L.A. Unified ditches homework
By Kelsey Williams, SFGate:
The Los Angeles Unified School District just released their new policy that homework will count for only 10 percent of the grade, giving students essentially a free pass to not do a thing.
While there are some lauding the approach as progressive and fair towards students whose home life and economic circumstances makes work outside of the classroom difficult, the overarching move once again takes power away from the teachers who know their student's situation better than any school supervisor could. According to the Los Angeles Times:
The L.A. approach is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district's mostly low-income, minority population. It's also aimed at supporting L.A. Unified's increasing focus on boosting measureable academic achievement.
According to the new policy, "Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade." It was distributed to schools last month.
Homework, however, is not just a teacher's form of torture meant to overload students and cause
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hottopics/detail?entry_id=91814#ixzz1QXqql4DN
