I was really hoping this is a decent article about what some teacher or school did about the problem. It starts like that but then it goes kablookie...
So, a certain Joshua Moreno is fed up with the system and did something about that, 2 paragraphs. GREAT. Then the rest of the entire article is about institutionalized racism and how the current system fails us. At no point do we get a good example about what mr Moreno did, only what he moved away from. This is horrible confusing writing.
I'm sorry but this is absolute click bait garbage. I AGREE with the fact that there is institutionalized racism and I aplaud work to reduce that. But this article is misleading, and confusing, and poorly written. There's no concrete idea in it that we could debate here on HN. If there is, someone would have to rewrite and state it clearly.
Education is one of the places where institutionalized racism clearly exists in the US and Western Europe, but not in the way you think. According to Wilfred Reilly for the US: “Black (and Latino) students often receive admissions offers with test scores twenty or thirty percentage points lower than those of white or Asian applicants. At a typical top-50 educational institution, the “affirmative action edge” for minority applicants appears to be in the order of 300 test points.”
“the middle-class white male applicant to any good college or Fortune 500 job does not actually enjoy massive white privilege. Instead, he is at a 250–310 SAT-point competitive disadvantage relative to an identically qualified Black or Hispanic opponent.“
— Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About by Wilfred Reilly
Isn't the general intelligence level going down since like 20 years or so? I admit I have no factual proof nor a link to study, I only read and hear that from time to time so this might be an urban legend.
But if so, we face a large-scale societal problem we might not even be able to tackle, like leaded gas was likely a major contributor to soaring violence in the 60ies to 80ies.
> There's no concrete idea in it that we could debate here on HN
Sure there is. The problem described in the first few paragraphs is essentially due to a Goodhart's Law situation and the imposition of deadlines that are not actually related to what the class is trying to accomplish.
These are both things that are ripe for HN debate (and have been debated in other contexts here).
Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?
Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong?
Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us.
Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"?
You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough time to study after school.
What you should be doing is figuring out how to not penalize those with less opportunity to ensure they can either catch up or at least not fall behind.
They mention that because it emphasizes their other point.
It's the equivalent of "I'm a vegetarian but even I drool at the thought of bacon". You don't have to mention that you're vegetarian....it's there because it places extra emphasis on how appealing bacon can be.
> Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?
I'm only going to argue this point. I could claim an idea is bad because I disagree with the idea. Let's say you say that something is racist and I disagree and we have an argument about whether that thing is racist or not. The article claims (among many other things) that there are racist undertones here.
However, that's not my point here. The problem here is the article claimed to talk about A (school reform) but spent 70% of it's page space on B (things suck, and racism is involved). And I didn't care about B when the author promised me A and the author DID NOT ACTUALLY COVER A. I'm not attacking the B idea, just the inconsistency of the whole writing.
Malcom Gladwell (for example) covers institutional racism in schools VERY WELL in his podcast Revisionist History. He delivers B quite successfully. And I'm sure other authors are great at discussing B if they want to.
How is this penalizing well-off students? By making it harder to automatically get ahead in education just because your poor classmates are sliding off the slippery slope of a negative feedback loop? I wouldn't call it penalizing.
I’m sure every generation feels like the next is going to turn the world to hell… but what the hell? I find it absolutely bonkers that gifted classes, math, homework and objective performance assessments are suddenly under fire as instruments perpetuating inequality. Does our education system leave much to be desired? Absolutely! Let’s pay teachers more and improve access to quality education for all students, not cognitively handicap the next generation.
The crazy thing is that the bar is so low in the US.
Where I live, Hoboken, NJ, the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%
What the hell are they doing if they're not even teaching kids math and reading? And why are they graduating them?
Grades aren't meant to be a feel good merit badge. They're supposed to be an accurate reflection of your level of knowledge relative to your peers. If it ceases to be that, then the selection just happens elsewhere. So now high school diploma isn't worth anything because everyone graduates. Hiring a high school graduate doesn't even guarantee you the person can read. Same thing happens in bachelors as schools become less selective and inflate grades.
How on earth do we de-escalate from here? I feel that in the US it is impossible to summon the political willpower to make it HARDER to graduate HS or go to college, even if these things would make society better off.
My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.
> What the hell are they doing if they're not even teaching kids math and reading? And why are they graduating them?
As a parent with a partner who also works full time, who who lost daycare for a few months at the start of the pandemic: Babysitting. Teachers main value add is babysitting. It's sad, and education is still highly valuable, but its the truth.
School seems to fulfill at least three different purposes:
A. Give kids some education (or educayshun, depending on the quality of the school).
B. Act as a sort of daycare, so that both parents can go to work and keep the wheels of the economy turning (or the computer mice clicking, nowadays).
C. Job security for the staff.
B+C can be easily done without accomplishing much of A, and the only thing than can guarantee at least some A is pressure from the parents. But in some places, concerned parents with enough time and energy to do that are so few that they cannot move the colossus. Moving away or finding private school for their kids is simpler.
Strange. Nationally the number is 37% of 12th graders in reading and 24% of 12th graders in math, if you're using NAEP Proficiency to define the level.
