What happens if homework no longer matters?

Taught math for almost 40 years. Gave homework 5 nights a week. Provided tutoring during my lunch period. Had the highest state test scores in my school every year.
You get better students by expecting more, not less. Good luck LA.

Once again, the government is lowering the standards for everyone to accomodate a few. This is why jobs are being sent to China, India, and Japan. We as Americans should be an example, not a statistic! We are basically saying, no need for hard work to advance in life, we'll just hand it to you. Do we really need to ask what is wrong with this country? Well if you do, this article should make it clear!!!

Doesnt LA unified have like a 70% dropout rate??? huh figures.... Wonder what happens when that 30% hits college. uuhhh Can you say REALITY CHECK!!!

Come on, LA school district is just "free" daycare for all the Mexicans' kids.

The next time you go to the doctor, and she is from Bangalore, think about why you can never find an Anglo American doctor anymore.

this means that kids will see final grades based on test scores. I can hear the complaints already: "oh I'm not a good test taker!" you mean that part of school where they see how much you know and remember? thats what you're not good at? knowing things?

The decline of America continues...Fat, lazy, stupid and corrupt.

No Homework = lifelong loser.

Parents are convinced their children are brilliant and do not need to work.

If students fail, then it must be the fault of a teacher.

The think tanks, tea party and social conservatives have fed this myth.

LIfe always produces winners and losers.

50% of all children are BELOW AVERAGE. Not much can be done about it.

This is not a civil rights issue. It is a bell curve issue.

This homeowork issue is "reform" in LAUSD.

And if it fails, teachers will be blamed.

So a high school teacher gets gets a student for about 45 min a day, cannot give homework and then is judged on what the student knows.

Well, this is ridiculous. Kids actually don't have too much homework, they just slack off more and more. I can only say this because it was the case with me. Homework is a great thing that teaches work ethic. When you are at school, you are being fed information, and don't go off on your own much to show what you are learning. Homework provides this function. It shows kids how to be independent, so when they go off to work and college, they know what they are in for. Motivate yourself to do work! Find how rewarding it is. Also, When they go to an out of state or city college, they are going to be hit in the face with the amount of work, and will not have developed good study *work* habits. I shudder to think of what will happen to the children in this district.

There should be no homework. Homework should be done everyday right there in school after a short discussion on the subject before each class. This bringing it home to wangle with our kids about each night, to parents that have long been out of school is a waste of time and confusing to our children. Our teaching of twenty years ago, is way outdated for us parents to be effective, and we have enough in life to handle without trying to study all the time to stay current enough to help with homework.. Evening time should be family time. Too much time is taken away from family time, playing school after the kids have been in school all day. Then when the kids start acting up they call the parents in and expect us to do something about it, when we arent getting enough parent time to truly make a difference in the shaping of our childrens atitude, because the wealth of each week is put into school work, instead of family work.

If the Titanic was crewed entirely by Liberals then all of the passengers would have died because they would have forced every single person into the life boats causing them all to sink. The moral of the analogy is this: Life isn't fair. Some people didn't get a seat in a life boat just as some people aren't born into good homes and some just don't have the discipline to do homework. That doesn't mean you lower the standards for everyone thus leaving them less prepared for college or the real word.

Great: more time for LA kids to watch TV, play video games, and join street gangs. And yet we wonder why our country is in decline.

This is stupid and it should be a no brainer. The only kids who will get hurt are the kids that do poorly on tests, and they are just going to be limited to a 10% bump for homework success. There is no restriction on the amount of homeowrk, just on how much the teacher can penalize a student for failing to do the teacher's job on the the student's own time. Homework is necessary only when the teacher fails to impart the needed information in the alotted time to the student, and when re-inforcement is needed. It is stupid to penalize the students who do not need the re-inforcement because the teacher was taught a false premise that homework is important for every student, or because the teacher fails to use frequent quizzes to determine what the students have learned or failed to learn. Part of the objections are because many who decide to teach were students who would not have succeeded without the homework grade boost.

It means that teachers don't care and kids get a lot fkg dumber.

my nieces daughter in france just graduated from high school. she can speak in addition to french fluent english and mandarin. she had much more home work than one hour a day. also did well in math and history and geography. now she will go to university where it only gets harder. school should be hard and rewarding. theres no such thing as too much knowledge.

A much more relevant statistic would address how much homework is actually finished and turned in by students. The work ethic of too many students is nonexistent and assigning homework and having it finished and turned in are two very different matters. Until students and their parents take education seriously and school boards and administrators actually demand respect for the educational environment and teachers, we will continue to waste huge amounts of money trying to educate those who don't care to be educated.

Yeah Dumb Amerika just got that much dumber !

How would KIPP or religious schools or vouchers make this better?

This is what PARENTS WANT: NO WORK AND PAY.

Conversation with my son, (who never did his homework) regarding homework in a high school where daily homework counts for 30% - 40% of the grade.

Him: Why do they make such a big deal about homework?
Me: Because it teaches discipline and critical thinking and helps to reinforce what you're learning in class.
Him: And how does the teacher know if I'm learning what I need to learn in class?
Me: The tests and quizzes and papers show her (or him) what you've learned.
Him: And what do I get on all my tests and quizzes and essays?
Me: A's
Him: So does that not prove that I've learned what I need to learn?
Me: Yes.
Him: So tell me again, why do I have to do all the busy work homework?

This was an ongoing battle for the duration of high school. Because he didn't do most of his homework he was operating on a maximum grade of a C (or sometimes D), when his knowledge of the material and quality of essay projects was clearly superior.

Our high school assigns such a high point value to homework in order to allow students to improve their grade, not on what they know or how well they write or think, but rather on how "hard they try"- Needless to say, these students have a rude awakening when they go to college, where their grade is based on a midterm and a final. If they need to spend countless hours on self-imposed homework as a way to study, it's up to them, but their grade shouldn't depend on how many hours they studied, but rather on how well they actually learned the material.

Hooray for the LA Unified schools.