Over the weekend an opinion piece by Louis Menand, The End of Homework?, in The New Yorker made it across my RSS feed. I read it and passed it along to our Assistant Principal of Academics with the note: “This will be in next week’s New Yorker, but I thought you’d like to see it before then.” Sure enough, the article is now making the rounds amongst teachers concerned that homework will be banned here too.
The key to Menand’s piece is buried here:
…Finnish schools are doing what Finns want them to do, which is to bring everyone up to the same level and instill a commitment to equality, and South Korean schools are doing what South Koreans want, which is to enable hard workers to get ahead. When President Hollande promises to end homework, make the school day shorter, and devote more teachers to disadvantaged areas, he is saying that he wants France to be more like Finland. His reforms will work only if that is, in fact, what the French want.
The question then, for us, is simply: what do we want?
What do we want for our students? What do we want them to know, be able to do, and be like? And what homework is necessary and sufficient to achieve those outcomes?