Ban Homework from Schools.

BryceSloan

"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend the rest of its life thinking it is an .”  -Albert Einstein

Today I stand in firm Affirmation of the following resolution:  Ban Homework from Schools.

Framework for this round will be that of Utilitarianism.  We must value the lives of our many students and staff on this topic.  By allowing this to move on, we are further protecting our constituents inside schools.

Contention 1:  Homework disadvantages to low-income students.
41% of US kids live in low-income families, which are less likely to have access to the resources needed to complete homework, such as pens and paper, a computer, internet access, a quiet workspace, and a parent at home to help.  They are also more likely to have to work after school and on weekends or look after younger siblings, leaving less time for homework.

A study by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation found that 96.5% of students across the country said they needed to use the internet for class assignments outside of school, and nearly half reported there had been times they were unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the internet or a computer, sometimes resulting in lower grades.

Private tutoring is a more than $6 billion enterprise that further advantages students from wealthier families.  A study published in the International Journal of Education and Social Science concluded that homework increases social inequality because it "potentially serves as a mechanism to further advantage those students who already experience some privilege in the school system while further disadvantaging those who may already be in a marginalized position." 

This just proves how utilitarianism flows on the PRO side.  Low-income families are being harmed by a simple assignment.  We are harming the lives of many of our constituents by ignoring this topic and must allow it.  In the CON world, students are being rushed to turn in assignments and being forced to take time away from more important things like making money or caring for family members.  In the PRO world, these problems don't exist.  We are allowing these low-income families to provide for their families easier by taking homework out of the picture.

I leave the rest of my text to my ever honorable judge and my opponent and await their reply.

MayCaesar

Thank you for the interesting debate topic! This is not the argument I have heard a lot, but within the scope it is discussed it seems reasonable to me. The problem I have with it is not the internal logic, but rather the prescription following from it.

Contention 1 is definitely correct as long as we are talking about comparing the students' performance: those students that have access to more financial resources will be able to obtain access to more educational resources, allowing them to score better on the homework assignments.

1. First of all, let us consider the goals of the homework assignments. There could be many, but the most general goal would be to get the students to learn and process the material better. The competitive nature of these assignments is reflected in the ability of students to receive different scores, but does it go far beyond these somewhat arbitrary numbers? I do not think so.
It could be argued that some students being more likely to receive better scores due to having more educational resources at hand does not constitute a problem: all students are going to learn something from the assignment, and some students being able to learn more (hence scoring more) I personally see as a boon, not a curse.

2. Homework assignments in the current system typically have a "resource floor" needed to complete them. For example, let us say the average student can complete a given assignment perfectly after investing 3 hours of hard work into it. In that case, even the disadvantaged low-income students will be able to do so, as the assignment is not hard enough for the difference in incomes to become a factor, and the argument becomes obsolete.
For example, an assignment requiring some expensive private software to complete will obviously make it much harder for low-income students to complete it. On the other hand, an assignment requiring the student to solve 10 simple integrals well of the type well explained in the handbook and on the Internet can be done by anyone and depends much more on the time invested, than to the resource access.

3. As follows from 1, even if we agree with contention 1, the problem can arguably be redeemed by simply reworking or removing the score system. It is not necessary to remove homework itself from the process to achieve the desired outcome (equality of educational opportunity, which I believe utilitarianism directly leads to).

4. Similarly, as follows from 2, you could propose reworking homework assignments so they always can be completed by using only the resources all the students have access to. And perhaps it is already the case. The Internet has an overwhelming amount of free information even on very sophisticated scientific topics, let alone on simple school homework assignments.
You could argue that every school must teach its students how to use those resources, but the resources themselves are free, one only has to pay for the Internet access. In case someone cannot afford even that, I suppose you could make a case for the school taking responsibility to pay for that. But after that, the amount of resources everyone has at their disposal is sufficient to complete any assignment with excellence, and even though higher-income students still have an easier access to private tutors or rare expensive books, they will not be at an advantage sufficient to consistently beat any low-income kid who works hard enough score-wise.

Now, my personal view is that homework format should be reworked to closer resemble what we have to deal with in real adult life. In our life, we rarely are required to solve a square root equation or write a summary of a classical book. What we have to do instead is projects: our boss, or we ourselves, tells us what needs to be completed by when, and then we work on that project, assembling the information, creating a plan to attack the project, following the plan through and, at the end, reporting on our results. The sophistication of the project can depend on the job, as the project a simple office clerk has to do can be very different from a project a professor emeritus in economics has to do - but in the end, projects having the goal, things that need to be done that the boss cannot / does not want to do themselves (that is why they have hired you, after all), and the successive report are how life works, so to speak.

So, instead of "Solve the equation x^2 + 2x = -1 for x", we could instead have homework assignments with an unknown answer. For example, "Take the equation x^5 + 2x = -1, which cannot be solved arithmetically with 100% precision, and write a short paper analysing this equation. What can you tell about its non-arithmetical solutions? What natural processes could it describe?" Then in class the teacher would give the students the material necessary to complete their projects (each student would have their own project, of course, so the students learn from each other's projects) and help them make some progress. There is no "perfect solution" of the problem, but there is a lot of investigation to be made.

Then, those of the students who go into serious academical mathematics will do this kind of projects all the time. And those who do not still will acquire important problem-solving skills that can be sold to any employer. That ability - to take a hard problem with the unknown solution and achieve some results in working on it - is easily the most valuable skill a student could learn in a high school, and it is essential to succeed in the modern world, where automation took over simple menial jobs, and the job market is all about thinkers and investigators now, rather than raw doers.