If you assign homework to children in elementary school, make certain that you assign the right work for the right reasons. If you do so, their homework may have nothing to do with their daily assignments in grades K – 6 and everything to do with what they will learn in grades K – 12. There are two issues at play. Homework is almost always contentious, and, because it is contentious, homework time is too valuable to waste on doing more and more class time assignments at home.

Ask educators and parents for their beliefs about assigning homework to children in elementary school and you will get a wide range of answers. You also may get kudos and hate mail.

Educators cite sundry research that supports both pre-learning and reinforcement theories of education as a rationale for assigning homework to young children. Homework assists children to prepare for new learning by introducing new words and concepts and giving all children a similar layer of background information. Some children have an abundance of reading materials and opportunities at home and other children have no materials or opportunities. Some parents read and talk with their children about events in the world and other parents have no time for these. Homework in advance of new instruction gives each child a fair chance for successful learning.

Homework also provides distributed practice of what children learn in class. Long term learning requires 17 to 20 repetitions of the information and skills to be learned, each repetition in a slightly different form. Then, theory tells us, learning needs intermittent repetition to extend its retention. There is not enough time in class to give children these repetitions so homework provides every child with necessary practice of what they learn in school.

However, elementary homework also has a downside. The potential for benefit backfires when children don’t do their homework. Then the teacher is compelled to use class time to create background for learning. Secondly perhaps foremost, when children leave school they are ready for play. Doing homework robs their play time and many children just cannot give their homework much attention.

Parents either cheerlead or are on the warpath regarding homework. Some parents believe that children in the US need every available opportunity to become competitive with their international peers. These parents cite PISA and TIMSS reports and the OECD findings that declare the failure of US schools to educate children to the same levels as schools in Singapore, Finland, and Czechoslovakia. However, for every pro-homework parent there are several who are anti. They believe that elementary teachers should take care of all learning in school. The assignment of homework makes parents into “homework Nazis.” And, homework detracts from family time.

Talk. Talk. Talk. Rather than rave or rage about elementary school homework, we need to turn the question from today into a statement about tomorrow. Homework should be about the end game. The end game is helping children to build large, real world vocabularies, expanding their virtual background knowledge beyond their community and chronological age, and enabling them to process information in new and unique ways. These three ends will not be achieved by doing homework tonight that reviews yesterday’s lessons or prepares for tomorrow’s classes. So, let yesterday and tomorrow take care of themselves. Use homework to advance children toward the end game.

In this blog, we will talk about words.

If real estate is location, location, location, the ability to understand information and express yourself is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Those who have a broad, real world vocabulary are able to read and understand technical and informational materials because they are not stymied by words they do not recognize or know. They either know the words or know how to decipher the word due to their school-based vocabulary training. This advantage allows them access to advanced education, jobs and employment advancement that are closed to those whose lack of vocabulary leave them only with a scratch of the head and “I don’t know.”

The advantage of vocabulary begins almost at birth and some think it even begins before birth. The advantage is a child’s accessibility to words that are spoken or read even if a child does not know the meaning of the words art at first. Children whose parents read to them on a consistent basis, talk with them about what is happening at home and in the community, and take them to libraries, museums and parks at a young age begin to develop a large, real world vocabulary. When these children begin school, they have an extremely significant learning advantage because they know many of the words that appear in school lessons and assignments. Research has proven this advantage to be a consistent truth.

“There is a gap in vocabulary knowledge between economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged children that begins in preschool and is an important correlate of poor school performance. (p. 526)

Consider the following results from some seminal studies in the field:

• First-grade children from higher SES groups know about twice as many words as lower SES children (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).

• High school seniors near the top of their class know about four times as many words as their lower-performing classmates (Smith, 1941).

• High performing third graders had vocabularies about equal to the lowest-performing twelfth graders (Smith, 1941).

The end result is that enriched environments promote vocabulary development. Good readers read more, which in turn helps them become even better readers with even larger vocabularies. Poor readers read less, which contributes to their becoming poorer readers with more limited vocabularies. In effect, “the rich readers get richer and the poor readers get poorer.”

http://www.education.com/reference/article/socioeconomic-status-vocabulary-development/

Schools cannot affect the language development of children before they enroll in school. But schools can and must do all they can to build every child’s vocabulary once they are in school.

“As Mark Twain said, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.’”

I would modify Twain’s reference. An adequate vocabulary is knowing the difference between lightning and lightening or even enlightening. In the same sentence, a large, real world vocabulary is as powerful as lightning in enlightening a person’s understanding of the world.

