Dialing for Help With Homework : Education: City schoolteachers answer calls from students struggling to complete the mandatory assignments that are key to academic success, educators say.

At first, the student seemed to have trouble reading the passage about farmers and forest lands in a seventh-grade social studies text while on the phone with teacher Robert Meyer to ask a question.

Meyer, one of 22 San Diego city schoolteachers who take turns staffing the district’s new Homework Helpline, patiently guided the student back over the information on farming until the meaning came clear. “Yeah, I think I get it now,” the student said, thanking Meyer as he hung up.

But a couple of minutes later, another student called the social studies line for assistance on the same point. It turned out that the previous caller had been her 6-year-old nephew, whom she had persuaded to test the new service for junior- and senior-high school students.

Having found out that Meyer, a Bell Junior High social studies teacher, didn’t “bite,” she spent the next half hour discussing with him several concepts in the chapter.

That experience on a recent night sums up the potential benefits, as well as limitations, of the new service, funded by $24,000 in federal grants to San Diego last year as part of a multimillion-dollar package for special magnet education programs at minority schools.

Helpline, available Monday through Thursday from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., provides assistance to students at eight predominantly nonwhite secondary schools in math, science, English and social studies. Help is available in English, Spanish, Lao, Vietnamese, Thai and Tagalog.

It’s predicated on the fact that, with homework now required at all grade levels under district policy, schools need as much help as they can get in pushing students to complete their assignments. With many students now coming home to empty houses--where one or both parents work--educators believe students often have no one to turn to if they get stuck on an assignment.

The hope is that, rather than closing their books and giving up, the students will call Helpline.

“Just by explaining the directions for a particular assignment, we can keep them from shutting the book,” said Michele Waine, a San Diego High School teacher and one of several math instructors who take calls daily. After two months in operation, 64% of Helpline calls have been math-related, and Carol Buguey, program coordinator, has put in additional lines to prevent students from being placed on hold for a long time.

“We know from research that doing homework increases student achievement” especially at the secondary level, Buguey said.

“Homework is not a panacea, of course, but we’ve known since at the least the time of the Greeks that, the more you study, the more you learn,” said Herbert Walberg, an education professor at the University of Illinois.

A new study by Harris Cooper at the University of Missouri finds that homework assignments for elementary students should be varied, with goals of developing positive attitudes, habits and character traits.

As reported in the most recent newsletter of the Harvard School of Education, Cooper says that homework, when completed, begins having significant effects on student achievement at the junior- and senior-high levels, when it serves primarily an academic function.

But this latest effort in the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system--trying to build on the success of similar help lines in Indianapolis, Philadelphia and a few other cities--won’t work without other changes, educators admit.

Although the studies show--and the common wisdom assumes--that consistent completion of homework brings better academic achievement--there is increasing evidence that the quality of the assignments and the amount of parent and teacher feedback to students play a vital role as well.

“Any type of help line is a great idea,” said Rick Morris, a teacher at Sequoia Elementary School and a frequent lecturer to teachers in Southern California on ways both to improve classroom management and to excite students.

“But to be really effective, what I call ‘home education’ has to include strong communication with parents, some accountability--so that students know you’re going to be checking--and a time when I, as the teacher, will let them know what I thought about it.”

Many elementary- and secondary-level students do not complete assignments despite teacher admonitions to do so. Many teachers look upon homework as a way to mete out discipline or to keep students busy rather than as a creative means to stretch the learning day.

So far in San Diego, students from three schools--Bell and Morse high schools and Gompers secondary school--account for almost 60% of Helpline calls, with students from San Diego and Lincoln high schools and from Memorial Junior High accounting for less than 20%. Buguey cannot explain the disparity.

Keiller Middle School and Crawford High are the other two schools where educators have promoted the program, although students from any district school are given assistance.

“Some of my students have just laughed when I’ve told them about the program,” Waine said. “Some say they’ll call but they don’t, even though I tell them they don’t (have to) give their name, that nobody checks up on them, that there is no penalty of any kind.”

For district trustees, the ideal, contained in their revised homework policy statement of March, 1988, calls for a few minutes a day spent on homework in early elementary grades, increasing to two hours a day or more by high school. Each school is expected to have a written plan carrying out the policy, and teachers are expected to follow it.

But the reality has often meant settling for far less, even though almost every school district nationwide mandated more homework after the 1983 Carnegie Foundation report “A Nation at Risk” called for additional assignments as a way to improve dismal school performance.

At Correia Junior High in Point Loma, principal Mike Lorch has decided to put teeth into his school’s plan by sending students to a mandatory after-school homework room when they fail to turn in an assignment two times in a row.

“We notify the parents that the kid is expected to be there, that there will be teachers and teaching assistants assigned to help them, if necessary, and that all the materials to complete their homework will be in the room,” Lorch said.

“We started out with 135 students to the room, but now we’re down to about 50 on any given day . . . it’s seen as kind of punitive, and it is mandatory, so the kids don’t like it much.

“But I don’t care whether it’s punitive or not. We’re saying that homework is important, it’s part of the kid’s job to learn to do it on his or her own, and I want kids to understand they have to work on the skills that they need.”

At the same time, Lorch finds his teachers have begun to assign “better homework.

“They don’t want me down in their classroom saying, ‘You’re giving out stupid homework, what’s the idea of assigning 900 problems that the students did in the third grade’--it’s turned out to be a good way to supervise what is being assigned.”

Although his school is not officially part of the Helpline, Lorch has handed out the telephone numbers. “I think it’s a good idea . . . given all the communications gadgets we have these days, we don’t have enough good ideas on how to use these things.”

Assistant schools Supt. Eloisa Cisneros said that principals in her operations area tell her that homework assignments have become more routine, although there is only anecdotal evidence from teachers on whether more assignments are being completed.

“Generally, we know that homework should be meaningful, to be more than just busywork at home, but it has taken a while for teachers to understand this,” Cisneros said.

In the San Diego district’s new language arts/reading program--to be introduced later this year--homework will be literature-based and involve reading and writing activities that parents will be encouraged to share in, coordinator Melinda Martin said.

“Hopefully, this will give teachers more of a chance to be creative, and not just send home spelling and complete-the-word work sheets,” Martin said.

Morris tells teachers that homework should be a continuation of a daily lesson, to find out whether students have understood the material.

“I don’t want them trying a new skill at home,” he said. “I want the work rather to be a continuation.” Helpline teachers say that, when students districtwide call with similar math questions on the same night--as has happened once or twice--they conclude that a new concept has been inadequately introduced in the schools.

Morris also said that homework should be varied. At times, he gives students a non-academic assignment, such as having them collect an item for an art project or talking to their parents for a writing activity.

Helpline administrators will survey some classrooms in the eight participating schools this spring to see if more students are completing assignments as a result of the phone link. Depending on results, they will expand the project to cover more schools next fall.

“It’s not as good as inviting the teacher into the home for dinner, to talk with parents and the student in the home environment, but it’s a step forward in at least having a place for students to call” and connect with someone who cares, Walberg said.