While math has actual course material that needs to be taught, reading tests are more of a general intelligence test. It sounds like there is some serious problem with the math education in Hoboken.
This is one issue that I'm passionate about. Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school; and only valuable in high school and beyond.
> and objective performance assessments
I think some of these radical experiments are crazy. But, there's valid reasons to consider e.g. not grading missing absent assignments as a zero. A few of them:
A) If our goal is for grades to reflect demonstrated student mastery --- a missing assignment doesn't indicate that proportion of mastery "missing." Especially if it has been demonstrated satisfactorily on an exam or by other measures.
B) A couple zeroes on a gradebook can be an insurmountable hill to climb-- leaving no further grade incentive at all for students to work hard in the class.
C) Grades are strong motivation for already-strong students with the most involved parents, but can actually be demotivating for the bulk of your class. An effective teacher needs to find other ways to motivate students. For many students, grades are something that can make one feel bad about oneself but not provide an opportunity for positive differentiation.
The classes I teach are "easy A's" in the gradebook for most of my students... and are incredibly demanding compared to normal MS/HS fare. This requires buy-in from my students. I work to build genuine curiosity and in-class competition (on a variety of axes where all students can excel, not just the top couple dunking on everyone else).
The elementary school our kids go to has an official policy of "no homework". It's more like "low homework" though. According to past parents the school used to really load the kids up on this stuff.
Most homework is just something like "read for 30 minutes". Other than that, they do sometimes assign more formal homework, but most of it takes 5-10 minutes, and they explicitly state that if it you spend 30 minutes on it and haven't finished, you can stop.
Every week the kids pick 4 books from a set of books the teacher chose for that individual's reading level. And they get to go to the library and pick any book they want.
And no homework over the weekend, except to "have fun".
My son is experiencing the homework issue this year. He’s 2 years ahead in math and the class he’s in gives out massive amounts of homework. It’s exhausting. He had to pull him out of sports so he could have more time in the evening for his homework.
As someone who excelled early in school and damn near never graduated, the age grouping doesn’t line up for me. I should probably have never graduated high school because my scores were so low from homework not completed. Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD and Autism, and makework was valuable for me early but useless for me as I grew into myself.
Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
A) but that's not the only goal, sometimes you want to teach them it's important to execute on an assignment for the sake of it. Because that s how you deliver in demanding jobs.
B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think, he needs to change how they deliver: if they cant reach the level, either they must move out because they never will and that s fine, or they must be handled specially so they reach at a different speed with a different method. I ve seen first hand you can teach hard math fast and burn most or slow and get most super motivated. Grades and exams being the same.
>> homework
> This is one issue that I'm passionate about. Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school; and only valuable in high school and beyond.
Isn't the article about removing homework in high school?
Mr. Moreno, the Alhambra High School English teacher, specifically said he no longer gives homework. Doesn't this mean the research indicates he is removing something valuable?
It might all be semantics though.
I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
The value of homework has little to do with learning. Yes, students can learn from it. On the other hand, it is mostly intended to promote a certain type of work ethic where those who devote additional time and effort have more opportunities for success. Whether this is desirable is a different question. For those in a more supportive environment, it can lead to a narrowness of vision (with respect to both learning and life). There are also issues with respect to equity. While I have seen successful social programs that help less affluent families access better resources, those still depend upon supportive families.
Grades themselves are truly a mixed bag. They typically conflate work submitted with material learnt, communications skills, work ethic and motivation, as well as any other factors that implicitly seep into the approach the teacher employs (e.g. communicating expectations and meaningful feedback). Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments, unfortunately almost everyone from students to families to schools to boards of education to ministries of education wants quantifiable metrics.
* students in mostly AP classes who were college bound
* students in no AP classes who were mostly not college bound, or were at least limited to community colleges and state schools (Which are great choices! But often have lower success rates and career outcomes)
For the AP students grades were a joke because all the teachers would happily give out extra credit to any student who wanted it, all in the name of college admissions.
For everyone else grades were a joke because all the students cared about was passing, and teachers REALLY wanted students to graduate, and would give grade bumps to any student who needed it.
I believe most schools suffer from this sort of grade inflation, to the point that grades are at best useful for loose categorization (i.e. A+ students, A-C students, F students) and thats it. It never was and never will be a true meritocracy at scale.
That’s unfortunate. Twenty years ago I attended high school in a working class suburb. I was fortunate to get selected into a gifted program and had teachers who challenged me to work hard and overcome my surrounding. Changed my life and inspired a career as a data scientist and entrepreneur. I hope the younger generation can have the benefit of adults who care enough about them to challenge them to succeed, because the real world does not grade on the curve.
I knew so many valedictorians that flunked out at the state school I went to (University of Missouri - Rolla). High school is a garbage indicator for how well you'll do in life or further education.
It extremely easy to make it a meritocracy: just impose an externally-graded exam at the end. Then, the students cannot cheat (because it won't be their teachers grading them), and the teachers don't have an incentive to cheat (because high grades with low final exam will reveal their fraud).
