Encouraging Courage

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Education research doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, but let’s be honest: There’s already enough of it to help us decide what to do (or stop doing) on many critical issues. Likewise, there are plenty of examples of outstanding classrooms and schools in which that research is being put into practice. What’s lacking is sufficient courage for those examples to be widely followed.

It pains me to say this, but professionals in our field often seem content to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions -- even when they don’t make sense. Conversely, too many educators seem to have lost their capacity to be outraged by outrageous things. Handed foolish and destructive mandates, they respond only by requesting guidance on how to implement them. They fail to ask “Is this really in the best interest of our students?” or to object when the answer to that question is no.

The Cowardly Lion was able to admit that he lacked what made the muskrat guard his musk. Cowardly humans are more likely just to change the subject. Propose something that makes a meaningful difference, and you’ll hear “But we’ve always…”, “But the parents will never…”, “But we can’t be the only school in the area to…”

What, then, do truly courageous educators do? They dig deeper, they take responsibility, and they share power.

Digging Deeper. It requires gumption to follow one’s principles wherever they lead. One may hope, for example, that children will be lifelong learners. One may even include that wish in a school’s mission statement. But what if evidence and experience tell us that interest in learning declines when students are graded and also when they’re made to work on academic assignments after they get home from school? Are we willing to say, “If we’re serious about our goals, then we must be willing to question any traditional practices -- including grades and homework -- that prevent us from reaching them”?

Advanced Placement courses often just accelerate the worst kind of lecture-based, textbook-oriented instruction. They’re “rigorous,” but that doesn’t mean they’re good. When it was reported that Scarsdale High School in New York joined other schools in deciding to drop all AP courses, an administrator at a nearby school circulated the article to his colleagues under the heading, “Do we have the guts?”

To dig deeper is to ask the root questions: not how many A.P. courses kids should take but whether to replace the College Board’s curriculum with our own; not howmuch homework to assign but why kids should have to work a second shift every evening; not how to grade but whether to do so at all.

Even when practices seem to be producing good results, a courageous educator questions the criteria: “Wait a minute -- we say this policy ‘works,’ but doesn’t that just mean it raises scores on bad tests?” “My classroom may be quiet and orderly, but am I promoting intellectual and moral development, or merely compliance?” “We look good because our graduates get into prestigious colleges, but isn’t that mostly because they come from affluent families? Are we helping them to become deep and passionate thinkers?”

Taking responsibility. The path of least resistance is to attribute problems to those who have less power than you. It’s much harder to say, as a San Diego teacher did, “If a child starts to act up, I ask myself: ‘How have I failed this child? What is it about this lesson that is leaving her outside the learning? How can I adapt my plan to engage this child?’ I stopped blaming my children.”

We have to be willing to take on the nay-sayers, to fight for what’s right even in the face of concerted opposition. Maureen Downey, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, described how tough that can be in a culture where those “who speak up when they believe their students’ welfare is at stake, and who question the system, earn the label of troublemaker.” Lots of principals, she added, are “too cowed to practice ‘creative insubordination.’”

Parting with power. It takes guts, not just talent, for a teacher to lead students beyond a predictable search for right answers -- and to let them play an active role in the quest for meaning that replaces it. That entails not only accepting some unpredictability and messiness but also giving up some control.

A Washington teacher was proud of herself for having posted this sign at the front of her classroom: “Think for yourself; the teacher might be wrong!” But gradually she realized that her classroom wasn’t really learner-centered. “I wanted [students] to think for themselves,” she confessed, “but only so long as their thinking didn’t slow down my predetermined lesson plan or get in the way of my teacher-led activity or argue against my classroom policies.” It takes courage to admit one hasn’t gone as far as one thought.

Over the years, I’ve met teachers who took a deep breath and let kids choose their own final grades, who tried out a no-homework policy to see what would happen, who stopped decorating the classroom by themselves and instead invited the kids to decide collectively how they wanted their classroom to look.

I’ve also met administrators who facilitated democratic decision-making among the staff instead of merely trying to get “buy in” to decisions they’d already made, who invited teachers to run the faculty meetings on a rotating basis rather than controlling all the meetings themselves (thereby modeling a top-down management style for teachers to reproduce in their classrooms), who suddenly realized that much of their airy talk about “responsibility,” “citizenship,” “character,” and “motivation” really just amounted to euphemisms for obedience.

*

These days the greatest barrier to meaningful learning is the standards-and-testing juggernaut, the top-down, corporate-styled mandates that are squeezing the life out of classrooms. This, therefore, is where courage may be needed most desperately. I’m heartened by teachers -- most recently in Seattle, but before them in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Illinois -- who have refused on principle to administer standardized tests. ("How can I teach my kids to stand up for what they believe in if I'm not doing that myself?" asked one Chicago test boycotter.) And by the Michigan high school teachers who rejected the obsessive and reductive focus on numerical “data” in the standard version of “Professional Learning Communities” in favor of a teacher-designed initiative to focus on what students need. And by hundreds of Florida teachers who tore up or returned their bonus checks for having produced high test scores (read: for having taught in a rich district). And by the New York superintendent who announced “it’s time for civil disobedience” -- and then worked to create an alternative diploma that wouldn’t be based on high-stakes tests.

I understand how real fear keeps more of us from doing what we know should be done. I don’t want to blame the victims, or minimize the culpability of those who pass bad laws. But if every educator who understood the damage done by these policies decided to speak out, to organize, to resist, then the policies would soon collapse of their own weight. I often hear from teachers and administrators who debate whether to do so, who struggle with whether to teach in a way that responds to students’ interests rather than follow a script or conform to prescriptive state (or national) standards. They know the risks but they also realize that Jonathan Kozol was right: "Abject capitulation to unconscionable dictates from incompetent or insecure superiors can be contagious.”

