Hardworking Students And Slackers

Hate homework? Move to LA... where it now only counts for 10% of a student's grade

America's second-largest schools district is giving students a break with a new policy ruling that homework can only count for 10% of a student’s grade.

Los Angeles is joining the growing list of school districts across the country that are downgrading the importance of time children have to spend working on assignments at home.

The idea is to allow students to spend more time with their families or on extracurricular activities such as sports or hobbies.

Parents are increasingly worried that the competition to get into good colleges is leaving their children exhausted with all their free time taken up doing hours of homework.

But teachers worry that the move penalises hard-working youngsters who are eager to improve by taking on extra studies at home.

Critics also say the Los Angeles Unified Schools District is effectively rewarding slackers who don’t bother doing their homework.

They quote research that shows students who do their homework perform significantly better at school than those who don’t.

In Davis, California, schools already have limits on the maximum amount of homework they can assign and bars teachers from asking children to do extra work over weekends and holidays.

Other districts in areas including Fontana, California, and Pleasanton, New Jersey, are also trying to curb the long hours many pupils need to spend on studies at home in order to get good grades.

According to the new LA policy circulated around schools last month, ‘Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalise a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade.’

Grades should be based on learning in class so it ‘accurately represents what a student knows and is able to do.’

They should not be determined on how the students gain the knowledge ‘nor on their behaviour, attitude, effort or attendance,’ added the advisory.

Up to now, it was left up to teachers in Los Angeles to decide how much weight was given to homework, tests and other work.

Wheelcock College associate professor Janine Bempechat claimed the district should focus on providing students with the help they need to comlete their homework.

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