What are you really measuring come exam time? It's not an objective measure, that much is sure. Someone who is loaded with work, family, and various other considerations isn't given a due handicap, and even in the event that there is a curve in place, it's still not measuring much. We'd do better to recognize that the measure of man is almost always going to result in spurious data. A D student isn't necessarily dumb, but disinterested, or distracted, perhaps disenfranchised or something along those lines. And grading itself really isn't revelatory, it's easy to game. I just did it, open book quiz with a digital copy, I ctrl-F'd through it and found the answers with ease, I didn't read much of anything, but I did get a perfect score. What does it say, then? That a student can exploit Campbell's law, and the teacher can do the same, so the district can look good and continue receiving grants. It has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with sculpting the metrics to say that someone is intelligent. Grading wasn't always the case, mind you, it was an invention of the late 1700's - and frankly a bad one. But institutional inertia carried it to the present.
What I assure you won't result from dismantling the systematic psuedo-objective measurement of humans is "cognitively handicapped" generations.
What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!")
...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
> Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lower grade. They did worse. The grade can reflect that. That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student. It means they demonstrated worse performance in the class. How you interpret that later on is a different question, and interpreting Y's lower performance in the context of the environment that caused it is fair.
Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless, and worse, can lead to bringing back biases that were tried to be balanced for: in evaluating a student for a job who looked like Y and another who looked like X and got the same GPA, which one is the better student? If you believe that the grades were more lenient toward Y, picking applicant X as an employer just makes sense.
In another context: we report the times of runners running the 100m dash in seconds and hundredths of seconds, regardless of if they're in the 100M final of the Olympics or at a local high school track meet. Is 10.8 seconds a good time? In the Olympic 100m mens final? no. In the US collegiate championships for women? definitely.
1. Y is worse than X. If you give both of them a math task ("how should I launch this rocket so that it lands safely"), then X is more likely to get it right. The reason why is irrelevant; results are relevant.
2. In contrast to what people like you usually think, performance and context are two different variables. If you measure performance objectively, that gives you a chance to influence context and see which interventions make sense! Maybe giving poor kids' families money doesn't help as much as sending the kids to boarding schools, or enrolling them in extracurricular activities. How could you know? By measuring it! Bottom line, objective measurements are THE BEST way of achieving positive social change (assuming it's your goal... it is mine).
Life is competition. Life isn't fair. No one will hire you because you are a good person or you endured hardships. They will hire you if they think you are capable to get the job done.
Would you rather undergo surgery by a doctor who learned his craft well or by a someone who has a kind soul and has endured hardships in his childhood?
The purpose of school is train children to function in the real world. I don't understand how you can see a child from a disadvantaged background and say "let's help them by teaching them less"?
If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades. Make them work twice as hard as the other kids for the same grade, that will really make up for their background and place them in the lead.
Just because a learning environment is lighter on the pressure than usual does not mean it provides you with less knowledge. Besides, you're making it sound like the ultimate goal of academic success is to get a better grade than your colleagues, which it is not - it's learning.
You're right in the sense that moving away from grades might make it harder for universities to pick out the best students among applicants, but again, defime "best" - is the best student the one with the most knowledge, or the one who was able to systematically turn in homework just good enough to get an A-?
I don't think pay is the issue. Teachers are already reasonably well paid considering their benefits (e.g. summers off). I think the problem is that we have to pay and fire teachers based on seniority instead of ability.
Most of what you're saying seems reasonable... but then I see a statistic like this:
"Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics."
There is a cult around intelligence we really need move beyond, given that it is predominately an inherited trait, speaking no more or less to any individuals self-worth.
Proportional representation of various (tribal, ethnic, gender, religious, racial) groups would actually be the anomaly in nature, not what the parent is identifying as an issue.
It is always math and but never nursing. That alone may shed a little light on our biases.
I’d say this is a problem of compounding. The odds of any kid going on to get a PhD in math (or any subject) is vanishingly small, and is impacted by outcomes at every level of education preceding grad school. Saying that math is racist because there are few black phds in the subject neglects the law of large numbers. Few secondary teachers really understand math at a deep enough level to be inspirational… If kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are not shown how beautiful and useful math can be, what motivation would we expect there to be that could carry them far enough in the subject to get a phd in it?
There are questions that are not allowed to be asked and addressed because they are (often rightly) deemed racist. There are also questions that need to be asked that despite the racism still need to be addressed. But because there is no one size fits all, it doesn't matter. The only answers that avoid the questions are those which cannot be answered for many, many generations, and which also require racist policies to be enacted in order to be considered legitimate questions.
Noam Chomsky went to a Deweyite high school with no grading and turned out more than fine (he actually enjoyed it). I am opposed to grading, I would replace it with a levelling system - you would have to show certain proficiency to gain a level.
I think that’s a great idea. I’m not necessarily advocating for a strict grading scale, just an objective yardstick for gauging progress towards achieving proficiency in critical subjects like math, language arts, etc.
> assessments are suddenly under fire as instruments perpetuating inequality
But we all want and need the other people to be assessed. When we go to the doctor, we want to know they competed for and earned the right to be in that position. A lack of high standards would hurt every identity group. For example, COVID won't avoid or forgive people who are in discriminated groups, or be any easier to heal by a doctor in this group - nature doesn't care.