It takes courage to stand up to absurdity when all around you people remain comfortably seated. But if we need one more reason to do the right thing, consider this: The kids are watching us, deciding how to live their lives in part by how we’ve chosen to live ours.

Today's Parent: the end of homework?

Today's Parent featured an article for back to school season on homework titled The End of Homework: Overwhelmed by how much work your kids have each night? Some schools are rethinking what they assign. It's a perennial topic that we seem to recycle every year. I was interviewed for the article and my contribution is below:

Many of the Canadian teachers I spoke with agree that today’s overscheduled kids have too much on their plate, and that the research suggesting homework is ineffective rings true to them. Joe Bower, a public school teacher in Red Deer, Alta., says that after 12 years of rigorously assigning traditional homework, along with severe late penalties, he had an epiphany. “Who the hell gave teachers the right to tell parents how they're going to spend their evenings, weekends and holidays? Imagine if parents came in and said, ‘This is what you're going to teach for the next two weeks.’” 

So Bower changed his approach to something more personalized. First, he familiarizes himself with the interests of each kid, then he fills the room with books and movies on those topics. For students who are interested in pursuing these interests at home, he comes up with customized projects designed to inspire and stimulate. Last, he leaves it up to the children if they want to participate. It’s what he calls “The Mission Impossible Theory of Homework” (as in, “Your homework, if you choose to accept it…”). Homework isn't part of the overall grade calculation, either. “In an optimal learning environment,” he says, “the learner would have at least as much say in the homework as the teacher.”

A correction is in order: I spent 6 years rigorously assigning homework, not 12.

The rest is bang on and reflects some of my take on homework. For more, you can find all of my blog posts on homework here.

You can read more about:

 Harris Cooper and the infamous 10 minute homework rule here.

The myth of homework's non-academic benefits. (here and here)

My Mission Impossible Theory of Homework here

And if you haven't read Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth, you really need to.

China Enters "Testing-free" Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform

This was written by Yong Zhao who is Presidential Chair, Associate Dean Global and Online Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Catching Up or Leading the Way and World Class Learners. He blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared here.

by Yong Zhao

No standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking to lessen student academic burden. The Chinese Ministry of Education released Ten Regulations to Lessen Academic Burden for Primary School Students this week for public commentary. The Ten Regulations are introduced as one more significant measure to reform China’s education, in addition to further reduction of academic content, lowering the academic rigor of textbooks, expanding criteria for education quality, and improving teacher capacity.

The regulations included in the published draft are:

1. Transparent admissions. Admission to a school cannot take into account any achievement certificates or examination results. Schools must admit all students based on their residency without considering any other factors.
2. Balanced Grouping. Schools must place students into classes and assign teachers randomly. Schools are strictly forbidden to use any excuse to establish “fast-track” and “slow-track” classes.
3. “Zero-starting point” Teaching. All teaching should assume all first graders students begin at zero proficiency. Schools should not artificially impose higher academic expectations and expedite the pace of teaching.
4. No Homework. No written homework is allowed in primary schools. Schools can however assign appropriate experiential homework by working with parents and community resources to arrange field trips, library visits, and craft activities.
5. Reducing Testing. No standardized testing is allowed for grades 1 through 3; For 4th grade and up, standardized testing is only allowed once per semester for Chinese language, math, and foreign language. Other types of tests cannot be given more than twice per semester.
6. Categorical Evaluation. Schools can only assess students using the categories of “Exceptional, Excellent, Adequate, and Inadequate,” replacing the traditional 100-point system.
7. Minimizing Supplemental Materials. Schools can use at most one type of materials to supplement the textbook, with parental consent. Schools and teachers are forbidden to recommend, suggest, or promote any supplemental materials to students.
8. Strictly Forbidding Extra Class. Schools and teachers cannot organize or offer extra instruction after regular schools hours, during winter and summer breaks and other holidays. Public schools and their teachers cannot organize or participate in extra instructional activities.
9. Minimum of One Hour of Physical Exercise. Schools are to guarantee the offering of physical education classes in accordance with the national curriculum, physical activities and eye exercise during recess.
10. Strengthening Enforcement. Education authorities at all levels of government shall conduct regular inspection and monitoring of actions to lessen student academic burden and publish findings. Individuals responsible for academic burden reduction are held accountable by the government.

It took only six years before I wanted to quit teaching

I started teaching in 2000.

I'm now starting my 14th year.

In my chapter Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning, I reflect on my 13 years:

I am not the same teacher I used to be. When I started, I was focused on power and control. I assigned loads of homework, dished out huge penalties for late assignments, assigned punishments for rule-breaking behavior, and averaged marks to determine the students’ final grade. I did some of these things because I was trained to do so in university. However, most of these teaching strategies were being done mindlessly and, for the most part, I was simply teaching the way I was taught.

It took only six years before I wanted to quit teaching. I had become increasingly unhappy with my teaching and my students’ learning. I was tired of laboring through hours and hours of marking, and I hated nagging kids to complete their homework. Instead of students asking “What is this question worth?” I wanted them to actually get excited about the content. I wanted change, and I came close to thinking that change required me to leave the profession.
Instead of pulling the plug on what could have been a short teaching career, I started to question the traditional pedagogy that I had so mindlessly adopted. I began asking questions that would challenge the status quo. Many professional development conferences provide teachers with opportunity to ask questions such as “How do I mark better?” or “How do I get my students to do their homework?” At first glance these look like challenging and provocative questions, but they are still questions that promote more of the same. Far more powerful questions are “Why do I mark?” or “Why do I assign homework?” Investigating the motives for our actions, rather than merely examining our methods of implementation, is a better use of our time, particularly if the subject in question is a belief or habit that we’ve come to accept as a given truth. I have come to see that:

"[t]here is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us." (Kohn, 1999a, p.1) 

For too long, I was letting schooling get in the way of my teaching and too many of my teaching practices were based on pedagogy that was at best unhelpful and at worst harmful to my long-term goals. Through critical questioning and extensive research, I came to the conclusion that my pedagogy had to revolve around one priority: learning. If there were things that worked to sabotage learning, then it was my professional responsibility to remove them.