“But it’s not enough to just know the right word – you also need to remember it when it’s time to use it. This is harder than it seems. Keeping your vocabulary ready and agile takes practice. It’s easy to slip into patterns, using dull, pallid words and monotonous sentence structures, overlooking colorful synonyms and dramatic grammatical fireworks.”

This is the job of the school; to enrich every child’s vocabulary and give all children meaningful ways to exercise their vocabulary.

http://sojournersong.blogspot.com/2007/10/value-of-vocabulary.html

The first rule for elementary school homework is “Words are our work when we learn from words!” Yesteryear’s word walls live again, though they are not limited to classroom walls. Words can live on notecards in pockets and be recorded on MP3 players and displayed on tablets and laptops. They can be e-mailed and texted. They can be sung and rhymed and drawn in color. A new word can be learned from TV commercials, the evening news, a post on a computer, a song that is streamed, and from eavesdropping in the grocery store. We are surrounded by words and children need to be helped to hear and read and pay attention to all these words. Especially, children who do not begin school with a large vocabulary.

A word is just the beginning. Some word enthusiasts want to begin with a predetermined list of basal words. Nah! The end game begins with the words that children bring to the game – their words. When children use the words they see, hear and read, they are invested in understanding the word they bring to the lesson. Then, teachers help children create word families. Prefixes and suffixes are added. Synonyms and antonyms are added. Homonyms add richness. It does not take long to geometrically grow a child’s vocabulary if educators use words that are meaningful to children and use best linguistic practices.

Class time should be committed to having children tell their classmates the new words they have read or seen or heard. And, to giving real world definitions to these words. This is not a great amount of daily class time; perhaps ten minutes. But, the payback over time is like compounded interest in the bank. Once defined, linguistics manipulates the letters and new words and new meanings flow.

The second rule for learning words is “Make learning words fun!” There are so many exciting ways to introduce new words and ideas to children that a child should be able to use any of these to achieve the end game of a large, real world vocabulary. Watch television to see the world. Watch videos to understand stories. Listen to music to learn how words work together. Play games that have specific terms. Solve problems to use words precisely and for a purpose. Go the park to play and learn the words of nature. Or, go to the park to learn how to socialize and use words to collaborate with others. Test your parents rather than have them test you.

Bah, humbug! to word lists that teachers of old used to copy from the back to basal readers. Double humbug! to the blind memorization of those words and weekly quizzes of those words. Booyah! to the words that children find interesting, that they laugh about, or that they wonder about. Kudos to games that teachers connive for children to say a word and then talk about it.

The end game does not care how children learn new words and grow their real world vocabulary. Well, it does want them to learn safely in every definition of that important word – safely. But, it does not care if they use television, video games, hand-held devices, stay at home or go out safely into the community. The end game wants children to explore their language and their world. When they begin to do this at a young age, they will do it for their live time. And, remarkably, these words and a child’s ability to learn about and from new words will advance their learning of literature, history and science and every other subject dependent upon words and language.

Is this homework as usual for children in elementary school? Not so much. Is this life learning for these children? Will growing a great vocabulary while in elementary school help all children be better prepared for the specific subjects they will study in secondary school? Can children who begin school with a lesser vocabulary build a powerful vocabulary using purposeful homework? You bet to each of these. That is the end game.

Sometimes you nod in agreement with a writer until you reach a “Ya, but” point. Then your nod turns into a shake of the head.

I read “Do Evaluations Penalize Teachers of Needy Students?” by Stephen Sawchuk (Education Week, August 2014). I fully agreed with his take on the unfairness of teacher evaluation procedures that apply the same student achievement criteria to teachers of academically-efficient children and teachers of academically-inefficient children. Poverty, special needs and lack of English language literacy are real impediments that can significantly diminish a child’s achievement on academic assessments. Teachers in dense, urban schools often have higher numbers of academically-inefficient children. In addition, the more successful teachers of challenged children in urban districts frequently are assigned proportionately more academically-challenged children than their peers because of their past success. As Sawchuk makes the case, an unfair playing field is created when the academic achievements of these children are compared with the academic achievements of more affluent, instructionally-ready children in schools without as many distractions and these achievements are used to evaluate the professional effectiveness of teachers. I found myself nodding in agreement with his argument and his points.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2014/08/do_ratings_penalize_teachers.html?intc=es

But, his writing stopped short and my nodding moved from vertical agreement to a sideways “It ain’t so”. Unfair playing fields what they are, we still must teach with the purpose of moving the learning achievement needle from “this is what they knew, could do, and how they processed information before I taught them to this is what they know, can do, how they process information after I taught them.” All kids can learn and must be taught for the purpose of learning regardless of their circumstances.