Some people seem not get it: dropping homework or objective assessment will not help under-privileged students but hurt them. Homework and object assessment are not used to oppress people (what kind of sick mind would think of that?). They are used to give students timely feedback on what they need to improve upon. Just reading books and listening to lectures will help students learn probably 20% or less, and it is homework or exercises in general that will take students to the next level. Remember the classic STEM textbooks? The authors will usually say that exercises are an important part of the book, and students should try to solve all of them? Let me guess, completing those exercises will be racist?
And why do you left think that lowering standards will help poor students? You think the poor students will get better education without pushing themselves? You think less trained students will do better in their future job? You think they will magically master advanced concepts and skills? You think they will suddenly become better problem solvers? On the other hand, you think the families with means will not send their kids to Russian School of Mathematics, to Art of Problem Solving, and to teach some kids advanced STEM and reading and writing with other like-minded parents and private teachers? You think that those with means won't send their kids to private school if public schools go to hell? Do you left even know that those with means do not need to go to tutoring schools or private schools if public schools have some common sense? Do you left even know that the best K-12 schools in China are always, I mean always, public schools? Do you left even know that the best teachers in each Chinese city are always, always, public school teachers? Do you left even ask yourself why the majority of Chinese students graduated from public schools yet they are so good at STEM subjects (they may not have as many geniuses as in the western world, but I'm talking about ordinary students here)?
Yeah, I'm sure labeling everything racism and everyone who disagree with you racist will magically improve K-12 education of the US. It's as if you left are trying to destroy the life of under-privileged by pretending to be righteous.
I think that the point is not about lowering standards; it's about preventing unrelated variables to enter the equation.
Examples:
- A lot of redundant homework is assigned, quantity over quality. Some students with external duties (e.g. family, work) are just unable to deliver all the homework, and thus get lower grades, even though less homework would be enough to demonstrate ability in a topic;
- Deadlines are set too close to an homework availability date, so students with external duties are sometimes unable to meet them;
- Students in affluent families could be helped by third parties with their homework; it's hard to verify that;
- Students that do a bad homework or fail an exam should be able to retake it, since it's easier to have a "bad day" if your family has issues.
The point is measuring actual student ability, not busywork throughput or the willingness to meet arbitrary deadlines.
And to not penalize students (.i. homework grades) if they have to work to help support their family, or have so many other trauma issues. GP here really seems to have an idealized version of how school works, ignoring all facts that actually influence learning and stuff (.i. socioeconomic ones). Homework just compounds those problems, and I'd also say there's no such thing as "objective assessments" as well.
Just wanted to say thank you for providing actual, reasonable things to think about. As someone who is very skeptical of movements to ignore grading/etc, as are many others here, it's nice to have good counterarguments against my default view.
(That said, and agreeing with the above completely, I think many people are saying things that are far less reasonable than everything you say above.)
it's not about removing assessment, but not penalizing for an assessment that determines there's more learning to do; the point of assessing is to get a sense of what work the teacher needs to do to get the student up to speed.
A lot of the heated debate here is about racism. I'm not from the US, but in my experience people get terribly inequal opportunities in education even in environments where everyone has the same ethnic background. The most limiting factors as I see them are first and foremost a lack of love and care from one's parents, and second a wealth deficit.
Many commenters are also furious about alleged "lowering the bar". Remember than once we take away certain factors from grading, if we do it right, new factors will take their place - it's not just going to be all participation prizes. The idea is that the bar will be higher, but it will be positioned in a place where all students have to jump the same height to clear it.
The general idea is clear, but as for how that could be implemented, I don't know. I was hoping to find out in the article, but I was left terribly disappointed. The way it is written does make it sound like coaching baloney, which I think doesn't do the people trying to improve their education system any justice, it just makes it easy for them to be labeled social justice warriors.
> The most limiting factors as I see them are first and foremost a lack of love and care from one's parents, and second a wealth deficit.
I have numerous friends who are teachers and they all consistently say that the biggest problem is poor parenting. Primarily disengaged parents or parents who don’t value education.
Of course this is the elephant in the room because no politician is going to blame parents.
It seems to me that all the chat up-thread about schooling vouchers and parental choice are entirely missing the point. The children of engaged parents will probably do ok anyway. It’s the bad parents that are the problem.
>I have numerous friends who are teachers and they all consistently say that the biggest problem is poor parenting. Primarily disengaged parents or parents who don’t value education.
But that should be the role of public schools. Teach children even if their parents don't care and don't challenge them to learn.
> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work
I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later.
> eliminate zeroes in grade books
Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.
> and re-do tests
Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.
> Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.
Usually this is not by marking assignments "not required" or changing the denominator. Instead, many educators are giving a 50% for a missing assignments: not a zero, but a far less insurmountable thing to overcome.
If I had a problem with a student with systemically missing work, I'd give them 2/3rds credit on any part of homework they'd shown mastery on by some other means (test, class activities, other assignments). So they'd likely get more than 33 and less than 67.
> Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.
If you know the specific problems, sure. I don't recommend giving the same student the same test (well, I have been known to allow students to rework a problem for partial credit).
But I don't seek to ever give students a test where what's on the test is a surprise/some kind of secret.
I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse
Redoing tests is actually amazing! Worst case is that you learn the same amount and best case you really get a good understanding of the material! I’ve had two classes with test redos and I always learn more with them!