Since 2006, I have worked to identify and remove things like grading that traditional school has done for so long. And when I share this with others, I receive mixed responses. Some listen intently, nodding their heads in agreement, as if deep down they have always sensed something wrong with what Seymour Papert (1988) described as School with a capital S, which is a place that he explains as having a bureaucracy that has its own interests and is not open to what is in the best interest of the children. Unfortunately, when most people close their eyes and think of their Schooling, many have experienced no other kind of School than the one with a capital S. Some listen in shock and awe at how school could even function without such things as grading. The people who have a hard time comprehending how children could learn without extrinsic manipulators concern me the most. They are so invested in traditional schooling that they have never questioned its foundation. Unfortunately, some have a distrustful view of the nature of children; they believe that without grading there would be nothing to stop children from running amok.

Homework undermines education

This was written by Mark Barnes who is a 20-year classroom teacher and adjunct professor at two Ohio colleges. Mark blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared at SmartBlog on Education.

By Mark Barnes

Students often ask me why I don’t assign homework. “I don’t believe in it,” I quickly respond. “It doesn’t tell me what you’re learning.” They forge ahead with furrowed eyebrows. “Then why do all of our other teachers assign homework?” Although I typically leave that one alone, my experience tells me that the answer isn’t at all elusive. The average educator was taught in her pre-service days that homework is a part of every teacher’s instructional handbag. You lecture, model, assign a worksheet and follow that up with homework that, in many cases, looks a lot like the worksheet. Then you test and move on. Students who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework.

This practice of assigning homework, simply because it’ something that’s always been done, is not only absurd and outdated, it is undermining effective 21st-century teaching and learning. Most teachers link homework to grades so the students who don’t do homework don’t learn the material — mainly because not enough teaching is being done in class – and many would-be learners grow to hate school because they wind up with poor grades and, ultimately, feel like failures. When I began teaching, my students, too, fell victim to the archaic tradition of homework. For more than a decade, I peppered students with mundane nightly activities, as I had been taught to do by education professors and mentors, all of whom ran the old-school teaching playbook, like a young football coach running the plays of Knute Rockne or Pop Warner — ancient coaching legends whose methods would likely fail in the modern era. Year after year, I watched students get low grades in my class and fail standardized tests, blaming them instead of questioning my own methods.

A few summers ago, I looked in the mirror and said, “Enough is enough; something has to change, and it has to start with my approach to teaching and learning.” I began studying the work of luminaries in education and human behavior research such as Alfie Kohn, Stephen Krashen, Nancie Atwell, Dylan Wiliam, Daniel Pink, Carol Dweck and many others. These experts showed me that the one-room-school- house method of education is an inefficient means for developing lifelong learners. Most important, they taught me that teachers will get the most from students by encouraging intrinsic motivation, autonomy and collaboration. I learned that the rote memory activities that most homework is founded on are useless when it comes to imparting knowledge and critical thinking.

So the homework stopped. Now, projects and individual activities and diagnostics are all worked on in class. Best of all, many of my students still work at home, but they choose what to do and when to do it. This is what independent learning is. This is what every teacher should want.

Are you ready to throw out homework? If not, what’s your concern about change? Please leave your comment whether for or against homework.

The Parenting Trap

Check out The Parenting Trap by A.A. Gill from Vanity Fair. Here are my favorite parts:

• Forget all the advice. Forget the special tutors, camps, coaches, and therapists. A father of four argues that the biggest problem kids face is the byzantine education-industrial complex known as school, which ruins the most carefree and memorable years of their lives.

• I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can’t read.

• In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bu­reauc­racy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it.

• If you want to see the absolute proof that we’ve got it all wrong—that education is really about the fear and guilt of parents projected onto their children, then go to your own school reunion. Obviously most normal people would rather attend a naked consciousness-raising workshop. But do it once and you’ll see what the Adonises and the Venuses of your halcyon days actually did with all that promise. The boy who was captain of everything, who strode the halls like a young Alexander; the girl with the glistening hair who memorized poetry and whose golden limbs danced across a stage as a Juliet no one would ever forget. Well, they’re both sorry, seedy never-was-es now. Their finest moments are behind them. Everything after that brilliant year at school or college was mediocrity. Nothing good ever came from peaking too early.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule. My advice to any child reading this: If you’re particularly good at the violin or math, for God’s sake don’t let anyone find out. Particularly your parents. If they know you’re good at stuff they’ll force you to do it forever. You’ll wake up and find yourself in a sweaty dinner jacket and clip-on bow tie playing “The Music of the Night” for the ten-thousandth time in an orchestra pit. Or you’ll be the fat, 40-ish accountant doing taxes for the people who spent their school days copping a feel and learning how to roll a good joint.

Limits of Time on Task

This was written by Alfie Kohn who is the author of 12 books including The Schools Our Children Deserve and the Homework Myth. His website can be found here and he tweets here. This post first appeared here.

by Alfie Kohn

Back “when experimental psychologists mainly studied words and nonsense syllables, it was thought that learning inevitably depended upon time,” a group of educational psychologists explained. But “subsequent research suggests that this belief is false.”[1]

Why? Let’s begin by conceding that the statement “People need time to learn things” is true. The problem is that it’s a trivial truth, one that doesn’t tell us much of practical value. On the other hand, the assertion “More time usually leads to better learning” is considerably more interesting. It’s also demonstrably false, however, because there are enough cases where more timedoesn’t lead to better learning. In the real world, the loose connection between these two variables doesn’t mean very much.

