Behavior in the school

There was a recent conflict in New York City over the presumed overuse of emergency services by the school. Children are being removed by ambulance for behavioral problems with the city council claiming that the school is falling short in providing mental health services. Both sides miss the heart of the problem. Each time the school calls for outside help to control behavior, they weaken their authority. Each time schools focus on mental health needs rather than education, their area of expertise, they weaken their authority. There will always be some unruly children and that may be more true in city than suburban environments, but the key to behavioral control and good education lies in the culture that gets established in the school. It is the milieu of the school that matters, meaning that the school needs to have an authoritative and caring principal at the helm, teachers who are empowered to teach in the class, and students who believe that they are in a safe place and where learning is valued and what they are there to do. There are many factors that work against these dynamics and they are certainly a reality in crime ridden neighborhoods. Yet, the inner desires of human beings, the principals, the teachers, the parents, and the students themselves, to have a safe, positive and learning milieu is still universal regardless of how these individuals must adapt to the circumstances within which they live. It is not surprising that so many city parents are looking to charter schools and don't relate to philosophical discussions of how public school ought to be, or even whether those charter schools are showing statistical and documented advances in the educations they provide. Parents first want their children to be safe and secure. They then want their children to learn. If the charter school can provide safety, it will be hard to dissuade them from getting behind that movement. And safety does not come from powerlessly flailing and calling in outside troops to make it happen.

So let's look at the components of a positive milieu that will bring the culture that these children and their schools need.  First, principals need to be in charge. Although they are certainly subject to performance review through their own chain of command, they do not need outside evaluators usurping their power to be personally responsible to evaluate, guide and train the teachers in their schools. Teachers need to be in charge of their classrooms. That means they need to have the freedom to use their own expertise to employ the curricula that is available for the children they teach and employ it is ways that do not force them to look over their shoulders at outside evaluators or standardized test scores that will have significant bearing on their evaluations and their careers. I don't have a major problem with tests. They may provide some useful information. But hinging careers on those tests and using them as the primary measure of educational success disempowers teachers and compromises their abilities to manage the things that go on in their classrooms.

Mental health treatment is not the purview of the school, but a matter for parents in consultation with their doctors, to address. Schools can certainly provide some student guidance services, but there is a limit to how much they can deal with mental health issues. What we need to do is to distinguish between true mental health problems that call for outside (not necessarily emergency) interventions, and behavioral problems that get fueled by the disempowerment of the teaching staff and the weakening of the positive peer milieu. And this brings us back to my favorite subject, which is homework.

Large numbers of behavioral problems are created by our overreliance on homework. By weighting homework as heavily as they do, teachers have given up large parts of their authority with their students in no less of a way than the do by dialing 911 to handle an in house behavioral problem. Let's look at teacher education and ask ourselves, what are teachers trained to do? They learn to teach. They learn classroom behavioral management techniques. They are not trained in homework-giving, and they are not trained in mental health. The more they spend time in class assigning homework, grading homework, and dealing with the problems of homework not done, the less time and energy they have to use the skills they truly have to both teach the children and establish the type of positive milieu that will aid them in managing the class. 

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On teacher education

The more I think about it, the more the culprit in parent-teacher conflicts over homework seems to me to be the schools of education. I wrote my book with the idea that it would be short and easily read, specifically with the hope that it could be used as a tool by the parent to give to the teacher and form the foundation for a productive dialogue over the child’s homework problems. I know parents who have brought other books on homework to their teachers in advocating for their children before mine came into print. But why is that necessary? I’ve been a psychologist for thirty five years and I’ve almost never been handed a book on psychotherapy or psychological testing to help me understand my field. Occasionally, I’ve had a client who has mentioned something that person heard in the news, or read, but rarely had that person felt a need to educate me in the field. I had an intensive education in the theory, research, and practice of the main things I do in my field – therapy and testing – in graduate school. I try to keep up with developments in my field, but I certainly don’t read every book. But that intense foundation from my graduate education has formed the foundation for the work I do now, and for my overall capacity to understand and conceptualize issues in my field. Where’s the course on “Homework.” I know teachers are educated in their field. They learn how to teach. They learn how to manage the class. I like kids but I’d be nervous about going in front of a group of children, day after day. I have never been trained to be a teacher. The said fact is that teachers are trained to teach, but they are not trained to give out homework. They don’t learn about homework until they enter student teaching at which point they model the behavior of an experienced teacher. But neither has been given the foundation they need to use homework as a tool, and that is what compel s parents to have to bring to them information about the problems with homework. For an activity that can garner a zero (a super F with 2 ½ times more negative weight than a 60, an ordinary failing grade) that factors in up to 25 percent of the students final grade, I would expect them to have more education on the topic and the technique.

