Dr. Kathy Kennedy had walked through the front door of Mary
Rieke Elementary hundreds of times before, but the evening
of Sept. 26 was different.
It was as if the smiling children's faces on the ceramic
mural inside the Hillsdale school's front door mocked
Kennedy, 46, as she headed to the library for Curriculum
Night.
Kennedy was the kind of parent every school wants: a
regular at PTA and site committee meetings and a classroom
volunteer. Somehow, she managed to take care of her three
kids while also delivering high-risk babies for Kaiser
Permanente.
The involvement of parents like Kennedy has helped to
make Rieke, one of Portland's smallest elementaries with
290 students, one of its best. Ninety-eight percent of
families attended parent-teacher conferences two weeks
ago; nearly as many frequently show up for projects such
as digging an irrigation system for the school's garden.
On Curriculum Night, in her state-of-the-school speech,
principal Nancy Verstegen, a soft-spoken Iowan, told parents
that Rieke's fifth-grade test scores last spring were
the second-highest among the city's 64 elementary schools.
A staggering 96 percent of students met state reading
standards; the students scored even better in math--every
single one of them met the standard.
But Kennedy and about 50 other parents from this year's
fifth-grade class were not in a congratulatory mood. While
Verstegen spoke in the gym, they were in the library,
confronting Rieke's fifth-grade teachers.
John Lehman, who teaches math and science, and Carla
Williamson, a language arts teacher, could be forgiven
if they felt confused. After all, they had repeatedly
delivered stellar test scores. Only months earlier, parents
had nominated Lehman for a Portland Public Schools Foundation
Excellence in Teaching Award.
But for an hour and a half, parents hammered away at
the two teachers, making demands that seemed counter to
their own aspirations and clearly out of step with the
educational climate in Portland and across the country.
They wanted less homework.
"I've been happy at Rieke until this year," Kennedy says.
"It's very difficult for me to help my son with the amount
of homework he has, and it's very frustrating for him."
Many other parents chimed in with similar concerns. Voices
grew heated in the library. For his part, Lehman bristled
at the criticism. "I told parents," he recalled later,
"that the only place you find 'success' before 'work'
is in the dictionary. That didn't go over very well."
Such tension between traditional allies--parents and
teachers--is not confined to Rieke. Across the city and
at all grade levels, homework has become an explosive
issue. Fifth grade, however, is a particularly brutal
year. It's the first time that kids, many of them barely
10 years old, shoulder the full brunt of Oregon's decade-long
experiment with school reform. The experiences of families
at Rieke--the kind of school at which reforms have the
best chance of being embraced--raise the question of whether,
instead of making schools better, the current methods
of instruction are making them worse.
"It's very stressful to have a kid sitting at the dinner
table working for three to four hours every night," says
the mother of a Rieke fifth-grader. "My son becomes so
distraught that he can't focus, and we have the Kleenex
box out because there are a lot of tears."
Absent a Palm Pilot or a parent willing to double as
a personal secretary, the average Rieke fifth-grader can
barely keep up with his homework schedule. The first Friday
of each month, Dyna Math is due. The second Friday,
a book report. The third Friday, Super Science.
The fourth Friday, another book project.
In between, kids must read 200 pages a month, complete
a weekly geography project and regular health, social
studies, spelling and math assignments. "Managing the
homework was more complicated than my experience in college,"
says Heidi Knodell, whose son was a Rieke fifth-grader
last year. "Very few 10-year-olds have the time-management
skills to do the work."
Irene Hediger, who once led the school's site council,
says a typical night for her son involves two to three
hours of homework, much of it requiring parental assistance.
"We have weeks where there are 15 hours of homework, sometimes
more," she says. "It's pretty gruesome."
Karen Keller, a fifth-grade parent last year, is a supporter
of Lehman and Williamson but agrees that the workload
is heavy. "It was easily a couple of hours a night," she
says.
Rieke's fifth grade may be unusual, but it is not unique.
Dozens of parents, students, teachers, administrators
and school board members interviewed for this story agree
that homework has increased across Portland Public Schools.
People outside the system have observed an increase also.
Jeff Sosne, a child psychologist and founder of the Children's
Program in Multnomah Village, says homework is an issue
for all of his patients. "The intensity is much more noticeable
in the past three to five years," he says.
