Stop Homework

Fred Baum­garten, the father of two daugh­ters in pub­lic school in Sharon, Con­necti­cut, began talk­ing to other par­ents in his daughter’s fifth grade class about home­work after he read The Home­work Myth, by Alfie Kohn, a col­lege class­mate. Fred, who has a M.S. in Edu­ca­tion from Bank Street and is cur­rently a direc­tor of Foun­da­tion, Gov­ern­ment and Cor­po­rate Rela­tions at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege, has a blog, Home­work Headaches, where he recently posted the let­ter he wrote to the Fifth Grade par­ents at his daughter’s school. In addi­tion to read­ing his let­ter, you should visit his blog, where you can fol­low his orga­niz­ing attempts.

Dear Fifth Grade Fam­i­lies & Friends:
by Fred Baum­garten
Sharon, Connecticut

I’ve spo­ken with a num­ber of you indi­vid­u­ally in the last few months about prob­lems with fifth grade home­work that have had an impact on our fam­ily and on our daughter’s atti­tudes toward school. Many of you have shared sim­i­lar stories.

Recently the Prin­ci­pal sent out a let­ter address­ing some of these con­cerns and reit­er­at­ing the school’s home­work poli­cies and atti­tudes, but this let­ter pro­poses no sub­stan­tive changes and fails to get at the heart of the problem.

There are really three home­work prob­lems, in my view:

(1) Quan­tity: Even if it’s true that our stu­dents are spend­ing an aver­age of an hour a day on home­work assign­ments, it would still be too much; it means that some days it takes a lot longer; it doesn’t take into account after­school activ­i­ties; and it takes away from time legit­i­mately spent in fam­ily activ­i­ties, relax­ing, reflect­ing, read­ing for fun, going out­doors, etc. Most of all there is the relent­less­ness of home­work – every night, and on week­ends too, which also relates to the sec­ond point, below.

(2) Con­tent: With very few excep­tions, fifth grade home­work assign­ments have been repet­i­tive, unen­gag­ing, and one-dimensional – lit­er­ally the same thing, night after night.
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Rosie Scrib­ble, a free­lance writer in the U.K. who spe­cial­izes in men­tal health issues and blogs about life with her 6 year old, wrote a won­der­ful piece about why she doesn’t make her daugh­ter do home­work. Many of the com­menters also wrote that they didn’t make their chil­dren do home­work, either. Now, if they could all inspire their friends and their friends’ friends, etc., home­work for young chil­dren would no longer exist (after all, most ele­men­tary school chil­dren require some kind of parental involve­ment to get their home­work done).

I Have Banned My Child from Doing Home­work
by Rosie Scribble

Some­times I get a bit hot under the col­lar, stamp my foot and decide that what­ever I have been told to do — I’m not doing it.

Then I won­der why my six-year-old daugh­ter does the same.

How­ever today, once again, I have decided there are a few things that our lit­tle fam­ily will not be doing, for one day at least.

Here’s the list:

I.J. [my daugh­ter] will not be doing any home­work
I.J. will not be watch­ing News­round
I.J. will not be look­ing at her school read­ing book
I will not be dis­cussing key­words and spellings with I.J.
I will not be test­ing her on her addi­tion and mul­ti­pli­ca­tion
I will not be help­ing her to prac­tise her alpha­bet
We will not be doing any­thing related in any way to edu­ca­tion
We shall only be doing fun things
Why?

Because a mother knows when her child is under stress, when she has had enough and is over-tired and over-sensitive, when being asked to watch the news will only add to her cur­rent anx­i­eties, when num­ber work at school is get­ting her down to the point where she can’t sleep at night, when the pres­sure to prac­tise her read­ing every night is get­ting her down, when it is all becom­ing too much.

A mother knows when her child needs a night off, a break from it all, and when a dose of fun takes pri­or­ity over homework.

So here’s what we will do instead:

We’ll close the cur­tains, turn off the lights and turn the front room into a cin­ema
We’ll watch a brand new DVD, pos­si­bly Cloudy with a chance of Meat­balls as rec­om­mended by A Mod­ern Mother
We’ll eat party food fol­lowed by choco­late cake
We’ll cud­dle up on the sofa
We’ll shut out the rest of the world
We’ll for­get about school
We’ll for­get about every­thing else
We’ll have some fun
And I’ll hope for a calmer more relaxed child tomorrow.

(Read the post and the accom­pa­ny­ing com­ments here.)

