LA schools; Homework is racist
ROS and Eleven-Bravo sent us a link to the LA Times which makes the case for reducing homework in LA schools because it’s keeping students back, somehow from something;
For while the days of actual Jim Crow laws in California may be gone, Latino and African-American school children are profoundly segregated and at a serious disadvantage.
Imagine how segregated they’re going to feel when they get culled out of the herd of employable people because they think they can bitch and get a lesser work load out in the real world (not to be confused with the MTV show).
From LAWeekly Blogs;
Based on the theory that homework is more likely to be completed by kids with a secure home life and involved parents — aka, the white middle class — LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student’s grade, beginning next month.
“The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population,” writes the Los Angeles Times today.
Yeah, less education is the answer to the myriad urban problems.
Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn’t have his own room and his mother baby-sits young children at night. “They’re always there and they’re always loud,” he said, explaining his challenges with homework.
Not at all like a workplace, huh? It’s funny, but many educators have discovered that every time they make demands on a student, the student at least meets those new challenges…and students who aren’t challenged also meet those expectations.
And they wonder why the world thinks Americans are unemployable.
It’s hard to do homework when you’re still up selling crack or whatever at 1:00 AM.
Wouldn’t put too much into what an indian tech CEO says. For a battle you may or may not be aware of, check out
http://www.techinsurgent.com
To see how India is contributing to the destruction of the American middle class.
I have to admit, I’d love to have seen this when I was in school. I was the kid that never did the homework but always passed the tests. Needless to say I failed a lot of classes in K-12. The emphasis on homework on the grading matrix is put in place to allow stupid people to pass classes and shitty teachers to skate on having to actually teach their students the material. The reasoning here is dumb but I think there’s real benefit to getting back to a place here your grade is reflective of your knowledge of the course material and not the amount of busy work you’re willing to do.
Crap, that was me on #3.
I used to be a recruiter in those areas. To say that I was saddened to see how crappy the schools were there would be an understatement.
Bell HS, for example, had 2500 freshmen, and 600 seniors. That’s right, nearly 75 percent of the kids had dropped out and of those who did manage to graduate, they were woefully unprepared for college or the workforce.
Single sets of textbooks, dumbed down curriculum, the list goes on. But hey, they had literally HUNDREDS of administrators in LAUSD who were making over $200K a year. But of course, it was “for the children,” and after having seen what it’s REALLY used for, the use of the phrase never fails to sicken me.
The continued dumbing down of America by the “education” system.
Not everyone needs to do the homework to learn the material. But, just like anything else people do (to include sports), sometimes it takes practice to master a skill. That’s what homework is for. Restriction homework will be counterproductive for those student who desperately need the practice in order to succeed.
The parents of the students that care will have their kids doing more homework/practice, whatever you want to call it. The parents that don’t care won’t even check to see if the reduced amount is done. The result will be that the parents/kids that don’t care will still end up at the bottom, early drop-outs and soon to be either guests of the state or living off the state (or having an interim stint of street corner capitalism).
Idiocracy at it’s finest.
Don’t give the kids a place to study or the option to complete homework on campus after hours or anything. Just take the homework away.
That is regoddamndiculously brilliant.
Oh….and my daughter just finished Kindergarten. She was doing homework once or twice a week.
Oh, but I guess she doesn’t count because she’s white. Never mind that our black neighbors have a child attending a private university and another moving to Atlanta to attend college there. I guess they’re just a houseload of ‘Uncle Tom’s’…….
I wonder if these bastions of Progressivism are creating a workforce of human mules fit only for manual labor on purpose? Like slaves, but without the label.
Tell ya what, I’m now seeing first-hand what even supposedly decent educational systems consider good these days.
The girlfriend’s daughter is in 4th grade. She’s making “A’s” in math but can’t do simple fractions or multiplication of them. Of course, had she never done any homework or brought any home, we’d be none the wiser and with her report cards, thinking she was all that and a bag of chips.
Needless to say, based on that and some other exposed areas of weakness, she’s going to be doing a lot less X-Box and a lot more of the 3 R’s.
NoSoOld, it is not busy work. It is the job. How many idiotic things have you had to do in your career? Part of homework is teaching the material – learn by doing. Part of it is teaching kids that sometimes you have to do it because somebody said so. Another part of it is time management, learning how you do things and about how long it will take you. Granted, sometimes it is useless. However, the reasons for limiting it are pure stupidity.
Forget about fractions or multiplication or skills that make you a valuable employee.
The Obama Administration is focused on what’s really important in public schools:
http://www.cnsnews.com/cnsnewstv/v/93691
re #13
Well that’s part of a fundamental question of what public schools are for. Are they to instruct in academic curriculum or are they to socialize children and teach them how to function as an individual? While I have a foot in both camp I always felt it must be the primary responsibility of public education to instruct academic curriculum and the primary responsibly of the family unit to instruct social vales and personal responsibility. I know that teaching things like study skills, time management and research techniques are important to success in higher education but I also feel the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. When open book homework constitutes as much as 70-80% of a grade you create an environment where children are not actually forced to learn anything in order to pass classes and graduate from school. It creates an environment where we have senior classes where 40-50% are borderline illiterate and lacking in even basic, survival mathematics skills.
I’m sorry, I was under the impression learning to self-motivate and work for yourself were good things.
Silly ROS.
I almost got stuck attending LAUSD schools once, then the old man got bur under his blanket and moved us to Montana..Hmmm.
Once again the soft racism of low expectations.
Since I teach in LAUSD at a middle school where this policy is targeted, I want to let your readers know that I don’t have a conflict with the new homework policy in respect to the students I work with. And I certainly am not for “dumbing” anyone down. I work very hard to lift students up. Last year, I weighted homework for 15% of the grade. Lowering the percentage next year just means that tests and classwork – more rigorous demonstrations of knowledge – will count more toward their final grade. What’s wrong with that? My classroom tests are a far more reliable measure of what a student has learned than the homework brought to school each day. As with adults, kids get out what they put in. Rather than denigrating my students’ home culture, let’s focus on how we can help kids get more out of the time they are in the public school setting.