Why Grade Homework?

Yesterday, I had a conversation with one of my colleagues at school about homework.  It goes without saying that independent practice is essential to understanding and mastery of any subject or skill.  However, the traditional public school model has teachers grading homework as a means for student motivation and the main driving force for student achievement.  But, the questions that emerge from this are worth thinking about.  If teachers didn't grade the homework that they assigned, would student performance suffer, remain the same, or improve?  Are students only completing the homework for a grade, do they they actually care and study the material?  Do students want to learn?  Are they even enjoying the education process at all?

As a new educator, I would love to take the risk and see what happens if I didn't grade homework.  No doubt, I would still have students who would do the homework, not just so they do well in assessments, but also because they love learning.  However, it seems these students are far and few between.  I have a strong impression that most students would give up on homework altogether, until they realized that it was necessary to pass the class.  But at that point, they are just seeing the class as an obstacle to graduation.  Again, the love of learning and perfecting a skill is absent in that type of schooling system.  From the educator's side, the thought of not grading homework in an age where evaluations (and jobs) are weighted heavily on end-of-the-year exams is career suicide.

Personally, this says that that our schools are unable to produce many independent thinkers who are sincerely interested in learning, which could also be accurately called an educator's nightmare.  If our goal is craft the future generation into a group of people to complete menial tasks,  then we are doing the right thing.  But if we going to solve the problems of the twenty-first century, then we need an educational system that prepares those students with those goals in mind.

If you have 12 minutes to watch this, then watch and be amazed.