It’s hard to deny, for example, that lots of kids spend time in school looking at books, or listening to lectures, without getting much out of the experience. Would more of what the experts call “time on task” (ToT) be likely to make a difference? The answer to that question is so obvious that ToT proponents were forced some years ago to revise their original proposition. In the amended version, learning was said to improve in proportion to the quantity ofengaged time on task. But how do we help kids become engaged with what they’re doing? There’s been quite a lot written on creating classrooms that promote student engagement. These ideas pull us in a variety of directions, some more promising than others. But time is, at best, only one consideration among many. More to the point, compelling students to do more assignments -- at school or at home -- is not especially likely to maximize engaged time. The upshot is that in order for the idea of ToT to be of any use at all, it has to be refined in such a way that time, per se, is no longer the dominant concept.

Let’s look at the research a little more closely. The amount of time a student spends on a task “is not so consistently related to achievement as it may seem,” one scholar concluded from her review of several studies on the subject. “Time is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for learning. Learning takes time, but providing time does not in itself ensure that learning will take place. More time may result in more learning – if [lack of] adequate time was the major cause of the problem in the first place. If other factors were the real cause, then providing more time will not be an effective strategy.”[2]

Let’s come at the question from another direction. Instead of asking “Does more time for academics help?” maybe we should ask “Does more time for academics help more than other things we could do instead?” A Stanford University study compared four different reforms: peer tutoring, smaller classes, more use of computers, and adding an hour of instruction each day. The result: “On a cost-effectiveness basis, the time intervention was found to rank at the bottom with respect to improving student performance in mathematics and third out of the four [in reading].”[3]

Carole Ames, dean of the college of education at Michigan State University, points out that it isn’t “quantitative changes in behavior” – such as requiring students to spend more hours in front of books or worksheets – that help children to learn better. Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation.”[4] In turn, these attitudes and responses on the part of students emerge from the way teachers think about learning and, as a result, the ways they’ve organized their classrooms. If the goal is to figure out how best to cover a set curriculum – to fill students with facts – then it might seem appropriate to try to maximize ToT, such as by assigning homework or lengthening the school day or year. But that’s highly unlikely to have a positive effect on the critical variables that Ames identifies. Perhaps it makes sense to see education as being less about how much the teacher covers and more about what the students can be helped to discover. More time won’t do a thing to bring about that shift.

On an even more basic level, to think about providing more time for students to learn something is to sidestep the question of whether that something is worth learning. Suppose that extra hours after school really did make it more likely that children would be able to commit a list of dates or definitions to memory. If there isn’t a good reason to make students memorize something they’re likely to forget anyway (and which they can always look up if necessary), then the apparent advantage of more time wouldn’t mean very much. Of course, this invites us to ask what is worth learning, and how that should be decided. But my point is that a conversation on so crucial a topic is less likely to take place when we‘re focused on trying to maximize the amount of time spent on the tasks that comprise the current curriculum.

In fact, the nature of the task helps to determine the relationship between time and achievement. It turns out that more hours are least likely to produce better outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved. “How much is learned by rote is a direct function of time and effort,” acknowledges literacy expert Frank Smith. “But when the learning is meaningful we learn much faster. . . . Having to spend long periods of time in repetitive efforts to learn specific things is a sign that learning is not taking place, that we are not in a productive learning situation.”[5]

Sure enough, researchers have found that when children are taught to read by focusing on the meaning of the text (rather than primarily on phonetic skills), their learning does “not depend on amount of instructional time.”[6] In math, too, even the new-and-improved concept of “engaged” ToT is directly correlated to achievement only if both the activities and the measure of achievement are focused on rote recall. By contrast, there is no “linear positive relationship for higher level mathematics activities, including mathematical applications and problem solving.”[7]

Thus, claims that longer class days (or years) produce "better outcomes" or "higher achievement" should be met with skepticism even if they occasionally turn out to be true. If those phrases mean only that more time might improve standardized test results, that's very different from showing that it leads to better learning -- which, as we've seen, is less likely to be true (by more ambitious criteria). No wonder the folks who confuse higher test scores with better learning are also more likely to think kids should be made to spend more time doing the same stuff.


[For complete citations, please see The Homework Myth]

1. Anderson et al., p. 34.

2. Karweit, p. 33.

3. Levin 1984, p. 3.

4. Ames, p. 268.

5. Smith, p. 46. This view directly contradicts the widespread notion that education is always hard work – an idea that proceeds from a specific and usually unstated set of assumptions about what’s being taught, and how. Some kinds of curriculum, and some instructional techniques, can make learning unpleasant, but the unpleasantness isn’t inevitable.

6. Anderson et al., p. 34.

7. Putnam et al., p. 129. Note that this doesn’t mean ToT loses its relevance for mathematics in the later grades; it means it’s less important at all grades when the subject is taught in a way that emphasizes understanding.

Summer learning loss: What's true and what's false

This was written by Alfie Kohn who is the author of 12 books including The Schools Our Children Deserve and the Homework Myth. His website can be found here and he tweets here. This post first appeared here and also here.

by Alfie Kohn

The idea of summer learning loss -- the implication being that it’s risky to give kids a three-month vacation from school because they’ll forget everything they were taught -- has become the media’s favorite seasonally specific education topic. And that’s not just because they’re desperate for something to write about when school’s out. It’s a story we’re all predisposed to embrace because we’re already nervous about time off for children. It’s widely accepted, for example, that kids need to be doing some homework every night during the school year lest they find themselves gravitating to insufficiently constructive activities.