Surprisingly, despite the vast amount of time spent on
homework, Portland Public Schools does no research on
the topic, leaving officials only a vague idea who is
doing what. Part of the reason is that central administration
plays little role in determining how much homework kids
should get. The district policy does follow national norms
suggesting about 10 minutes of homework per grade per
night (i.e., 50 minutes for a fifth-grader) but its 10-year-old
policy is widely ignored.
In reality, decisions about homework are left to teachers.
At affluent schools such as Rieke, teachers assign more
work than their peers at less affluent schools. There
are a variety of reasons why money plays a factor. Some
people attribute it to a difference in expectations. Others
say it's because at less affluent schools, students' families
may lack time, education or other tools such as computers.
"In our school we don't have enough books for kids to
take home," says Clara Lafayette, a teacher and head of
the site council at the troubled Whitaker Middle School.
"The reason we don't assign much homework is we don't
have the resources."
Dawn Billings, director of curriculum for the Oregon
Department of Education, agrees that the amount of homework
is often a function of parental support. "I think it's
probably true that schools of higher socioeconomic status
assign more homework," she says. "It makes sense as a
teacher that you're more likely to assign homework if
you have an expectation that it can get done."
Still, all indicators suggest that on average, the homework
load has increased. The Multnomah County Library Homework
Center, for instance, recorded 115,260 hits to its website
this September, nearly four times the total of the past
two Septembers combined. The trend is a national one.
In 1998, University of Michigan researchers found that
the amount of time elementary-school students spent on
homework had jumped more than 50 percent in the past two
decades.
None of the parents interviewed for this article say
that Rieke's John Lehman or Carla Williamson or any other
teachers assign too much homework because they despise
kids, want to torture parents or love grading papers.
Why, then, is the load at Rieke and across the district
so heavy?
One answer is that there is simply more to know. "Homework
allows teachers to extend the day. We're asked to teach
too much, and we don't have enough time to cover it all,"
says Eric Olson, a fifth-grade teacher at Chief Joseph
Elementary in North Portland. "There's not enough time
to get across what we need," adds Portland School Board
Chairwoman Debbie Menashe, "and that translates into more
homework."
Other people say that parents demand homework. "There's
an almost universal feeling that homework is the sign
of a quality program," says assistant Portland superintendent
Pat Burk, a longtime principal before joining central
administration. "There's a general perception that if
there is no homework, expectations are not high enough."
Both explanations make sense, but there are three far
more powerful reasons why there is more homework today
than ever.
Those reasons are Vera Katz, Norma Paulus and Duncan
Wyse.
To understand why Portland's mayor, a retired politician
and the head of the Oregon Business Council are responsible
for kids' 30-pound backpacks and ghostly pallor, it's
useful to review some history.
In 1983, a federal task force published A Nation at
Risk, which argued that an inferior U.S. educational
system threatened to torpedo our economy, allowing Asian
and European countries to steam ahead. The report inspired
school reform across the country, including in Oregon,
where Katz, who became Speaker of the House in 1985, led
the charge. In 1991, the Legislature passed Oregon's Educational
Act for the 21st Century, billed as "a systemic strategy
to produce the best educated citizens in the world by
the year 2000."
The plan never received proper funding, but Paulus, who
was the state's superintendent of instruction from 1990
to 1998, oversaw the implementation of a massive battery
of statewide tests at third, fifth, eighth and 10th grades
in the late '90s.
It would not be an overstatement to say that the tests
have consumed education in this state. The biggest day
on the K-12 calendar is when the Oregon Department of
Education releases test scores. The results are splashed
across the front page of The Oregonian and nearly
every newspaper in the state, despite serious questions
about the tests' validity and accuracy in measuring anything
other than parents' socioeconomic status (which numerous
studies have shown to be the biggest factor in standardized
test scores).
Yet anytime there's even a hint of rethinking reform--as
when State Superintendent of Education Stan Bunn proposed
earlier this year to ease 10th-grade testing requirements--Katz
and Paulus scream foul.