www.thehomeworktrap.com

Homework Relief Forum

I was so impressed with a blog I read from a teacher who decided to experiment with no homework that I've decided to set up a new forum for teachers to report their experiences with homework relief. Here's the link to her blog. Starting today, I am inviting teachers around the world to conduct their own "no homework" or "reduced homework" experiments. Your experiment can go on for a week or for a year. Challenge your old ideas, test out a reduced homework concept, and report it as a comment to this blog. As long as you report the results of your experiment, we'll keep it here for all to readIf you simply share your pre-existing beliefs about homework, we'll take the comment down. The idea is to test the notions teachers have about homework and report the results of those tests.

I am aware, and quite sympathetic to teachers, that they are expected to develop homework policies with virtually no training in their schools of education. I don't understand how schools of education fail to have courses called "Homework" in them. Teachers are expected to use homework as a common practice with no orientation to its history, research, and technique.  I'm a psychologist and have worked in the field for 35 years. Although I've learned a lot along the way, I had courses in psychotherapy and psychological testing and that gave me the foundation to understand what I was doing as a starting point for my further work. Teachers are well trained in how to teach children. They get no training at all in how to give homework, at least until they start their student teaching at which point they are modeling the work of other teachers who, like them, never had courses in homework.

So, here's your chance to consider new ideas, post them on my blog, and join a discussion that asks the questions: Does homework work? Does it work for all students? What should we be doing?

www.thehomeworktrap.com.

Education as big business

Gail Collins wrote this column today in The New York Times.

I left the following comment.

There is no doubt that if money is to be made, businesses swoop in, but I don’t think that is the issue as much as the fact that desperate people look for solutions, and parents of children in failing schools are desperate. They want safe schools first, and effective schools next. Even when statistics may not support the charter movement, safety is a sufficient reason for a parent to want that school. If we look at the issue in an even more expansive way, not just failing schools but failing students – some schools failing lots of their students but others failing some, we realize that the key component, whether the school is public or private, lies in shoring up the authority of the teachers to work directly and personally with their students, and that this lack of authority comes from different sources, some imposed on teachers from the outside and some they make for themselves. All this standardized testing and humiliating outside evaluations hurts the educational process by weakening teachers. But overreliance on homework does just as much harm. We need safe schools, teachers in charge of their classrooms reporting to principals in charge of their schools. If there is not enough time to teach the kids in class, then expand the class time; give extra tutoring in school, but place very little reliance on what happens in the homes, and for sure, don’t halt or stop a child’s education, if he cannot get his homework done. Kenneth Goldberg, Ph.D. www.thehomeworktrap.com.

More on 504 plans

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the 504 plan is the way to go to achieve relief for your homework trapped child. The feedback I constantly get about my model is that it makes sense but the teachers won't buy it. I think they don't buy into it because they have not heard of it and because they have not yet had the experience that the model helps them with their goals as well. I am very interested in learning what experiences people have had with the 504 process. My sense is that it is easy to get more time for your child to do the assignments. It is harder to get less work, which is what the child really needs. Please post a comment here, on my guest book at my website, or through an email to me.

Working memory and IQ

Read this article in The New York Times. Then, consider my comments.

I find this to be an incredibly important article, and would like to point to the other side of the coin, which is how we persecute children who have poor working memory. It’s a ground-breaking concept that we could improve IQ through training to improve working memory, but for those kids with poor working memory, we systematically abuse them through our homework system. We expect them to go home and hold onto concepts taught in school and work independently, often hours on end, without positive results. Then, we punish theme severely with low grades, sending their parents into a frenzy that persecutes them more. I’ve said for years that these children need homework relief and to focus their education primarily to classroom work under the supervision of professional teachers. This does not mean special education or separation from regular courses of study, just relief from the homework they cannot do, at least until some form of remediation takes place. I’ve always considered the two primary offenders to be working memory and processing speed, and assumed there were more possibilities for remediation for deficits in processing speed than working memory. This article challenges that belief. But homework relief is essential until science and education catch up. Kenneth Goldberg, Ph.D. author of The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Students and Teachers. www.thehomeworktrap.com.

On 504 plans

I recorded the following video this morning. It discusses implementing the concepts of the homework trap, including the possibility of formalizing the approach in a 504 plan. I recorded this video clip at home. Sound effects are provided by Buddy, the family dog.