Experts who study creativity like to talk about doing and resting, painting and stepping back from the canvas, thinking about a problem and taking a break during which a new insight may sneak up when we’re not expecting it. (Recreation can mean re-creation.) If, on the other hand, we’re enamored of a factory model, then we’re going to be more concerned about productivity than imagination -- and, theologically speaking, more worried about idle hands being the devil’s tools. Busyness becomes an end in its own right. We frown when our kids waste time and feel a little ashamed when we ourselves are guilty of it.[1]

I shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that when I’ve raised questions about the practice of assigning homework on a regular basis, the most common challenge I’ve faced isn’t related to the putative academic benefits (which, incidentally, research generally fails to support)[2] but to the prospect that children will just misspend all that time on Facebook or video games. It’s kind of interesting, when you think about it: No teacher ever admits to assigning busywork, but this defense of homework itself has nothing to do with the value of the assignments; the point is just to keep kids busy.

It’s predictable, then, that we’d be disinclined to let children chill just because it’s hot out. We’re primed and ready to respond when someone claims that all the progress students have made during the school year will be lost forever if they’re allowed to slack off during the summer. It’s a Sisyphusean metaphor buried in our DNA: The minute you let up in your efforts to roll that rock toward the summit, well, you know what happens. “L’école d’été pour tous les enfants!”

What does the research say? Is there any truth to the summer loss claim? Yes. But it’s more limited than is generally acknowledged and it doesn’t point to the solution that’s most commonly endorsed.

First of all, whatever kind of loss does occur, at least in reading skills, is directly related to students’ socioeconomic status. Low-income children are affected disproportionately -- to the point that a good part of what is classified as the achievement gap can be explained, statistically speaking, by class-based differences in what happens over the summer. The “summer shortfall…[of] low-SES youth…relative to better-off children contributes to the perpetuation of family advantage and disadvantage across generations.”[3] That’s very different from sweeping claims about learning, per se, being something that’s inevitably lost when you take a break.

Second, to the extent that low-income kids are likely to lose ground in reading proficiency, Richard Allington, who specializes in this very issue, points out that summer school (and summer homework assignments) aren’t necessary or even sensible. Rather, he and his colleagues have shown that the key is to ensure “easy and continuing access to self-selected books for summer reading”[4] -- a solution that’s not only a lot cheaper than summer school but a lot less likely to cause kids’ interest in learning to evaporate in a sweltering classroom.

Third, in evaluating the nature and extent of the problem, it’s important to keep in mind that virtually all of the research, like almost all talk about the achievement gap itself, is limited to what shows up on standardized tests. Here’s the question we should be asking: “Is there still a summer loss problem when we use more meaningful assessments, or is it an artifact of exams that we already know to be deeply misleading (and to have bias built into them in various ways)?” The answer is: We just don’t know. For the time being, then, we should refer to the phenomenon as “summer loss on standardized tests.”

Finally, even within standardized test measures, summer loss mostly applies to “factual and procedural knowledge” such as “math computation and spelling skills,” according to the 1996 meta-analysis that’s still the most widely cited source on the topic.[5] This echoes what we know about the whole idea of “time on task,” which turns out to have a much less significant relationship to learning outcomes when those outcomes are intellectually ambitious. More time reliably leads to higher achievement mostly when the task involves very little thinking.

As progressive educators have been pointing out for a long time, one of the flaws of traditional instruction is that it consists of transmitting a bunch of facts and skills to students, which they then promptly forget. Summer loss thus should be seen not as a sad but inescapable truth about education, but as one more indictment of traditional education, with its reliance on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, grades, tests, and homework -- all employed in the service of making students cram bits of knowledge into their short-term memories. (And how absurd to think that the solution to this predictable forgetting is to give students more of the same!)

By the time September rolls around, kids may indeed be unable to recall what they were told in April: the distance between the earth and the moon, or the definition of a predicate, or the approved steps for doing long division. But they’re much less likely to forget how to set up an experiment to test their own hypothesis (if they had the chance to do science last spring), or how to write sentences that elicit a strong reaction from a reader (if they were invited to play with prose with that goal in mind), or what it means to divide one number into another (if they were allowed to burrow into the heart of mathematical principles rather than being turned into carbon-based calculators).

Summer learning loss? It’s just a subset of life learning loss -- when the learning was dubious to begin with.

NOTES

1. For a refreshing perspective on this issue, see Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,” New York Times, June 30, 2012.

2. See my book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), especially chapter 2.

3. Karl L. Alexander et al., “Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 175.

4. Richard L. Allington et al., “Addressing Summer Reading Setback Among Economically Disadvantaged Elementary Students,” Reading Psychology 31 (2010): 423.

5. Harris Cooper et al., “The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores,” Review of Educational Research66 (1996): 260.

Healthy Homework Guidelines

"Homework may be the single greatest extinguisher of children's curiosity that we have yet invented."

--Alfie Kohn

The academic piece of their day is one part what they need, they also need time for fresh air and exercise, they need time for friends and family.

We are looking at kids not only in terms of academic growth but we are also interested in their growth artistically, emotionally, physically and socially. We want kids to develop in all kinds of ways.

HOMEWORK: THE DOWNSIDE

No research has ever found any benefit to assigning homework before kids are in high school. Even in high school there isn't a strong reason to that kids that got no homework at all would be at any kind of intellectual disadvantage.

Homework contributes to the gap between the rich and the poor. Some kids go home to well educated parents, access to all kinds of resources. Other kids go home to parents who may work at night, no Internet access, to parents who might speak a second language that can't help them with the homework. So the inequalities that exist in our society are actually magnified by the practice of homework.

MOVING FORWARD: HEALTHY HOMEWORK GUIDELINES

Guideline 1

If we are going to have homework at all, it must be about promoting real learning. In other words, 6 hours a day of academics is enough except on those occasions where the teacher can make a strong case that a given assignment is likely to help kids become deeper thinkers who are more excited about learning.