Redoing things until you understand them thoroughly is the point of homework assignments. The test is supposed to assess if the material was learned, not teach it.
>These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation.
Thanks to people like him the education in US will fall even deeper.
> Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines.
That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace.
Teach students that they are entitled to bad behavior, bad work habits, and deadlines? Fuck deadlines
The next generation is going to have a hard time competing in the global workplace against cultures that do enforce reasonable consequences for fucking up.
When I fucked up in middle/high school, it wasn't because I was lazy. It was because I had no idea how to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines. I had teachers who luckily were empathetic and I grew up eventually. I was lucky - I have fantastic parents in a loving, stable marriage and my mental health on the whole was not extraordinarily bad.
Many kids are not that lucky. In my experience, the kids (my peers) who were doing drastically badly weren't lazy. They had something else going on - a bad home life, or serious mental health issues.
Dealing with stress/anxiety/deadlines is a vital life skill. At some point people have to face failures and consequences (even if the failure was "not their fault"!) and learn to handle them; if they don't do it in school they'll be doing it for the first time in college, or in the workplace, or with governmental requirements.
School really doesn't mimic the workplace very well. For one thing, work doesn't usually give homework! (with some exceptions like the law). Docking students for bad behavior is problematic, because it requires the teacher to be extremely honest, to avoid unequal standards. Late penalties almost certainly impede learning since they cause the give up effect, where students give up on something they can't hope to finish, instead of actually trying.
The issue ultimately is that if you want grades to be a measure of student performance, they should actually measure student performance, and not other aspects of what students do in a class.
> School really doesn't mimic the workplace very well.
That irrelevant.
The point is that in any given relationship, expectations are established and how well an expectation is met greatly determines the outcome.
If a student, employer, son, friend, mate agrees to completing a 1-hour task within a week and they fail to deliver, that's a problem. There are consequences.
The gist of the article is that the student is really the victim and should be pandered to.
That might work for a student or a someone's kid, but any other relationship is going to end badly. Friends, partners and employers get to choose their relationships. If you're irresponsible and disrespectful, they get to chose someone else.
> Late penalties almost certainly impede learning since they cause the give up effect,
You're confusing causation with correlation. Late penalties do not impede learning. Chosing not to learn by not doing the work impedes learning.
If a student isn't mature enough to meet expectations, the underlying cause should be addressed: the student's imaturity, irresponsibiltiy, home environment, learning disablity, lesson plan, whatever...
Removing consquenses for failing, making excuses, and giving the student a victim identity isn't doing the him/her any favors.
Work does give you homework, it's just the self-selected kind. The people who excel and get ahead at work are the ones who recognize this and do the extra work. Whether that's educating themselves so they can make a career move, or taking on extra tasks (which often requires self-edification) to show they are worth promoting.
I think what school fails to do is teach the difference between internal motivation and external motivation. Mandated homework is external motivation for those who don't get it, and for those who do the mandate isn't necessary.
But some level of work ethic is certainly important. You don't need to work 80 hour weeks but you need to actually get your work done within a ballpark of when you said you'd get it done.
"Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25"
"25.:Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge."
Of course it's not just getting up and shuffling from class to class, but also waking up regularly, meeting deadlines, managing time efficiently. All of these things combined with the "basic educational foundation" which is in fact largely preparatory for later education and workplace fundamentals does seem to point against your assertions. And, frankly I think it's all harmful.
Edit:
Should probably also indicate that socialization in a hierarchical setting with various modes of authority being assumed while also dealing with virtual strangers at all points in the day is also not unlike work.
you got to understand where this new guidelines are coming from.
If a 5 years old student already can do algebra and calculus but his teacher give him 100 page of simple addition to do as homework and he decide to not do them…
Should he fail the class ?
I don’t think so, the class is already too easy for him!
His grade should only be based on his score on exams!
Why force student to waste hours at home doing busy work on something they already master? this sound like torture!
The problem is that exams are often an extremely poor assessment of actual student learning, since they're such an unnatural format (no checking of oneself, strong time limits, extremely "easy" problems that can be done in those time limits).
The other problem is that the only way to actually learn something is often to practice it. Attaching grades to "homework" is a method of forcing students to actually do the practice. Otherwise, there has to be some other reward mechanism, because frankly, its very hard for children to have the self discipline to study on their own.
The same people who are arguing for "no homework" are also the ones arguing for "no tracking." So, in your hypothetical, this kid who can do algebra at age 5 would fail his math class but also not get placed in an advanced math track doing calculus at age 6 where he/she belongs.
Readit News
http://web.archive.org/web/20211111005414/https://www.latime...
So, a certain Joshua Moreno is fed up with the system and did something about that, 2 paragraphs. GREAT. Then the rest of the entire article is about institutionalized racism and how the current system fails us. At no point do we get a good example about what mr Moreno did, only what he moved away from. This is horrible confusing writing.
I'm sorry but this is absolute click bait garbage. I AGREE with the fact that there is institutionalized racism and I aplaud work to reduce that. But this article is misleading, and confusing, and poorly written. There's no concrete idea in it that we could debate here on HN. If there is, someone would have to rewrite and state it clearly.
