Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.
Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!
So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.
There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.
“homework is fascist”-posting except it’s real instead of a joke
Why homework? Because the children must learn to struggle for the sake of struggle, weeding out the undisciplined and allowing the strongest wills to rise to power.
Because kids need to be able to read and do basic math and yes they should have the discipline to do something they don’t necessarily like to improve themselves.
The literature does not support that homework is an effective way to accomplish those goals.
really because I found sources that do support it
research shows that it does help
as this article points out the way homework is assigned and set plays a key role and even suggests that abolishing homework would make the class differences in education worse as less supportive backgrounds are more likely to lack in other forms of educational enrichment at home
Quote from one of the articles, which ignores Germand and French studies and literature on the topic of the last 30 years.
which article are you quoting there. Because I read those articles and what kind of homework is assigned was highlighted often
for example in the first linked article
and
Your links are literally top search results for “does homework help students learn?”. These aren’t peer reviews research and digging through their cited links for about half an hour I could only find one peer reviewed source.
The first page from a UK nonprofit says right at the top that the evidence for efficacy is low and if you go to the section that supposedly links supporting evidence, it links to another page on flipped classrooms, which is a different strategy that is research-based and literally supports my claim. Not engaging with that one further.
The Duke article doesn’t list the actual name of the study, but I managed to find it with some digging. Here’s a Scihub link:
The Forbes article is pretty nuanced and while I agree that there’s potential for slightly more nuance than “all homework is always bad for every student forever”, I don’t think she’s making the case you think she is and even if she was, her citations are mostly blogs or random pages which themselves do not cite sources. That’s a recursive link hell I’m not diving into any more than I have.
I’m planning on posting some peer reviewed articles later tonight and I’ll be sure to add them here.
What you say the goal is is not reached by homework. If you are a scientific socialist and materialist I urge you to follow the current discourse on the abolishment of homework. The second part is just grinding for capitalist overlords and isn’t achieved with homework either.
I think a little bit of self motivation is important outside of providing value for others.
Especially as somebody who recommends people read long, old political books.
Also my mom was an elementary teacher for 40 years and I’ve got a kid that just started second grade, they deffinitly need some homework to do without being coached through it to learn to do it themselves they should just have enough time to do that during school hours.
So supervised exercises.