Where It's an Unaffordable Luxury

By Jodie Morse/Boston

When the dismissal bell rings at Boston high school, 10th-grader Shante Bodley's day has only just begun. Her afternoons, like those of most students, are often booked solid. For Bodley, it's not debating practice or piano lessons that keep her busy but rather a $6.25-an-hour job cooking at a convention center. After her shift ends at 6 p.m., she must baby-sit for her five-year-old niece, often until 10 p.m. Only then does she begin to think about hitting the books. "I have too many other responsibilities, and I can't focus on my homework," says Bodley. And when she can't focus? Without a note of chagrin, she admits, "I just don't do it."

Neither do an alarming number of her peers. In contrast to their overburdened counterparts in private and suburban schools, students in Boston's 11 public district high schools give homework such a low priority that many no longer bother to carry a backpack. Frustrated teachers say often only a handful of students turn in homework, making it nearly impossible to discuss course material. The Boston Globe reported that as many as 20% of teachers have, in response, simply stopped assigning homework. "Peculiar to urban high schools is the notion that homework is an imposition," laments Boston High English teacher Riza Gross. "It's horrifying and deteriorating."

Superintendent Thomas Payzant has since vowed to crack down on the truant teachers. While their "behavior is unacceptable," he maintains, "parents are responsible for students many more hours than teachers and have got to do some monitoring of homework." But what happens when such home support is lacking? While their suburban peers return home to parents eager to boot up the computer to help with a research paper, many inner-city students don't have the same resources or have parents who are undereducated or too busy making ends meet to help with homework.

"Homework is done in radically different environments and is biased against poorer kids," says Etta Kralovec, director of educational studies at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. In the early '90s she surveyed Maine high school dropouts, who all cited their inability to keep up with homework as a major factor in the decision to leave school. Kralovec's solution to the inequities: "Homework should be done in school by all students--poor, middle and upper class--so that they all have the same access to computers and teachers." Boston's Dorchester High School has taken a step in that direction, opening up classrooms after school, where students can do homework under the watchful eye of teachers.

But for many students with jobs, an after-school study hall is a luxury they can't afford. At Boston High School, many kids receive class credit for paid jobs. A more radical proposal comes from Richard Clark, dean of the graduate college of education at the University of Massachusetts Boston: "Don't go to work at Hardees, and instead go to work on your homework, and we'll pay you for that."

The stakes are rising quickly for Boston high-schoolers. This year for the first time, students who don't complete their course work--of which homework counts at least 20%--cannot advance to the next grade. And freshmen entering high school this fall will have to pass tough state exams to graduate.

Bodley won't face that hurdle, but not doing homework could hinder her progress nonetheless. Her teachers say she has plenty of smarts, but the missed assignments added up to three Cs on her latest report card. More grades like those, her teachers worry, could keep her out of college.

--By Jodie Morse/Boston