WHS not grading homework this year

WASHINGTON — Washington High School students are adjusting to a major change in their grades this year, as teachers at the building cease grading exclusively out-of-class assignments or offering extra credit.

That doesn’t mean high schoolers aren’t getting homework, however. Nor does it mean their work outside the classroom will stop impacting students’ overall grades in their classes, according to Principal Ed Rathjen.

“Homework is when I get to the end of the class and I say, ‘Alright folks, do problems 1-30 on page 10 and bring it back to me tomorrow,’” Rathjen said. “I’ve given you no time to do it in the classroom, I don’t have any opportunity to support you should you have questions or get stumped. The other part of that is, I don’t know if you did the work or not.”

WHS teachers are still assigning take-home tasks, Rathjen said. But they’re approaching it differently: assignments are meant to be finished during class time, but can be completed at home if students run out of time before the bell. And some work may naturally spill out of the classroom for things like exam preparation, essay revisions and rehearsing for presentations.

Some instructors have even continued assigning traditional homework; Rathjen’s example of a math teacher listing take-home problems can still happen in any classroom at the high school.

But unlike in previous years, those assignments are graded based on whether students complete the work, not whether they find the right answers.

At a school board meeting last week, Rathjen said homework was a poor indicator of how well students understand their curriculum. He noted the recent growth of technology that makes it easier to cheat on assignments, as well as much older problems like the ability of some students to get answers from parents and peers, or inability to complete assignments in their home environments.

“When they take it home, we really don’t know who’s helping the students,” he said. “Are we testing what students know, or are we testing what mom and dad know, what AI knows, what the student that they took the paper from knows?

“We also know we have some students who, their home life isn’t very conducive to homework, or they don’t have anybody there to support them, so then it becomes an equity deal.”

Rathjen said the new approach still pushed students to practice their course material at home, to build life skills like time management and meeting deadlines, and gave them feedback from educators about what they’re doing wrong and doing right.

Those skills simply won’t be reflected in a grade on their assignments.

That said, the building has no plans to switch to a heavily exam-based grading system either. Rathjen said teachers would still evaluate students’ performance in a variety of ways playing to pupils’ varying strengths, whether through papers, labs, routine comprehension checks, presentations or any number of other academic endeavors.

“All those things can be done in the classroom, giving students opportunities to demonstrate their learning,” the principal said. “There are students, they may demonstrate [understanding] early-on, but they aren’t very good test-takers … so the question is, can I tell how well you’re learning, looking at all the material?”

Asked in an interview Monday about whether assignments were still getting done under Washington’s new approach, Rathjen said it was too soon to tell conclusively.

“It is a bit of a challenge, we have to work with the kids and teach them that you do need to practice, you do need to put in some effort,” he said. “It’s probably too soon to tell, but that’s something we’re monitoring.”

School officials — Rathjen included — say the change in policy isn’t that big of a paradigm shift, although it’s been frequently misunderstood by district families and community members who worry, erroneously, that the school has pivoted away from homework entirely.

At last week’s school board meeting, district decision-makers said they needed to step up communication of the new homework philosophy with parents.

“I was like, ‘Well, why aren’t we grading homework?’ but once you read this, it makes it clear as day,” school board member Troy Suchan said after Rathjen presented on high school grading standards at the Sept. 10 meeting. “But we need everybody to be able to see that.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com