Exactly right. Homework is the teachers outsourcing their own responsiblities to the parents.
Just wow! How about turning the prism for a different take: assigning and requiring homework fosters a sense of responsibility—something that parents may be outsourcing to teachers.
Man! Public schools are failing. We get it. Teachers, generally, like so many other workers in our society, are doing a poor job. Check. Public schools have lost their way when it comes to teaching the building blocks of learning. Got it. And all this takes place in a vacuum? Not exactly. American schools are the product of America’s turn away from God, from America’s founding principles, from the original charter of our public education system—to teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ (which, ironically, is the only thing you can’t teach in public schools nowadays.) Americans have let this happen. All Americans—not just teachers. Not just teacher unions.
You want a working public educational system? Really? Then you’d better get back to what was working before Americans thought they could live apart from God. That includes every American family, every finger-pointer here at FR, every bureaucrat/technocrat/educrat, every individual, every person fed up with dealing with a teenage counter person who can’t figure out change for a buck, every boss tired of hiring an interpreter for employee emails, everyone sick of seeing our country being governed by an Obama or a Bush!
I’m a teacher. And I assign homework. I don’t outsource my job. I check the homework turned in by my students all by myself.
Sorry to sound snippy. I know/hope folks aren’t ridiculing all teachers. But easy arguments do not lead to real answers, and just pounding away at the failure of public schools doesn’t fully address the complete nature of the problem.