As a first year junior high school teacher in Flint, MI, in 1970, I was overjoyed to be a teacher. The fact that the 36+ students in each of my six classes a day were populated with more poverty, racial diversity, and learning challenged children than classrooms in the junior highs in the more affluent part of the city was inconsequential to my daily teaching and my students’ daily learning. My job was to cause these children to learn their seventh and eighth grade English and world studies curriculum even though on any given day there would be a different combination of children and the non-educational problems that arrived with those present often took us far away from the curriculum. If in golf you play the ball where it lies, in education you teach the children with the background and baggage they bring with them to their place and time for learning. Every child in every classroom brings a unique background and perhaps baggage; it is part and parcel to teaching children. When children have more problems and more baggage, learning is harder to achieve. True enough, so get over it and teach them.

That said, I could return to Sawchuk, as his interest, once he described an inequitable state of affairs, was to address educational policy. I could now begin to nod again in agreement. Teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness policies and procedures need to understand that every learning needle begins at a different place on the given achievement scales. Certain things may always be true and educational policy can and should address these truisms. There is an approved curriculum to be learned and there is a place and time for teaching and learning. There is a public demand for learning efficiency and educational accountability. And, there is a mounting politic that wants to blame someone when learning is not efficient or the local achievement meter does not compare well the achievement meters in other districts, states and nations. Policies that assure what legislation and the courts have decreed, an equal access to a quality education, understand that some children live and are schooled in places that have not and do not provide equity and quality in the local schools. Policies that work to assure equity and quality provide for fairness. However, when policies and procedures are blind to the human story of the teachers and children being taught, they cease to be fair educational policies and become policing policies. And, that is where I find my greatest agreement with the Sawchuk argument. Teacher effectiveness evaluation policies that do not understand the conditions for teaching and learning are not educational improvement policies, but are only political policing policies. The blind enforcement of these political policing policies is unfair to teachers of children in disparate teaching and learning conditions. Why would we choose to be unfair when we know the difference between fair and unfair?

So, I agree with Mr. Sawchuk. Teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness evaluation policies that do not take into account the human stories of those being evaluated are not fair policies and need to be changed. And, then I disagree with his end point. Unfair policies need to be changed but they are not cause for a pity party. Pull up your socks and teach all children regardless of the inequity of their living and learning conditions and move their learning achievement needle. At the end of a day of school, children are not moved by the fact that teacher effectiveness evaluation policies are unfair; they are moved by the fact that you cared enough about them and their learning to give them your best teaching. That is what moves their learning needle.

If someone said “You are a good person,” what exactly are they saying about you? Would you feel good about it? Or, if they said, “You are a good enough person,” what are they really saying? We have lost our definition of good. It lies somewhere between being perfect and our worry that not being good enough is a statement of personal worth and not the quality of what we do.

Good is not an exacting word; it has become a catch phrase of soft meaning. If a dictionary tells us that good means “of somewhat high but not excellent quality,” we have clouded the modifier “somewhat” to the point of obscurity. Once, good meant correct. Good was what it is; something of high quality. My mother used to check me on my weekly spelling list when I was in grade school. “Spelling is not almost correct, it is correct or it is not correct,” she would tell me. “A ten letter word cannot have nine letters right and one letter wrong and be considered spelled correctly. If you are going to be a good speller, you must spell words correctly.” I would spell out my list of words over and over again until I could spell all twenty-five words correctly five times in a row. Not four times or two times but five times. Then, she would say, “Good.” I knew her meaning of good.

Somehow good has become stretched as if goodness is elastic. There is good as in correct and now there is good enough as in almost correct or correct enough. Perhaps goodness was beaten up a bit in the cultural and political turmoils of the last quarter century to the point that it is more difficult to define that high quality of good or goodness against which we should hold ourselves.

My golf partners watch match play golf on television and have come to believe that when a golf ball is within a two or so feet from the hole it is as good as in the hole. “That’s good enough,” they will say to each other and concede the belief that the “good enough” player would have made the putt. Good enough is close enough to being correct to be accepted as a concession to being correct. It is an approximation of being of high quality without being high quality. There is the rub. A good enough golfer may never put the ball in the hole, so we never really know how good good enough really is.

Maybe the phrase “good enough for government work” derived from a concession that work does not have to be correct but just correct enough. Does this mean we can accept a degree of incorrectness in performance, behavior and attitude? If so, has the concession to incorrection also filtered into our expectations regarding the behaviors and attitudes we attempt to inculcate in others?

