<p>"How do you think this would go over in the United States? French President Fran</p>
<p>For the U.S., it’d more likely be a story in The Onion.</p>
<p>I believe I read that French students go to school until late afternoon - like 5:30 PM - if that’s true, that may also be a reason.</p>
<p>The article said 8:30-4:30 is usual (some students stay later.) But they only go to school 4 days a week. They are talking about increasing to 4.5 days.</p>
<p>This is from the country where it’s mandated 5 weeks vacation, + 2 weeks if you work 39 hours a week, + 10 holidays… Oh to be French…</p>
<p>Banning all homework would never work in the US, but it is a shame that a very workable aternative cannot be implemented because we sold our academic souls to the NEA and AFT. </p>
<p>The alternative? Two to three hours of teachers led study rooms. No teacher takes work home. No kid takes work home. </p>
<p>No more excuses. And no more pretenses of long evenings of work. </p>
<p>But complete utopia.</p>
<p>I would favor eliminating homework through middle school. I have been told by elementary school teachers that homework is really just to keep kids away from tv and other distractions. I think it’s healthier for younger kids to have free time, and family life is greatly affected by homework. Kids can read on their own, play, make things…In middle school, so much is going on with young bodies and minds that I would be happy if they just ate and slept!</p>
<p>In high school, there is a lot of reading involved, so that is hard to do in school. However, I do like the idea of the flipped classroom (introduced by Kahn Academy; at least, that is where I first heard it) where kids read the lesson and then do the work in class, and a teacher can help them.</p>
<p>Here in the U.S., everything is about the “race to the top.” Start early, cram as much into a day as you can, succeed. I don’t think quality of education really results, in the end, and that more down time would help maintain creativity and inner resources that are needed for life.</p>
<p>Cram as much as one can could be greatly reduced by dropping a lot of the filler time and BS activities. </p>
<p>Again wishful thinking and utopia. Too bad because it would be nice to see how schools stack up when ALL the instruction HAS to come within the four corners of the school and given by … the teachers. We know that without parental assistance and hired mercenaries, the result would be abysmal, but we cannot hope to rebuild our education system until we really realize how abysmal it is.</p>
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<p>Ha! I was able to complete my homework with perfect marks while taking in my daily dose of afternoon cartoons like Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny, and the Transformers. And this was while attending a Catholic elementary school as the local public school students’ homework was less in quantity and rigor. </p>
<p>If that was the purpose of elementary school homework…it certainly failed with everyone I knew in my NYC neighborhood and among classmates in middle/high school…including the academic superstars. They also had no problems completing elementary school homework while watching the weekday afternoon cartoons.</p>
<p>compmom – I totally agree!</p>
<p>Like it’s really going to make a difference? So you don’t have formal assignment. That just frees up more time for the affluent parents to get extra help for their kids! If the homework is meaningful, and supports what is learned in class, and the kids are performing at an appropriate level, parental assistance shouldn’t make a difference.</p>
<p>meaningful homework is the key…kids should be spending more time outside, exercising, exploring, being a kid.</p>
<p>Ugh. If I had it to do all over again, I would do everything I could to try and homeschool my kids through elementary and maybe even through junior high.</p>
<p>I hate what’s happening in public schools.</p>
<p>It’s all “homework”.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine what my son would do without homework. He has a lot of reading assigned and I don’t think his education would be complete without it.</p>
<p>Also, maybe he’s not as bright as some, because he requires practice in the spelling of words in his foreign language, and in some math topics, as well. He also has writing assignments on a regular basis that I think have improved his writing ability, as well. I guess some kids, like mine, require practice to perfect various academic skills.</p>
<p>I know there’s something wrong with how homework is made. Assigning too many is a major problem encountered by so many. And I believe it is OK to assign homework but we have to be careful in how to design homework.</p>
<p>Now, if homework was part of multi-subject projects, homework is better.</p>
<p>I don’t see a problem with homework. Kids have more than 3 “free” months per year on vacations/break. That is enough for them to “be kids”.</p>
<p>If you read carefully the idea of the French president, it is repugnant, in my opinion, because of its reasoning: since not all parents are active in monitoring and helping their children to study hard and keep update in their learning process, it is unfair that kids from problematic/irresponsible families are handicapped academically while children of involved/caring parents get all the support they need at home.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, this is the sort of policy aimed to correct a problem that affects only part of the student body (students with parents that don’t care about their education) by obliging all other students to take part on this social experiment. And it hurts the children of parents that, for instance, would be extremely attentive to their kids’ homework at home, or that would hire private tutors to help their kids get ahead of the pack.</p>
