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.
Largely the evidence points towards it being harmful to learning in early educaiton.
> 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.
I think if you ask what homework is "intended" to do, you'll get a million different answers from different stakeholders. I think whether you assign homework or not, there's a massive impact of work ethic upon educational success and attainment of mastery. Some students just go the extra mile and are more successful as a result.
> Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments,
I like grades for MS and up. As much as you talk about the confounds of grading, every criticism you've levied would apply even more to more subjective, descriptive assessments. But I do support emphasizing them less and trying to make what they measure truly be mastery of material.
Do you have a sense of whether that's harmful at the margin (a small reduction from typical produces better results), harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages), or harmful in any quantity?
> harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages)
Most studies compare schools / classes assigning no homework to various "normal" levels of homework, so they imply that our results are presently worse than if there was no homework.
I do assign homework to middle school students. But I don't do it often, and it's typically of the form "think about an idea on the topic of _____ we can discuss" or "do the first couple items of this lab worksheet so that we can use our time in the classroom more efficiently tomorrow." I enforce its completion with social pressure, not the gradebook. "Dude, you were supposed to do the first couple questions on the lab worksheet!"
I have a feeling that there is better homework we could assign that would be useful. But we don't have a lot of evidence of what that would be. Proponents of flipped classrooms think that is the path forward, but the research quality is very dubious in primary education.
I learned the hard way that skipping the homework means bombing the test. You don't learn problem solving skills by listening to a lecture or watching TV. It's easy to imagine you've learned it, till you're confronted by the test.
This is true in later education, but it seems to not be so helpful in earlier education. You're far better off with supervised practice than unsupervised, at-home practice in younger students.
The teachers hardly ever filled up the class time, so there was always time to just do the homework.
Typical homework loads today are waaaaaay over 5 minutes per class in MS and HS. Current high school homework loads are on the order of 10 hours per week in many places.
And in fairness, people like you or me, or most of Hacker News-- don't really count. We're outliers and not really predictive of typical experience.
If the school-by-zoom accomplished anything, it gave the parents a window onto what was actually being taught. They didn't like what they saw, hence the pushback in the PTA and school board meetings.
I remember my highschool chem teacher harping on the class after every test "I'd like to tell you all that if you don't do the homework, you won't pass the test, but toast0 didn't do the homework and did the best on the test so do the work" (or something like that). To be fair, I'd look at the homework, I just didn't feel like writing it down and turning it in, most of the time, so for classes where grading let me skip homework and I felt I had a good grasp of the material, I skipped it.
But, for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff (or other students or other life issues). I think the real question is how to help the kids that need help. How do we get them motivated and engaged and empowered to learn the material?
I certainly was not.
> for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff
I did get some roadblocks from some the staff. I did well in spite of the staff's efforts :-) My biology teacher disliked me (for good reason, I was a jerk), and told me he was going to be very hard on my grades. If an assignment was subjective, he'd give me a bad grade. If it was objective, he was forced to give me As. Fortunately for me, nearly all the assignments and tests were simple checkboxes.