Study: Does homework widen the achievement gap?

“You Need to be more Responsible”: The myth of meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities

By Jessica McCrory Calarco , Ilana S. Horn , and Grace A. Chen

Many taken-for-granted aspects of schooling—such as testing and ability grouping—are practiced in ways that reproduce and normalize inequalities. They stratify students’ opportunities for learning and bolster the “meritocratic” narrative that higher status groups succeed in school because of individual competence, effort, and responsibility. Yet status-reinforcing practices remain part of the “grammar” of schooling. These practices remain entrenched in part because of external pressures, including pressure from privileged parents whose children benefit from their maintenance. Additionally, as research on testing and tracking has shown, these practices persist because educators develop accounts of these practices that justify the inequalities they create. These accounts, in turn, often rely on stereotypes of lower-socioeconomic-status (SES) students and students of color—treating inequalities in students’ performance as a function of differences in students’ motivation, effort, and ability rather than as the product of structural inequalities in students’ lives. We extend this line of research to consider how educators account for another status-reinforcing practice: homework—and specifically, math homework. Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.

Less clear, however, is how educators account for homework inequalities and how those accounts shape their practice. Our longitudinal ethnographic study of elementary- and middle-school math classrooms reveals that teachers do not always interpret homework through a structural inequalities frame, despite their awareness of those structural inequalities. We find that at least some educators account for homework inequalities by using the myth of meritocracy—the idea that people who are responsible, motivated, and hard-working will be successful, regardless of the challenges they face. Drawing on this myth, teachers treat inequalities in students’ homework as the product of students’ (and, particularly in earlier grade levels, parents’) responsibility, effort, and motivation. In doing so, they also justify practicing homework in status-reinforcing ways.

Read the full study here.

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