“the middle-class white male applicant to any good college or Fortune 500 job does not actually enjoy massive white privilege. Instead, he is at a 250–310 SAT-point competitive disadvantage relative to an identically qualified Black or Hispanic opponent.“
— Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About by Wilfred Reilly
But if so, we face a large-scale societal problem we might not even be able to tackle, like leaded gas was likely a major contributor to soaring violence in the 60ies to 80ies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Mind you, perhaps American High Schools are poised to stop this....
Sure there is. The problem described in the first few paragraphs is essentially due to a Goodhart's Law situation and the imposition of deadlines that are not actually related to what the class is trying to accomplish.
These are both things that are ripe for HN debate (and have been debated in other contexts here).
Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong?
Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us.
Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"?
You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough time to study after school.
What you should be doing is figuring out how to not penalize those with less opportunity to ensure they can either catch up or at least not fall behind.
It's the equivalent of "I'm a vegetarian but even I drool at the thought of bacon". You don't have to mention that you're vegetarian....it's there because it places extra emphasis on how appealing bacon can be.
sigh did I really to break it down like that
I'm only going to argue this point. I could claim an idea is bad because I disagree with the idea. Let's say you say that something is racist and I disagree and we have an argument about whether that thing is racist or not. The article claims (among many other things) that there are racist undertones here.
However, that's not my point here. The problem here is the article claimed to talk about A (school reform) but spent 70% of it's page space on B (things suck, and racism is involved). And I didn't care about B when the author promised me A and the author DID NOT ACTUALLY COVER A. I'm not attacking the B idea, just the inconsistency of the whole writing.
Malcom Gladwell (for example) covers institutional racism in schools VERY WELL in his podcast Revisionist History. He delivers B quite successfully. And I'm sure other authors are great at discussing B if they want to.
I Don't think this is what GP said. Where do you get this from? These two things are unrelated, the way I interpret the comment.
That's a reasonable worry in these days.
Are you really that self centered that you think that people around the globe care.
Dead Comment
Where I live, Hoboken, NJ, the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%
What the hell are they doing if they're not even teaching kids math and reading? And why are they graduating them?
Grades aren't meant to be a feel good merit badge. They're supposed to be an accurate reflection of your level of knowledge relative to your peers. If it ceases to be that, then the selection just happens elsewhere. So now high school diploma isn't worth anything because everyone graduates. Hiring a high school graduate doesn't even guarantee you the person can read. Same thing happens in bachelors as schools become less selective and inflate grades.
My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.
As a parent with a partner who also works full time, who who lost daycare for a few months at the start of the pandemic: Babysitting. Teachers main value add is babysitting. It's sad, and education is still highly valuable, but its the truth.
Or, in other immortal words of George Bush, "mission accomplished".
A. Give kids some education (or educayshun, depending on the quality of the school).
B. Act as a sort of daycare, so that both parents can go to work and keep the wheels of the economy turning (or the computer mice clicking, nowadays).
C. Job security for the staff.
B+C can be easily done without accomplishing much of A, and the only thing than can guarantee at least some A is pressure from the parents. But in some places, concerned parents with enough time and energy to do that are so few that they cannot move the colossus. Moving away or finding private school for their kids is simpler.
That was delegated to Sesame Street 40 years ago.
While math has actual course material that needs to be taught, reading tests are more of a general intelligence test. It sounds like there is some serious problem with the math education in Hoboken.
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Dead Comment
This is one issue that I'm passionate about. Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school; and only valuable in high school and beyond.
> and objective performance assessments
I think some of these radical experiments are crazy. But, there's valid reasons to consider e.g. not grading missing absent assignments as a zero. A few of them:
A) If our goal is for grades to reflect demonstrated student mastery --- a missing assignment doesn't indicate that proportion of mastery "missing." Especially if it has been demonstrated satisfactorily on an exam or by other measures.
B) A couple zeroes on a gradebook can be an insurmountable hill to climb-- leaving no further grade incentive at all for students to work hard in the class.
C) Grades are strong motivation for already-strong students with the most involved parents, but can actually be demotivating for the bulk of your class. An effective teacher needs to find other ways to motivate students. For many students, grades are something that can make one feel bad about oneself but not provide an opportunity for positive differentiation.
The classes I teach are "easy A's" in the gradebook for most of my students... and are incredibly demanding compared to normal MS/HS fare. This requires buy-in from my students. I work to build genuine curiosity and in-class competition (on a variety of axes where all students can excel, not just the top couple dunking on everyone else).
Most homework is just something like "read for 30 minutes". Other than that, they do sometimes assign more formal homework, but most of it takes 5-10 minutes, and they explicitly state that if it you spend 30 minutes on it and haven't finished, you can stop.
Every week the kids pick 4 books from a set of books the teacher chose for that individual's reading level. And they get to go to the library and pick any book they want.
And no homework over the weekend, except to "have fun".
It’s so frustrating how worthless it all is too.
Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think, he needs to change how they deliver: if they cant reach the level, either they must move out because they never will and that s fine, or they must be handled specially so they reach at a different speed with a different method. I ve seen first hand you can teach hard math fast and burn most or slow and get most super motivated. Grades and exams being the same.
