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Schools

Students won't get excuse to slack off on homework

The School Board rejects a proposal to lessen the impact on grades, saying that would undermine teachers.

By ABHI RAGHUNATHAN
Published September 21, 2005

BROOKSVILLE - The county's teachers won't lose their right to flunk students who don't do their homework.

The School Board on Tuesday rejected a proposal championed by senior district staffers and superintendent Wendy Tellone that would have reduced the emphasis some teachers place on homework. The district proposal sought to prevent teachers from making homework more than 10 percent of a student's final average in kindergarten through grade 8 and more than 15 percent of a student's final average in grades 9-12.

But School Board members wasted no time in bashing that district plan. Several Board members instead argued that there wasn't enough homework assigned and even briefly speculated that perhaps the district should require teachers to assign a minimum amount of homework.

Hernando has no policy governing homework. It's up to teachers to decide how much to weigh homework when calculating grades.

"It gives parents an opportunity to see what (their children) are doing on a day-to-day basis," said School Board member Pat Fagan.

Various school districts around the country have experimented with scaling back homework in recent years. According to the Chicago Tribune, administrators at the Marya Yates School in Matteson, Ill., decided in May to make homework about 10 percent of a student's final grade, with some teachers counting it even less.

School districts in Texas and Georgia have also set guidelines to make sure students are not burdened with too many assignments. But those regulations were prompted by parents who complained that their kids had too much work - not by district administrators.

District officials had tried to enact the change around the end of last school year as a way to keep students from failing just because they had forgotten a couple of homework assignments.

Also, superintendent Tellone said, school administrators felt a districtwide policy would banish grading discrepancies. For example, they didn't want one teacher making homework 50 percent of a student's grade, while a teacher next door counted homework as just 10 percent of a student's grade.

"It's the academic leaders who are bringing this to you," Tellone said.

But School Board members felt that a universal limit on homework would whittle away at teacher autonomy.

"I'm finding teachers feeling undermined here," said School Board Vice Chairman Jim Malcolm.

His colleague, Sandra Nicholson, agreed. She felt setting up a homework policy could lead to "dumbing down" in schools as well as frustrating teachers.

"I don't feel comfortable telling the teacher the percent of the grade (that homework should be)," she said.

Abhi Raghunathan can be reached at araghunathan@sptimes.com or 352 848-1431.

[Last modified September 21, 2005, 00:24:18]