Denver teachers should be holding kids — not parents — accountable for homework.
Beyond the core subjects assessed on standardized tests, our teachers should teach life skills such as responsibility, organization, and foresight. When parents are asked to manage homework for their children, it strips Colorado’s iGeneration of valuable opportunities for human development.
A year into elementary school, my after-school routine is down to a science: After dumping playground rocks out of their shoes, I bring my kindergartener and first grader inside, and ask them to wash their hands while I retrieve green homework folders from
The folders have pockets with notes, math and handwriting worksheets, spelling words, sight words, and occasionally art projects. In the back — in these transparent pouches — are homework accountability sheets, to be signed nightly and returned to school daily. Itap my understanding — based on ongoing parent-teacher communications — that I’m obligated to manage my lower elementary children’s homework for them, overseeing completion and the return of accountability sheets.
According to DPS’s Family and Community Engagement team, “Academic partnerships are encouraged between schools and families, but may look different across schools.” District-wide families should “encourage future success,” which “might include helping with homework.”
After informally surveying parents at my children’s school and other district schools, too, I’ve learned that lower elementary parents — not children — are reprimanded when homework isn’t completed satisfactorily.
And of course thatap the case! Itap an acknowledgement that kindergarteners and first graders aren’t mature enough to manage their own homework yet — because 5, 6, and 7 year olds lack the skills needed to sit down independently and do homework. Itap my job, then, to do my children’s executive functioning for them.
Letap rewind a few decades. By the time I was assigned homework — in middle school — the expectation was that I would do it myself. Good thing, too, because my parents worked and had social lives outside of mine that precluded managing a child’s homework.
Sometimes I didn’t do my homework. I learned how to wing it and, when I got caught, I learned how to deal with public embarrassment. I got in trouble occasionally, but my parents didn’t know it unless I told them. They didn’t get notes and phone calls when I missed homework assignments because my teachers didn’t need permission to discipline me or lower my grade. By having chances to fail, I learned to manage my time and myself, while the stakes were low. My kids deserve this opportunity, too. If a child is too young to be disciplined for missing a homework assignment, he or she is too young to fill out a homework accountability sheet.
If the purpose of early elementary homework is to build habit, teachers are better off waiting. According to Sara Knickerbocker, a Denver-based school psychologist in private practice, the “executive function skills” needed to independently manage homework won’t develop until around second grade.
“Children shouldn’t have much homework until third grade, and by then the less parent involvement, the better,” Knickerbocker says, adding, “Unless homework fosters relationship-building in families.” Then there’s real value.
While little research supports the proposition that early elementary homework improves academic achievement, for early elementary students in public schools practicing reading and sight words at home might be beneficial — not for kids, but for the teachers, who are overburdened by standardized tests and ridiculously large class sizes. If public school teachers need our support because of factors beyond their control, itap time to reevaluate the system, and think up new methods for after-school enrichment. “I would argue that playing a game of Monopoly would be a better use of a child’s math brain than a homework sheet,” says Knickerbocker.
Itap easy to blame schools and the tests, but the homework problem probably stems back, too, to parents, and our misguided attempts to improve our children’s academic success. Parents today are highly responsive. We rush lunches and musical instruments to campus when our kids leave them at home, and we demand better grades when they fail. Because too much of our own identities are wrapped up in our kids, we’re afraid to let them flounder.
When we manage our children’s executive functions, Knickerbocker says, “We’re controlling their air traffic for them, so they always have a smooth ride down the runway, and we aren’t giving them enough practice being their own chief executive officers.”
Letting your kids fail won’t come naturally, but do it anyway. Managing small things — even homework — can have long-term consequences. “At the college level, we’re seeing parental interference with adult-student academic life,” Knickerbocker says. “As an 18-year-old, your parents have no legal right to talk with your professors without your permission, and yet we have parents calling professors or showing up on college campuses, wanting to continue advocating for their child.”
Extrapolate that into the workplace, and we’re dealing with young adults whose parents submit their resumes, schedule job interviews, and negotiate raises — all of which do actually happen, and are discussed in Julie Lythcott-Hams bestselling book How to Raise an Adult. So letap stop holding parents accountable for homework. And parents, letap let kids screw up, and let teachers do their jobs, disciplining and grading students as needed, without fearing parental wrath.
Jamie Siebrase is a freelance writer whose two kids attend Denver Public Schools.
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