Guideline 2

We want to make sure that any homework that is assigned is student directed. Kids tend to learn better when they've had some say in what they've done. Some assignments that might make sense would include having kids read books of their own choosing.

Guideline 3

We need to focus on a balanced schedule. Kids should have a chance to just chill-out and be kids.

***

On Wednesday, June 20th, the "Race to Nowhere" Team, as well as education and homework expert Alfie Kohn, Sara Bennett and Etta Kralovec presented Healthy Homework Guidelines to the National Parent Teachers Association in hopes of gaining their endorsement.


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Dear homework: Family time is family time, so jog on!

Imagine this:

A mother who has been sober for 6 months decides that she wants to dedicate herself to being a mom for her 8 year old daughter. Both have fetal alcohol syndrome and require a number of supports if they are to make a go at life together.

You can imagine the difficulties that could and would challenge both mother and daughter and their attempts to stay together as a family. While it's true that child welfare can play a supporting role, they are also there to intervene -- it would not be out of the realm of possibility to see these difficulties challenge this family to the extent where mother and daughter are no longer together.

Out of all the challenges that could place this family's unity in jeopardy, what if homework was at the top of the list? What if homework was causing so much friction between mother and daughter that their was talk amongst their child welfare workers that perhaps the daughter might need to be placed in foster care?

What would you suggest?

I know what I suggested. If homework is rupturing the relationship between mother and child to the point that their living together as a family is jeopardized, then perhaps we should seriously consider no longer assigning the homework.

I realize that this is an extreme example, but I think there's a lot to learn from this story.

Who the hell gave school the right to tell families how they will spend their evenings and weekends? Who the hell gave school the right to draft parents as supervisors and enforcers for the school's agenda?

Research has shown that 3 out 4 adults were at one time children. And when we were children, we experienced first hand how frustrating, exhausting and pointless homework often was. Even if it coud be proven that homework had non-academic value (which it doesn't) or academic value (which it doesn't), parents still have the moral high ground to reject homework all together for three reasons:

1. Teachers and parents need to respect some distinct lines of authority. Teachers would not appreciate having parents micro-manage how they do their jobs, and so teachers need to respect that parents are in charge of their family's evenings and weekends.
2. We all want our children to develop intellectually and academically, but we also want them to develop in other ways such as socially and physically. Homework by definition does not acknowledge or respect this -- homework trumps this balance.
3. Family time is family time. Period. Full stop. 

Kids go to school for 6 hours or more, whatever the school needs the children to do can be done at school. The rest of their day and night should be spent pursuing other interests. No second shift is necessary.

Opt-out of homework

Over the years, I've had many conversations with people who lament over how homework ruptures their relationships with their children.

My daughter Kayley is starting kindergarten next September and as her parent and first teacher I take my responsibility for nurturing her love for learning very seriously.

Here is an opt-out of homework letter that first appeared on Alfie Kohn's website here:

Dear [name of teacher],

First of all, I'd like to tell you how pleased I am that you're Sandy’s teacher this year. Sandy experiences you as very kind, which couldn't be more important to me.

I respect you as my child's teacher, so I want to take the time to tell you why I'm going to pull Sandy out of the homework program this year. I know that homework is routine in first grade, but the more I've thought about the issue and watched the effects of homework on both of my own children, the more convinced I am that it isn't right for Sandy. . . .

I'm sensitive to your concern that learning be supported at home, and I intend to do this as best I can. I know that the easiest students to teach are the curious, interested, motivated ones, and examples of things we'll do at home to foster those qualities might include: finding a weird spider outside, looking up its scientific name and feeding habits and making a "home" for it in a Tupperware container or talking about why we should set it free; reading books every night before bed; planning and cooking a meal together; counting all the change in my pocket and then going out for ice cream; telling stories; writing letters to grandparents and friends; and taking pictures of all the critters we find in the ocean when we go to Mexico and sending them to class to share. Again, I'm interested in supporting Sandy’s learning. I'm just worried that homework provokes anxiety and often gets in the way of family activities and the kind of play (and downtime necessary to develop an internal life!) that help make Sandy such a cool, funny kid.

Please do let me know if there is an assignment such as interviewing a family member -something that simply couldn't be done at school but that is important to the things you're doing in class - and we'll be happy to work on that together. Please also let me know if you have any questions or concerns about my decision, or if you notice Sandy feeling "left out" when homework folders are pulled out - I'm sure we can figure out some way around that. I'm happy to talk - in person or by email if that is more convenient for you.


Have a great year!

Alfie Kohn is coming to Calgary

WHO: Alfie Kohn

WHAT: The Homework Myth

WHEN: Thursday, May 10. 7:00 pm

WHERE: Calgary, Alberta. Murray Fraser Hall (University of Calgary). Lecture Theater #162

WHY: Because too many kids get too much of a bad thing.

HOW: Tickets can be purchased for $35.00 here.




Here are all of my blog posts on why we need to rethink homework.




Here are a number articles by Kohn on Homework:

Rethinking Homework

Studies Support Rewards, Homework, and Traditional Teaching. Or Do They?

"But I Need to Assign Homework! Look at All I Have to Cover!"

Abusing Research: The Study of Homework and Other Examples

The Truth About Homework

Changing the Homework Default

Down with Homework

Kids may be right: Homework stinks

Interview with Alfie Kohn about homework

If it's harmful, get rid of it

Here is a guest post that was written by Lisa Cooley. She blogs here.

by Lisa Cooley

Let's think about those school practices that have actually been proven to be harmful to kids. Not big-picture issues this time; let's think of the littler stuff that is very big in the eyes of the kids who are subjected to it.

1. Homework. Get rid of it. Elementary grades: we should be giving none at all. Middle and high grades: only stuff that is supported by research. Don't make kids work a second shift. Do we really have any idea the happiness this would bring to so many kids? Instant good will on the part of children, with accompanying positive impact on learning.

