Having recently combined households with my girlfriend, I've recently had the experience of helping my 9 yr old stepson with his homework. He doesn't have much, because he goes to a Montessori school which doesn't really believe in it, but on occasions when he has been talking to his buddies instead of doing his "works" (Montessori for some reason  considers "work" to be a countable noun), he has to do the leftover work at home. The other day it was a book report, which involved a paper with six folded squares and instructions as to what each one should contain. Problems abounded...one was that the book he chose had numerous subplots, which made a five sentence summary impossible. One was the square next to the summary, where he was supposed to talk about how the story would have been different if it had been told from a different character's point of view. My stepson actually thought this was an exciting question , but his teacher hadn't explained whether the writing in the box should be from the point of view of the character or from the point of view of a student explaining how the character might feel.

My observations:
1-From watching my girlfriend helping with the book report, before SS decided he wanted me to help, it strikes me how hard it can be for someone who's not a teacher to be able to elicit answers from a wriggly 9 year old, instead of giving answers in some form. I never thought of this as a skill before, but it gives me a whole new understanding of why middle class kids' homework tends to be actually their parents' work, even if their parents don't intend it that way. (I never thought of this answer eliciting as a teaching skill, but I think it actually may be).

2-Given the amount of time and energy and perhaps expertise that this whole process took from me as well as SS, I'm trying to imagine my students' parents, given what I know about their families, going through this process with them on a regular basis amid bills and changing work shifts and not feeling confident about school and academic work to begin with, and I can't. Maybe some of their parents did try to do it, but it is now completely clear to me why that wouldn't be at all possible for some low income parents. (Most of my students' parents didn't graduate HS. How can you help your kid if YOU don't know the answers to their work?)

3-It is also suddenly clear to me how the American school system, whose primary impetus, I would argue, is sorting people by class and race and maintaining white middle class supremacy, hurts middle class kids too, relative to other countries. It really struck me how little SS understood about what the different parts of the assignment should look like. If I had been doing this kind of assignment with my students, I would have shown them examples of the different kinds of paragraphs, and we would have talked a lot about different ways to summarize, and how to choose the important points of the story without giving spoilers. I would have taught them how to do it. (That I have to do that has been a fairly hard won piece of knowledge in my teaching life). SS's teacher doesn't seem to have done that-in part maybe because she knew his parents would know how even if he didn't. In part maybe because language arts-wise, they already all know what they need to know for the standardized tests, because the students in the school are middle-to upper-middle class. It strikes me how little you have to do as a teacher of middle income elementary school students to be labelled excellent, or whatever, according to teacher evaluation systems that are based primarily on test scores. Not that all teachers with those students DO do little, because I don't think that's true, but that in fact you can get away with doing very little. Most of what they need to know to pass standardized tests on language arts is stuff they've learnt at home(I think that in math  it may be a little different, but still). At the same time, it strikes me that if income is the key determinant in test scores (which it is), for all the various reasons that's true, middle class kids just have to do better than low income kids to be considered smart and well educated ("gifted," perhaps). Meaning that they have to learn far less, and may be taught far less. SS could have actually learned how to do the stuff on that report. It's not tested, but it could be both useful and interesting-to me, that would be the point of giving the report at all. As it happened, he didn't, because he doesn't have to. In a country where the purpose of school is education rather than class and race segregation, he probably would have had to. I hear a lot of conservative types talking about how schoolwork has to be dumbed down because of "those kids," but the truth is, it doesn't have to be that way. In a country where there was political will to fight inequity instead of maintaining it, and in a school system that tested school knowledge more and cultural knowledge less, school could be challenging for all kids. But this is not that country or that school system.

Obviously none of this applies to kids of any income level with actual learning disabilities, and I think it stops applying in some areas once you hit high school (I can imagine, for example, that there are many middle class parents who cannot do calculus-I am one of them-although that might be required for a high school class. Same for Chemistry, AP Lit, etc).

Incidentally, I just read that in Canada ESL students aren't required to take regular standardized tests until 5 years after they've come to school. Because the research says that that's how long it takes to develop academic vocabulary (true, I've read some of it), and so why would you test any kid on something before they can reasonably be expected to know it? Amazing. Simple. Research-based. In line with the realities of life. It could be so simple, if we didn't need to punish anyone who's not like us for being not like us.