Good does not need to be a qualitative statement about performance. Today, it can also be a socio-emotional assuage. We are surrounded by “feel goodisms.” I watch my grandsons play youth baseball. These are 8 to 10 year-olds. Some children of this age have a natural athleticism that will set them apart in the years to come. They run, throw and catch with ease. Some children are trying to find their athleticism. They are not natural athletes, but will develop the ability to run, throw and catch that will make them average yet competent ball players. Some children are truly awkward and will be on the awkward side of want-to-be-athletes all of their lives. I hear “good heat on your fastball” or “good jump on your steal of second base” and know that these are qualitative “goods.” I also hear “good try” when the ball is dropped and “good hustle” when they are thrown out at first and “looking good” when their play is not good at all but no one wants to say so. There is nothing wrong with the socio-emotional goodisms, but we too often confuse them with the qualitative good. And, children who cannot discern the difference between good and goodisms begin to create false concepts of their abilities. Many children and their parents do not know the meaning of good. Good may always be just close enough to good to accept its incorrectness.

A local school board member told me recently that the school district’s Report Card was “pretty good. The elementary kids did a good job, but I don’t know what happened in the high school.” A school Report Card is a display of various school data. It includes the academic performance of reading and math test results and ACT results and ACT participation rates. It includes non-academic data, such as graduation and grade level promotion rates and daily attendance. It also disaggregates the data by student demographics – ethnicity, poverty, special education, native language.

“Good schools” has been a slogan in Wisconsin for some time. Without surprise, our Wisconsin Report Card divides school and school performances into five categories of goodness labeled as expectations. These are: Significantly Exceeds Expectations, Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, Meets Few Expectations, and Fails to Meet Expectations. As a district overall, the local schools rated an Exceeds Expectations, and individually, the schools rated Significantly Exceeds Expectations (elementary) and Exceeds Expectations (middle school and high school).

So, what are we to think? Good! Or, good enough!

Interestingly, the reading and math test results indicate that

• to qualify as an Exceeding Expectations school, 76.8% of the local elementary school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 52.3% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading, and

• to qualify as a Meeting Expectations school, 49.4% of the middle school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 42.2% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading, and finally,

• to qualify as a Meeting Expectations school, 37.3% of the high school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 35.3% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading.

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/dataondemand/wisconsin-school-standardized-test-scores-2013-254454201.html#!/pctmathprofadv_desc_1/

Still good or good enough? Let’s reverse the academic goodness statistics.

In the Exceeding Expectations elementary school, 23.2 % of the children were not proficient in math and 47.7% were not proficient in reading.

In the Meeting Expectations middle school, 50.6% of the children were not proficient in math and 57.8% of the children were not proficient in reading.

In the Meeting Expectations high school, 62.7% of the children were not proficient in math and 64.7% were not proficient in reading.

Putting aside the local graduation rates and daily attendance rates and ACT participation rates which actually are very high, as in the 90 percents, we must consider the expectational intentions of goodness related to fundamental math and reading proficiencies. A school is considered as Meeting Expectations when more than half of its children are not proficient in school level math and reading tests; repeat more than half are not proficient. In the school report card business, Meeting Expectations appears to be another concession to “good enough,” because when more than half of the test results are not correct there is more than just a little concession to incorrectness.

How can this be and what can we do to change from good enough to good?

I refer to two quotations from the past, perhaps from a time when there was not a concept of “good enough.”

Norman Vincent Peale said, “We tend to get what we expect.” In the case of a school report card, when Meeting Expectations is a “good” school report card we do not have an adequate measure of goodness. We are expecting too little of our children. We are giving in to the goodisms of our culture and do not want to be guilty of telling anyone that they are not good enough. We may not have liked the 100% proficiency requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, but when school report cards actually reported a school’s gap between actual math and reading proficiency and the requirement that 100% of all children must be proficient in math and reading, we knew the goodness of our children’s academic status. This is not a call for a return to the NCLB mandates, but for a more realistic statement of fact in our school report cards. When less than 50% of the children are not proficient in math or reading, a school is not meeting minimal expectations.

If, as Peale told us, we get what we expect, then we are going to get a lot of children who are not proficient. Yet, culturally and politically, good enough is good enough. How incorrect can this be?

And, Winston Churchill said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.” What is required is a definition of good that means “of high quality” and high quality should mean a result much closer to 100% of the children being proficient in math and reading. Or, at the very least, until 100% of the children are proficient in math and reading, we have not done a good job and must continue with their learning until we have done a good job.

Good enough is not good. The golf score is not made until the ball goes in the hole and a word with one letter that is incorrect is not spelled correctly.