Reply to Why do parents think it's ok to toss out homework? What do teachers think of this?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]No - school is for school. Home time is for family values. And please repeat with me again: research shows no benefit for early elementary homework.[/quote]

Repeat after me: You're an idiot.

Your precious research has found that low social economic children do not do as well in school as others. Why? Because researchers have found parental involvement directly influences students grades... like homework. [/quote]

Parental involvement helps, but homework doesn't.   Many lower income kids don't have a parent home in the evening at all to help with anything, much less homework.  They are often out working a different shift job.   They may not speak English.  They may have chronic health issues.  They may be trying to figure out how to feed their kids, and certainly homework is a lower priority than that.   Gaithersburg Elementary, with an 83% FARMS rate, eliminated all homework three years ago.   The Principal asks the kids to read for 30 minutes each evening instead.   This takes things the school can't control -- home environment -- out of the instructional and grading equations -- and levels the playing field just a bit more.

The type of parental involvement that helps kids much more than a parent helping or overseeing homework is reading to and with them, exposing kids to enrichment activities like museums, music lessons, doing other home learning activities, and guiding exposure to media, etc.  A kid is going to learn a lot more, and a lot better, if you help her build a compost bin and use it, than she would doing a worksheet on the environment.   And if a family has limited time at home, and chooses the compost bin over the worksheet, then I think that's a wise choice.

I don't think anyone on here is talking about NEVER doing homework.  But I think many recognize that it doesn't have real value in the early grades.  And depending on whatever the family's priorities are for a particular evening, homework may not be one of them.  [/quote]

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