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<p>Au contraire, mon cher!</p>
<p>There is nothing repugnant about the proposal. At least not as repugnant as our continuing desire to avoid looking at the problems that besiege OUR system of education. And our acceptance that success in today’s school is predicated on the … availability of parents (or hired mercenaries) to complement the failed education delivered during the day. Homework/busywork, by itself, is not the bigger issue; the expectation that parents and others are expected to shore up the multiple deficiencies is. </p>
<p>In the US, we have accepted a quasi-monopolistic system that gives government-ran schools the exclusive control of our education. The “deal” is that in exchange of such monopoly, our public schools should educate everyone. While the officials usually use that platform to dismiss the potential competition, the reality is that they only educate the ones who are easy to educate or rely on substantial help from outside the schools. </p>
<p>The patterns are clear. Students in the USA start ahead of the pack by the time they enter organized schooling, stay afloat through the middle of middle school, and then all wheels fall off, including massive dropouts and poorly prepared graduates. </p>
<p>The reason is quite simple: ineffective teaching. Taking the training wheels and crutches provided by out of school education should go a long way to correctly measure the depths of the problems, and start making the necessary adjustments to this tragedy.</p>
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<p>Thanks for making my point!</p>
<p>"I hate what’s happening in public schools.</p>
<p>It’s all “homework”. "</p>
<p>I agree. The best thing we ever did for our kid was send him to a private for high school. I only wish we had sent him in 6th grade.</p>
<p>I see no reason to have homework in elementary school and very little reason in middle. Most was nothing more than busy work.</p>
<p>I should also add banning homework…even in elementary/middle school won’t go over well with many immigrant parents who feel the US K-12 system, on average, is extremely lax academically. </p>
<p>Parents/older relatives never failed to remind us that back in the ROC(Taiwan), schoolchildren not only had a longer school day than most US schools, but also went 6 days a week until it was reduced to 5.5 days later on…and had more homework…especially if they hoped to continue on the college/higher-vocational tracks. </p>
<p>I can also tell you from my own observations that if kids weren’t occupied by homework or constructive activities through school or afterschool programs in areas like my old NYC neighborhood or middle school, they’re likely to be hanging about what were crime-ridden streets populated by youth gangs, drug dealers, and your garden variety muggers. If they weren’t victimized, they’re likely to end up being influenced/running with those criminal groups. </p>
<p>Far too many elementary school classmates/similarly aged neighbors ended up becoming crime statistics or are now at Rikers or other prisons for running with the above-mentioned “wrong crowd” because they weren’t occupied enough by constructive activities like homework and/or afterschool activities or decided such activities “were for chumps”. </p>
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<p>Agreed. </p>
<p>This is the very Harrison Bergeron approach to solving educational issues which caused similarly-minded folks to factor in CUNY’s post-1969 decline from being an academically esteemed university system to being a decaying one of absolute last resort for most NYC area HS students by the '80s and early-'90s…especially if they were above-average academically. </p>
<p>While that system has implemented many policies which put it on the rebound as of the '00s, it’s going to take much more to get it back to the reputation it held before the post-'69 decline.</p>
<p>My son, a 10th grader, is involved in an initiative at his school to modify homework but not to eliminate it entirely. The plan proposes changes such as no weekend homework (unless it’s part of a long-term assignment that continues through the weekend) and no vacation homework (except reading). The proposal suggests that teachers present students with a syllabus at the start of the term, just as college profs do, so that students can identify dates when major projects are due or when big tests will occur. That way, they can try to plan their extracurricular commitments accordingly. </p>
<p>The proposal also recommends that there are no one-night assignments so that students who have school-night commitments, which are VERY common (sports games, play practices or performances, band concerts, etc.), aren’t up until the wee hours finishing a task that they were given only a single evening to complete. Finally, because the school is on the block plan, which means daily classes that are nearly 90-minutes long, there is room for in-class “homework,” which is a great way for teachers to see if the kids understand what they are teaching. (Also, most of the AP classes in my son’s school last for TWO semesters, even though the kids are in them for almost 90 min/day. So that’s double the annual class hours that you’ll find in a typical school’s AP schedule. To me, this should translate into extra time to do homework before the bell rings.)</p>
<p>I’m not optimistic that any of these changes will be made during my son’s stint in high school (and the way things seem to work around here, probably not in his lifetime 
), but even small inroads would be welcome at this point.</p>