So does Wyse. As head of the Oregon Business Council,
Wyse argues that staying the course with reform is crucial
to the state's economic viability. "We've got to stay
strongly focused on the benchmarks," he says. Although
the Business Council lacks the name recognition of Associated
Oregon Industries, its powerful membership includes the
CEOs of the state's largest companies and the top local
executives of Intel and Hewlett Packard, giving Wyse's
voice far greater prominence in educational policy discussions
than virtually any educator.
The pro-testing choir gets plenty of backup from conservative
legislators who equate test scores with accountability.
And lawmakers, rather than parents or educators, drive
the educational policy bus, because--since the passage
of Measure 5 in 1990--funding for schools has shifted
from local districts to the Legislature.
In Portland, test scores carry even more weight than
in the rest of the state. Two years ago, the Portland
School Board magnified the scores' significance when it
voted to pay principals based partially on performance.
Since test results are by far the most easily observed
part of performance, it should come as no surprise that
the highest-paid principals tend to be at the schools
with the highest test scores--which also tend to be the
most affluent schools.
This obsession with test scores has resulted in more
homework. "If you look at the history of education, every
time people start yelling about poor achievement, testing
and homework increases," says Kathie Humes, a Portland
parent and educational activist. "There's definitely more
homework because of the testing," adds Paul Steger, principal
at Lent Elementary in outer Southeast.
The mantra that kids must do more homework in order to
do better on tests is so ingrained that when the Piscataway,
N.J., school board voted in October to limit homework,
the decision as was treated as heresy, a man-bites-dog
story. "I found the Piscataway model shocking in the face
of pressure to raise standards," admits Marc Abrams, Portland
School Board vice chairman, whose son, a sixth-grader,
does "a phenomenal amount of homework."
Homework can be helpful. It can reinforce lessons, teach
good habits and connect families to the classroom. In
fact, it might be tempting to agree with Karen Keller,
the Rieke parent who calls critics of the school's fifth-grade
teachers "whiners." But there are many parents raising
the alarm, and too many stories like Ben Alameda's and
Chad Paulson's.
Although Ben, a fifth-grader at Rieke last year, earned
A's and B's, his aunt, Delores Empey, says the homework
pressures got so intense that he was frequently afraid
to go to school and developed debilitating headaches that
a neurologist diagnosed as migraines. "I felt nervous
when something was due," says Ben, now 11. "I felt like
I wanted to throw up. I couldn't look at light. All I
wanted to do was sleep."
The low point of Ben's year, says Empey, came one Sunday.
Anxious over a looming assignment, she says, Ben suffered
a migraine while swimming at Gabriel Park. He vomited
in the pool, causing it to be closed. "Last year, I felt
really stressed," he says. "I didn't have time to do anything
except work." Empey says Ben's headaches, almost a weekly
event in fifth grade, have all but disappeared.
Chad Paulson, also a Rieke fifth-grader last year, felt
the same pressures as Ben. After completing what his mother,
Susan Paulson, describes as a particularly long health
assignment, Chad forgot to write his name on his paper.
Lehman, she says, ripped up the assignment.
Paulson says she and her husband have contributed hundreds
of volunteer hours to Rieke over the past eight years,
but for them, Lehman's "boot-camp tactics" were too much.
Her husband confronted Lehman, she says, and their shouting
match nearly turned into fisticuffs. The couple remains
angry. "I couldn't care less what these state test scores
are in the fifth grade," Paulson says. "What I want is
a classroom in which my child feels safe and develops
a love of learning. My rights as a parent and my child's
right as a student is being usurped by educators who put
too much emphasis on test scores." (Rieke officials declined
to discuss the Paulson incident.)
Parents say Lehman is no less intense this year. "The
kids in that class don't have time to be kids," Kennedy
says. "My son quit soccer and he quit martial arts. That's
the biggest loss to me."
Powerful research supports her concerns.
In The Battle Over Homework, a 1994 analysis of
more than 100 previous studies on the subject, University
of Missouri professor Harris Cooper reached an eye-opening
conclusion. "There is no evidence that any amount of homework
noticeably improves the academic performance of elementary
students," Cooper wrote.
Rieke parents say they have shared such findings with
Verstegen and her staff to no avail. "The administration
refuses to look at the program because test scores are
so high," says Heidi Knodell. "But in my opinion, that's
not a reflection of the teaching but of the socioeconomic
status of the families."
