Does Homework Widen the Achievement Gap?

In this New Yorker article, Louis Menand wades into the ongoing debate about homework. He reports that French president Francois Hollande announced recently that his government intends to abolish homework in all primary and middle schools. Why? Because students with more-affluent and better-educated parents have an unfair advantage when their children engage in academic activities at home, and Hollande, being a good socialist, wants to level the playing field. (He also plans to divert more resources to schools attended by less-advantaged children.)

“Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it,” says Menand. “Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it. Grading homework is teachers’ never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.” 

How substantive are the arguments against homework? Menand shoots down two of them: that it has no effect on academic achievement (in fact, it does, especially in the secondary grades); and that American students are getting more and more homework (except for a spike after Sputnik, the amount of homework has remained the same since the 1940s – an average of no more than an hour each weekday night).

It’s striking that the homework practices in two high-achieving countries are totally different: Finland assigns virtually no homework, and South Korean students have a backbreaking after-school load, including “crammer” schools that are sometimes operating after 10:00 p.m. A country’s schools tend to do what people want them to do – in Finland it’s bringing everyone up to the same level, and in South Korea, it’s enabling hard workers to get ahead. 

So what do Americans want from schools? “Not to be like Finland is a safe guess,” says Menand. “Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else.” The problem, he says, is that economically advantaged students have a definite advantage: “The educational system is supposed to be an engine of opportunity and social readjustment, but in some ways it operates as a perpetuator of the status quo.” 

But here’s the irony: the fiercest opponents of homework, says Menand, are affluent parents “who want their children to spend their after-school time taking violin lessons and going to Tae Kwon Do classes – activities that are more enriching and (often) more fun than conjugating irregular verbs.” Less-affluent parents tend to see homework as a way of keeping their children out of trouble. “If we provided after-school music lessons, museum trips, and cool sports programs to poor children,” Menand concludes, “we could abolish homework in a French minute. No one would miss it.”

“Today’s Assignment” by Louis Menand in The New Yorker, Dec. 17, 2012 (p. 25-26), 

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/12/17/121217taco_talk_me... 

From the Marshall Memo #466