Isn't the article about removing homework in high school?
Mr. Moreno, the Alhambra High School English teacher, specifically said he no longer gives homework. Doesn't this mean the research indicates he is removing something valuable?
It might all be semantics though.
I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
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Grades themselves are truly a mixed bag. They typically conflate work submitted with material learnt, communications skills, work ethic and motivation, as well as any other factors that implicitly seep into the approach the teacher employs (e.g. communicating expectations and meaningful feedback). Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments, unfortunately almost everyone from students to families to schools to boards of education to ministries of education wants quantifiable metrics.
* students in mostly AP classes who were college bound
* students in no AP classes who were mostly not college bound, or were at least limited to community colleges and state schools (Which are great choices! But often have lower success rates and career outcomes)
For the AP students grades were a joke because all the teachers would happily give out extra credit to any student who wanted it, all in the name of college admissions.
For everyone else grades were a joke because all the students cared about was passing, and teachers REALLY wanted students to graduate, and would give grade bumps to any student who needed it.
I believe most schools suffer from this sort of grade inflation, to the point that grades are at best useful for loose categorization (i.e. A+ students, A-C students, F students) and thats it. It never was and never will be a true meritocracy at scale.
It extremely easy to make it a meritocracy: just impose an externally-graded exam at the end. Then, the students cannot cheat (because it won't be their teachers grading them), and the teachers don't have an incentive to cheat (because high grades with low final exam will reveal their fraud).
Can you be so sure?
What are you really measuring come exam time? It's not an objective measure, that much is sure. Someone who is loaded with work, family, and various other considerations isn't given a due handicap, and even in the event that there is a curve in place, it's still not measuring much. We'd do better to recognize that the measure of man is almost always going to result in spurious data. A D student isn't necessarily dumb, but disinterested, or distracted, perhaps disenfranchised or something along those lines. And grading itself really isn't revelatory, it's easy to game. I just did it, open book quiz with a digital copy, I ctrl-F'd through it and found the answers with ease, I didn't read much of anything, but I did get a perfect score. What does it say, then? That a student can exploit Campbell's law, and the teacher can do the same, so the district can look good and continue receiving grants. It has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with sculpting the metrics to say that someone is intelligent. Grading wasn't always the case, mind you, it was an invention of the late 1700's - and frankly a bad one. But institutional inertia carried it to the present.
What I assure you won't result from dismantling the systematic psuedo-objective measurement of humans is "cognitively handicapped" generations.
...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lower grade. They did worse. The grade can reflect that. That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student. It means they demonstrated worse performance in the class. How you interpret that later on is a different question, and interpreting Y's lower performance in the context of the environment that caused it is fair.
Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless, and worse, can lead to bringing back biases that were tried to be balanced for: in evaluating a student for a job who looked like Y and another who looked like X and got the same GPA, which one is the better student? If you believe that the grades were more lenient toward Y, picking applicant X as an employer just makes sense.
In another context: we report the times of runners running the 100m dash in seconds and hundredths of seconds, regardless of if they're in the 100M final of the Olympics or at a local high school track meet. Is 10.8 seconds a good time? In the Olympic 100m mens final? no. In the US collegiate championships for women? definitely.
1. Y is worse than X. If you give both of them a math task ("how should I launch this rocket so that it lands safely"), then X is more likely to get it right. The reason why is irrelevant; results are relevant.
2. In contrast to what people like you usually think, performance and context are two different variables. If you measure performance objectively, that gives you a chance to influence context and see which interventions make sense! Maybe giving poor kids' families money doesn't help as much as sending the kids to boarding schools, or enrolling them in extracurricular activities. How could you know? By measuring it! Bottom line, objective measurements are THE BEST way of achieving positive social change (assuming it's your goal... it is mine).
Would you rather undergo surgery by a doctor who learned his craft well or by a someone who has a kind soul and has endured hardships in his childhood?
If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades. Make them work twice as hard as the other kids for the same grade, that will really make up for their background and place them in the lead.
You're right in the sense that moving away from grades might make it harder for universities to pick out the best students among applicants, but again, defime "best" - is the best student the one with the most knowledge, or the one who was able to systematically turn in homework just good enough to get an A-?
"Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math...
And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistics regarding the number of African American faculty members in mathematics!
So what else is our current system perpetuating besides inequality? What exactly are we "weeding out" in calculus? Or college algebra?
We don't let kids trust themselves intellectually in the classroom.
Proportional representation of various (tribal, ethnic, gender, religious, racial) groups would actually be the anomaly in nature, not what the parent is identifying as an issue.
It is always math and but never nursing. That alone may shed a little light on our biases.
But we all want and need the other people to be assessed. When we go to the doctor, we want to know they competed for and earned the right to be in that position. A lack of high standards would hurt every identity group. For example, COVID won't avoid or forgive people who are in discriminated groups, or be any easier to heal by a doctor in this group - nature doesn't care.
