homework. I would usually say yes, and sometimes they did do it at home, and sometimes they didn’t.

Since my school district and curriculum never mandated I give out homework, I could easily dodge what I told parents I would do a lot of weeks, too.

There’s a dangerous and now repudiated stereotype out there that parents and guardians in inner-city schools don’t want to be involved in their student’s education. My experience is that’s just not true. Kids who are raised by a single parent or by a grandparent often have a parent or guardian who cares a lot and wants to support as much as possible.

Kids who are homeless still often have a parent who wants to support their student’s education at home. Kids whose parents don’t know any English often have parents who want to support at home. There are indeed a lot of cases where a parent’s work schedule stops them from being as involved as they want to be, or when a parent is deceased or incarcerated by no fault of the student obviously. It’s far too unfortunate that factors like mass incarceration or economic disinvestment in a community have tragic downstream effects on a student’s education.

All of this is to say the progressive movement to end homework comes with a lot of good intent, and I would even venture to say it has more pros than cons. Sociologists Ilana Horn and Grace Chen from Vanderbilt University published a longitudinal study that found teachers often found students’ struggles with math homework as a product of insufficient responsibility and motivation from parents. Teachers would reward and punish students based on homework, which exacerbates inequalities and reinforces a notion of meritocracy in light of many societal ills.

I don’t think anyone is denying that wealthier parents with more time to spend on their kids’ education can usually help kids more with their homework. I don’t think anyone is denying that there are different implications from assigning homework in a predominantly White, wealthy, and suburban school versus a school of low-SES kids in the hood.

Jay Caspian Kang, one of my favorite writers, makes a good point that in the real world, a lot of jobs give homework that might seem meaningless. A lot of times, even if you don’t want to, you will have to do work at home if it’s not done in school. In college and beyond, you do have to do a lot of work outside class and lecture. And homework, even if it has little academic value, does teach kids how to practice things and drill.

The authors of the study also say a danger in giving ungraded or optional homework is that teachers may judge students who don’t complete it. I think there are teachers who might judge kids, but most teachers I know wouldn’t. I think most of us understand kids and parents might have a lot going on at home, but we also know a lot of parents want to help more, and see homework is the way to do it. That might change in the future, but we have to meet a lot of parents where they’re at, now.

I think every parent or guardian is different, and each one wants to help with a kid’s education. At first, I had a nagging thought in the back of my head that “you’re just giving kids busywork to make their parents happy.” But one piece of fluency homework I gave had almost every word circled. The student almost never said anything in class, and sometimes he guessed answers to multiple-choice questions right.

But this early-year homework assignment showed me the extent to which the student struggled with basic reading skills and often faked his understanding of content in class. I had to adjust my instruction accordingly and give him more attention, often away from his peers, so he wouldn’t feel embarrassed.

Obviously, not every school district is getting rid of homework. But a lot of liberal-minded and progressive school districts are. Again, it comes with very good and equitable intent.

But even in school districts like mine that service a lot of kids who live in poverty and have tough home lives, so many parents still want to help at home, and so many parents are complaining that their students’ teachers don’t send home any homework.

Perhaps my colleagues did give homework and the kid forgot about it — I don’t know. But assigning optional or ungraded homework doesn’t hurt and can provide reinforcement for course material. It gives students a chance to practice at home and parents an opportunity to help.

There’s a certain perspective where eliminating homework hurts low-SES parents more than wealthy and well educated ones. Someone like me, who has a Master’s Degree, has worked in education, and is middle class and may be upper-middle class soon, knows the right resources to supplement a child’s learning. I have the money to hire a tutor. I can buy more books. Someone enduring economic hardship has less of those privileges.

You might disagree, but putting the choice with the parent and the student as much as possible is where I stand on the issue.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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