Kennedy says that despite the Curriculum Night insurrection
and conversations that she and others have had with the
fifth-grade teachers and Verstegen, nothing changes. "Basically,"
she says, "the attitude is that the ends justify the means."
Verstegen, Rieke's principal, disagrees with the assertion
that elementary kids don't need homework. "I think homework
is really important in terms of academic achievement,"
she says, citing other research that shows that even though
kids are doing more homework, they still spend a lot of
time playing sports and watching television. She flatly
disputes that her teachers are too heavy-handed. "They
give homework appropriately and adjust it as needed,"
Verstegen says.
Indeed, several parents agree with her. Keller says Lehman
was the best teacher her children ever had. "I've never
met a teacher more dedicated or caring," she says.
But the parents who want change level detailed criticisms
that go beyond simply questioning the amount of homework
assigned. In fact, quality is just as big an issue as
quantity. "My son brought home a fill-in-the-blank assignment
with instructions to find the sentence in his health book,"
Kennedy recalls. "One question was 'blank can be
harmful to your health.' He wrote 'stress,' but the sentence
in the book said the correct answer was 'distress.' That
drives me crazy."
Perhaps the greatest source of frustration for both parents
and kids are assignments that ask kids to use concepts
and skills that they haven't yet covered in class. The
two workbook-based programs that Lehman uses as homework,
Dyna Math and Super Science, generate heavy
criticism.
The two workbooks often leave kids feeling defeated,
say parents, who themselves may lack the ability, knowledge
or time to teach kids the new concepts. "It's good to
have projects," Kennedy says. "But some of the stuff is
never taught in class. I've got a science background so
I can help my son, but I can tell you that college students
don't understand some of these principles."
Sosne echoes many educational researchers when he says
using homework to teach new skills is
a misuse of time and energy. "That's not the point of
homework," he says.
Kids don't drop out of school in fifth grade, but that
doesn't mean getting overloaded at an early age is harmless.
Knodell's son struggled mightily in fifth grade, and
she says even though his work load is lighter in sixth
grade, he hasn't recovered yet. "After last year, when
my son saw homework again, he was in the tank--he just
froze up," she says. "He thinks homework is a dirty word."
Knodell's son is not alone. Nearly a decade after the
Legislature passed Oregon's Educational Act for the Twenty-First
Century, it would be hard to argue that Oregon schools
have met the goal of producing "the best educated citizens
in the nation." In fact, increased homework and a maniacal
focus on tests appear to be the primary results of school
reform so far, and there is increasing evidence that whatever
improvements may be occurring, an unacceptably high number
of kids is being discarded in the process.
Figures gathered by the National Center for Education
Statistics and the ODE present a damning picture. Oregon's
dropout rate is among the highest in the country: 22 percent
of entering freshman quit before graduation. Even worse
is that during the past decade, according to the NCES,
Oregon's dropout rate has climbed faster than any other
state's. Oregon now ranks last in the nation in terms
of the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who have completed
high school. (Between 1990 and 1998, that percentage fell
from 90 to 75 percent while the national rate held steady
at 86 percent.)
There's little question that school reform bears a large
part of the blame. "Every time you raise standards, the
dropout rate increases," says Andy Clark, who directs
the district's math curriculum. "It's happened every place
across the country they've tried it."
In late November, Stan Bunn, the state superintendent
of instruction, conceded that reform has yielded mixed
results. "We have clear evidence that Oregon schools are
good and getting
better," Bunn stated. "But we have equal evidence that
many of our students are not enjoying that
success."
If Bunn is serious about stemming the flood of dropouts,
he could begin by attacking the current obsession with
improving test scores. To do that, he needs to convince
people such as Katz, Paulus and Wyse that more homework
and more tests don't necessarily create better students.
So far, apart from the September uprising at Rieke, few
Portland parents have spoken out against homework. But
when people whose kids are earning the highest test scores
in the city rebel, they may represent the canary in the
coal mine that many schools increasingly resemble. Perhaps,
instead of just focusing on test scores and tossing those
who cannot produce onto the slag heap, schools will give
greater attention to shaping well-rounded kids.
That is what Kathy Kennedy wants for her children. "I'd
like them to be interested and engaged in what they're
learning," Kennedy says, "instead of bored and oppressed
by it."