2. Extrinsic motivation. Snuff it out. No more lollipops for "good behavior," no more rewards for conforming to adults' expectations. Again, check out the research. All negative. Dump it.

3. Early start times for adolescents. Do you need to see any more research? Our high schools are full of zombies half asleep, half awake, all miserable. Let them sleep. It won't kill us.

4. Ban on cell phones. If you can't hold their attention in competition with a cell, that's not their problem.

5. Ban on social media. Kids have the world at their fingertips...except in school. Figure out how to connect your classes to the world. Better still, let kids do it.

6. Stop making them wait to go to the bathroom when they have to go.

7. Stop the ban on food in the classroom. When kids are hungry, they should eat.

8. Let them play. Let them hang out. Let them socialize.

9. Better lunch food, with kids playing a role in researching and deciding on menus.

Easy peasy, right? Send me your ideas on ways to make kids happier in school, starting right now.

The Homework Trap

Kenneth Goldberg, a clinical psychologist with 35 years of professional experience in dealing with many different psychological issues. He has worked with children, adolescents and adults.

In his post The homework trap and what to do about it, he writes about three adjustments that are crucial for what he calls homework-trapped children:

1. Time-bound homework. Just like school starts and stops by the clock, define homework as a fixed period of time. See what the child can do in a reasonable amount of time and work with that child on using the time well.

2. Reduced penalties. Zeros factored in 25 percent of the grade is too harsh of a penalty to alter behavior. Lesser consequences will prove more effective in both mobilizing the child and allowing the parent to approach the issue calmly.

3. Respect lines of authority. Teachers are in charge of their classrooms. Parents should tread lightly when it comes to telling them what to do. Parents are the people in charge of their homes; teachers should not tell parents how to organize their homes. Ultimately, when decisions are to be made about behaviors in the home (i.e. homework), the parent needs to be the one with the final say.

For more on rethinking Homework, check out this page.

Is reading good homework?

I am a strong advocate for rethinking homework. I would go so far as to say that most homework assignments are not worth the teacher's or student's time or effort. A lot of homework is busy work.

Upon saying this, I've often been confronted with a very good question: is reading good homework?

It depends. I see homework as something to be inspired not assigned.

Whatever we ask children to do, be it at school or not, we must first ask "how will this affect this child's desire to go on learning?"

The child who can read but chooses not to holds no advantage over the child who can't read.

To stave off the development of a generation of alliterates (those who can read but largely choose not to) we need to care about whether children want to read at least as much as whether they can.

It's not good enough to simply say we will make kids read at home. We have to ensure they like it.

Homework's misinformation campaign

After listening to Radio Boston's show on homework that featured Janine Bempechat and Alfie Kohn, I was horrified to hear Bempehat's closing words:

In all the complaints about homework what I hear is a subtext of people feeling sorry that children have academic work to do and I think pity is the kiss of death where children's learning is concerned.

Upon hearing this, I emailed Alfie Kohn to ask him how he would have replied to Bempechat's concluding words. With his permission, here is Kohn's response.

By Alfie Kohn

This is one of those statements or practices where offering any reaction seems pointless. (Another is the latest example of a school that has created a caste system by assigning color-coded IDs based on test scores. A third is the parenting style of Amy "Tiger Mother" Chua.) It's hard to imagine that anyone who wasn't horrified could be persuaded by anything one might say in response.

The background with Bempechat is that she wrote an article several years ago claiming that homework promotes self-discipline, independence, responsibility, and other nonacademic advantages. She cited four sources, giving the impression that they offered proof. I checked out all four. Not only did none of them contain any data to support her claim; none cited any other sources that contained data. I wrote to her twice to ask about this discrepancy and received no reply.

But misleading empirical claims turn out to be the least of it, as her subsequent writing reveals. Take these sentences. First, she collapses a slew of objections to homework into the single straw-man claim that anyone who offers objections is really against having students make an effort to succeed at academic tasks. Second, she tries to reframe compassion for children, empathy, concern for their well-being, or efforts to join them in opposing pointless or onerous assignments, as "pity" -- which sets her up to dismiss this response as not being in children's best interest. Again we have an absurd false-dichotomy: we pity and coddle them, or we make them do what they're told.

If we must traffic in dichotomies, though, I'd much rather entrust children to those who feel pity than to those who are pitiless.

By the way, the job of homework critics would be a lot easier if all defenses of homework were as heartless and mindless as Bempechat's.

My response to Ron Clark

I read a lot of articles on education. Some of them are insightful and some of them are not. Here's an article written by Ron Clark that I believe falls short of insightful. At best the messages delivered by Clark are unhelpful and at worst they may be harmful.

Early on the article points out a need for parents to trust teachers.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, "Is that true?" Well, of course it's true. I just told you. And please don't ask whether a classmate can confirm what happened or whether another teacher might have been present. It only demeans teachers and weakens the partnership between teacher and parent.

But then at the end, Clark writes:

If your child said something happened in the classroom that concerns you, ask to meet with the teacher and approach the situation by saying, "I wanted to let you know something my child said took place in your class, because I know that children can exaggerate and that there are always two sides to every story. I was hoping you could shed some light for me."

Can you see how I might be unsettled?

When it's the teacher saying something, Clark doesn't see any need for further inquiry, and yet when the student says something, the parent needs to get "both sides to the story". The best teachers know that there are "two sides to every story" even the ones teachers tell. What Clark may be missing here is that the best teachers leave their omnipotence at home.

Some of the strongest school memories any of us hold well into our adult lives are the times we were wronged by a teacher. This isn't to suggest the best teachers never wrong children -- Because they are human, despite their best efforts, they inevitably will do wrong. The best and worst educators are prone to error but the difference is that the strongest educators understand this -- the weakest ones deny it.