Dead Comment
And why do you left think that lowering standards will help poor students? You think the poor students will get better education without pushing themselves? You think less trained students will do better in their future job? You think they will magically master advanced concepts and skills? You think they will suddenly become better problem solvers? On the other hand, you think the families with means will not send their kids to Russian School of Mathematics, to Art of Problem Solving, and to teach some kids advanced STEM and reading and writing with other like-minded parents and private teachers? You think that those with means won't send their kids to private school if public schools go to hell? Do you left even know that those with means do not need to go to tutoring schools or private schools if public schools have some common sense? Do you left even know that the best K-12 schools in China are always, I mean always, public schools? Do you left even know that the best teachers in each Chinese city are always, always, public school teachers? Do you left even ask yourself why the majority of Chinese students graduated from public schools yet they are so good at STEM subjects (they may not have as many geniuses as in the western world, but I'm talking about ordinary students here)?
Yeah, I'm sure labeling everything racism and everyone who disagree with you racist will magically improve K-12 education of the US. It's as if you left are trying to destroy the life of under-privileged by pretending to be righteous.
Examples:
The point is measuring actual student ability, not busywork throughput or the willingness to meet arbitrary deadlines.(That said, and agreeing with the above completely, I think many people are saying things that are far less reasonable than everything you say above.)
Many commenters are also furious about alleged "lowering the bar". Remember than once we take away certain factors from grading, if we do it right, new factors will take their place - it's not just going to be all participation prizes. The idea is that the bar will be higher, but it will be positioned in a place where all students have to jump the same height to clear it.
The general idea is clear, but as for how that could be implemented, I don't know. I was hoping to find out in the article, but I was left terribly disappointed. The way it is written does make it sound like coaching baloney, which I think doesn't do the people trying to improve their education system any justice, it just makes it easy for them to be labeled social justice warriors.
I have numerous friends who are teachers and they all consistently say that the biggest problem is poor parenting. Primarily disengaged parents or parents who don’t value education.
Of course this is the elephant in the room because no politician is going to blame parents.
It seems to me that all the chat up-thread about schooling vouchers and parental choice are entirely missing the point. The children of engaged parents will probably do ok anyway. It’s the bad parents that are the problem.
But that should be the role of public schools. Teach children even if their parents don't care and don't challenge them to learn.
I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later.
> eliminate zeroes in grade books
Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.
> and re-do tests
Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.
> Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.
Usually this is not by marking assignments "not required" or changing the denominator. Instead, many educators are giving a 50% for a missing assignments: not a zero, but a far less insurmountable thing to overcome.
If I had a problem with a student with systemically missing work, I'd give them 2/3rds credit on any part of homework they'd shown mastery on by some other means (test, class activities, other assignments). So they'd likely get more than 33 and less than 67.
> Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.
If you know the specific problems, sure. I don't recommend giving the same student the same test (well, I have been known to allow students to rework a problem for partial credit).
But I don't seek to ever give students a test where what's on the test is a surprise/some kind of secret.
The "secret" is applying the knowledge supposedly learned, not applying the solution you already know.
Thanks to people like him the education in US will fall even deeper.
That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace.
Teach students that they are entitled to bad behavior, bad work habits, and deadlines? Fuck deadlines
The next generation is going to have a hard time competing in the global workplace against cultures that do enforce reasonable consequences for fucking up.
Many kids are not that lucky. In my experience, the kids (my peers) who were doing drastically badly weren't lazy. They had something else going on - a bad home life, or serious mental health issues.
Dead Comment
That irrelevant.
The point is that in any given relationship, expectations are established and how well an expectation is met greatly determines the outcome.
If a student, employer, son, friend, mate agrees to completing a 1-hour task within a week and they fail to deliver, that's a problem. There are consequences.
The gist of the article is that the student is really the victim and should be pandered to.
That might work for a student or a someone's kid, but any other relationship is going to end badly. Friends, partners and employers get to choose their relationships. If you're irresponsible and disrespectful, they get to chose someone else.
> Late penalties almost certainly impede learning since they cause the give up effect,
You're confusing causation with correlation. Late penalties do not impede learning. Chosing not to learn by not doing the work impedes learning.
If a student isn't mature enough to meet expectations, the underlying cause should be addressed: the student's imaturity, irresponsibiltiy, home environment, learning disablity, lesson plan, whatever...
Removing consquenses for failing, making excuses, and giving the student a victim identity isn't doing the him/her any favors.
I think what school fails to do is teach the difference between internal motivation and external motivation. Mandated homework is external motivation for those who don't get it, and for those who do the mandate isn't necessary.
"Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25"
"25.:Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge."
Of course it's not just getting up and shuffling from class to class, but also waking up regularly, meeting deadlines, managing time efficiently. All of these things combined with the "basic educational foundation" which is in fact largely preparatory for later education and workplace fundamentals does seem to point against your assertions. And, frankly I think it's all harmful.
Edit:
Should probably also indicate that socialization in a hierarchical setting with various modes of authority being assumed while also dealing with virtual strangers at all points in the day is also not unlike work.
Why do you think that?
The point of life is to teach you how to deal with life.
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If a 5 years old student already can do algebra and calculus but his teacher give him 100 page of simple addition to do as homework and he decide to not do them…
Should he fail the class ? I don’t think so, the class is already too easy for him!
His grade should only be based on his score on exams!
Why force student to waste hours at home doing busy work on something they already master? this sound like torture!
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It's a lose-lose.