Next, Clark tries to tug at the heart strings of teachers by indicting a child for neglecting their summer homework:

And if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them. I was talking with a parent and her son about his summer reading assignments. He told me he hadn't started, and I let him know I was extremely disappointed because school starts in two weeks. 

His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they'd been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn't help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some "fun time" during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn't his fault the work wasn't complete.

Can you feel my pain?

Some parents will make excuses regardless of the situation, and they are raising children who will grow into adults who turn toward excuses and do not create a strong work ethic. If you don't want your child to end up 25 and jobless, sitting on your couch eating potato chips, then stop making excuses for why they aren't succeeding. Instead, focus on finding solutions.

 Clark would like our first question to be: Why isn't the parent making sure this homework gets done?

But my first question is: Why is the teacher assigning homework over the summer?

Frankly, I'm skeptical of whether the teacher should have a say over what a child does during family time in the evening let alone whether the school should be allowed to dictate what a child does over the summer.

My second question is: Where's the research that shows if kids don't do their summer homework (or any homework at all) that they will end up 25, jobless, sitting on their parent's couch eating potato chips? The fact is there isn't a shred of evidence to support that there are any non-academic benefits to homework, and there isn't any evidence of to support academic benefits homework before high school.

These kinds of scare tactics do nothing but bully parents and children into doing things school forces families to do, like homework, that has no justification.

My objections to articles like this one can be summarized by Robert Fried:

Within the culture of failing schools one is likely to find that staff inertia and a penchant for victim-blaming prevail.

And by Pedro Noguera:

Many schools are plagued with a culture of failure where failure is normalized and predictable, and over time the adults come to blame the kids and their families. When this is the prevailing logic in a school that school will never improve.

When professionals like educators and nurses develop their beliefs based on blaming the very people they are to serve and work with, Robert Fried explains that "people stop thinking in new ways, they filter out evidence that might challenge old biases, and they stop reading in their field."

In other words, progress is plagued by a kind of professional paralysis.

The ultimate consequence of paralysis is that we spend less time focusing on meeting the needs of our students and more time complaining and feeling sorry for ourselves. Under these circumstances, the passionate educator that lies inside us all goes into hiding.

The funny thing about scapegoats is that they are always those with less power, and in education, those with the least power will always be the kids.

Mission Impossible Theory of Homework

Homework is a contentious issue. If you want to spark a debate among parents, teachers and students simply ask the question: How do you feel about homework?

Regardless of your opinion (or mine) on the matter, we need to at least ask the question.

My less radical feeling towards homework is that we should alter the default from homework assigned on a daily basis, regardless of need or context, to homework being assigned only when it makes sense to do so.

My more radical response is that homework is something to be inspired, not assigned. And that the only time homework makes any kind of sense is when the students have a say. I call this the Mission Impossible Theory of Homework. It goes like this:

You're homework, if you choose to accept it...

Critics might say that this is offering kids a blank cheque - but this is not the case. The point here is that like all optimal learning environments, the learner would have at least as much say in the homework as the teacher. Allowing the students to have all the say in homework would be as unfair and inappropriate as granting the teachers all the say.

Critics might also say that if the kids have a say in the homework, they might never do it. To this I have a couple responses. Firstly, such an assumption takes a disturbingly cynical and dark view of children -- one that perhaps tells us less about the nature of the child and more about the attitude of the adult. Secondly, if the learner would never do the homework with out some kind of coercion, then this might require a second look at what we are asking the kids to do. I've seen a lot of horrendous homework assignments that few members of the human race would want to do on their own free will.

Perhaps you whole-heartedly agree. Perhaps you vehemently oppose. Maybe we merely quibble over a turn of phrase. To what degree we see eye-to-eye on this issue is beside the point. Disagreement through dialogue is healthy - and perhaps the only way we ever get anything done. What concerns me is when a whole school-year goes by and these kinds of discussions are unheard of.

The homework monster

The next time a proponent of homework says that they have to assign homework because they simply do not have time to cover all of the curriculum, ask them how much time would be sufficient. Ask them how much time are they shy? Ask them how much time would they require in order to properly get through all that is asked of them via the mandated curriculum.

There are likely two kinds of answers.

One answer is that they won't have a quantifiable number - which implies no amount of time would satisfy the insatiable appetite of the curriculum and homework monsters. If this is the case, perhaps we should rethink the entire idea of homework and maybe even curriculum.

Second is that whatever answer in minutes or hours they give will likely be less than the actual hours, days and even weeks of homework their students are actually assigned.

My point here is that we are not nearly mindful enough about the kind and amount of homework that is doled out to kids. It takes mere seconds for a teacher to assign it, but infinitely more blood, sweat and tears from children and their families to to carry out such homework requests.

Race to Nowhere: Panel Discussion in Atlanta

Here is my favorite clip from Alfie Kohn while on a discussion panel about The Race to Nowhere:

It drives me nuts when I see schools offer stress coping strategies - we'll give you a hand parents and kids at putting up with the stuff we are forcing your kids to do that has no justification. In other words, it's like a factory that's pumping pollutants into the air but is happy to distribute respirators to the neighbours. We need to shut off the pollution at it's source. 

One example is homework.  

A second example is AP courses which represent typically the worst form of instruction but accelerated. Lecture driven. Why would we assume AP courses are ideal? Because we assume that if it is harder it must be better. And in fact many of these course are lecture driven, textbook based, and oriented ultimately not to help kids think like scientists or historians but merely getting a four or a five on an exam. So even good AP teachers are teaching badly. That's why some of the best high schools, public and private in the country, have eliminated all AP courses and replaced them with rich engaging courses. For more on that see www.independentcurriculum.org.

Race to Nowhere: Atlanta Panel Discussion from Vicki Abeles on Vimeo.