I always encour­age par­ents to write thank you notes when they appre­ci­ate some­thing that a teacher or admin­is­tra­tor has done. (There are a few exam­ples in The Case Against Home­work.) Shelli and Tom Mil­ley, the cou­ple from Cal­gary, Canada who recently nego­ti­ated an opt-out-of-homework con­tract with their children’s school, wrote a beau­ti­ful let­ter to the prin­ci­pal and teach­ers at Prince of Wales School in Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada, because they liked their piece in the Decem­ber 2009 issue of the Ontario Prin­ci­pals’ Coun­cil Jour­nal.

Let­ter to Jan Olson, Ms. Col­lett, Ms. Dickie and Ms. Miller
Prince of Wales School, Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada
from Shelli and Tom Mil­ley
Jan­u­ary 19, 2009

I recently read your arti­cle, Putting a Halt on Home­work in the Ontario Prin­ci­pals Coun­sel Exem­plary Lead­er­ship in Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion Mag­a­zine. I am writ­ing to applaud you and all the teach­ing staff at the Prince of Wales School in Bar­rie, Ontario. Your hard work in exam­in­ing the research on the value of home­work and ques­tion­ing whether or not it should be required at all must by itself be con­grat­u­lated but then to go on and spend many more hours focus­ing on cre­at­ing and imple­ment­ing teach­ing strate­gies that meet the needs of all stu­dents with­out the use of home­work is exem­plary. As you are no doubt aware, there is much lit­er­a­ture on the sub­ject of home­work, but, lit­tle or none on how schools can oper­ate with out it. To this end, you have led the way in cre­at­ing a sys­tem that works. As you stated in your arti­cle, “We need to stop try­ing to reform edu­ca­tion and, instead, rein­vent it”.

Your efforts and meth­ods are influ­enc­ing hun­dreds of par­ents, teach­ers, edu­ca­tors and admin­is­tra­tors not only across Canada and the United States but all over the world. They undoubt­edly influ­enced our fam­ily through­out our jour­ney on the mat­ter of home­work. The sta­tis­tics that your school has kept in stu­dent achieve­ment with­out the use of home­work speaks vol­umes. Clearly, you have “got it right”.

As a par­ent who spent almost three years read­ing the research, try­ing to edu­cate our children’s school and oth­ers and try­ing to find a solu­tion for our own fam­i­lies nightly home­work pains, I appre­ci­ate your time and hard work. I am thank­ful that my three year jour­ney recently resulted in my chil­dren, with our parental con­sent, being granted the right to “opt out” of home­work. We, as par­ents, now have the right to deter­mine those things that what we believe are in our children’s best inter­est out­side of school hours. Our chil­dren and fam­ily are no longer stressed from the nightly intru­sion of home­work – espe­cially graded home­work – and we are now able to pro­vide our kids with time to read, time to work on their weak areas, prac­tice math facts, musi­cal instru­ments, engage in extracur­ric­u­lar and reli­gious activ­i­ties and what ever else life throws our way. How­ever, opt­ing out of home­work is clearly not the opti­mal solu­tion. In my view, doing what you have done is the only way. Like you stated in your arti­cle it places all chil­dren on a “level play­ing field”.

Please do not under­es­ti­mate the pos­i­tive influ­ence that you have had and con­tinue to have on par­ents, teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors and dis­tricts and most of all on the students.

In Octo­ber, I posted a piece by Mary Sul­li­van, a free­lancer writer and mother to two fifth graders and a sev­enth grader in sub­ur­ban Chicago. She has her own web­page, Too Much Home­work, where she recently wrote about opt­ing out of home­work after she read the sto­ries that I had writ­ten about a fam­ily in Cal­gary, Canada, who opted out of homework.

Mary wrote to Har­ris Cooper – some­times called “home­work guru” and the per­son I hold respon­si­ble for 10-minutes of home­work per grade per night even though his own research doesn’t show any cor­re­la­tion in the early grades to home­work. Cooper told her:

I have no objec­tion to this pol­icy. I tell par­ents that if they have done their home­work (e.g., pro­vided a proper study­ing envi­ron­ment, seen to it that their child was doing home­work dili­gently so any prob­lems were with the amount or qual­ity of assign­ments and not with study habits) and assign­ments are still a prob­lem in their house­hold they should approach the teacher about reductions.

You can read the rest of what he had to say, other com­ments about opt­ing out of home­work, and post your own com­ments here.

This is the sixth post by FedUp Mom, the mother of a fifth grader. FedUp Mom’s daugh­ter used to attend a pub­lic school in sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia, but this year FedUp Mom moved her to a pri­vate Quaker school, hop­ing for a more relaxed envi­ron­ment. You can read her other posts here, here, here, here and here.

(If you want to write about your expe­ri­ences for Stop Home­work, please drop me a line.)

Gifted, schmifted
by FedUp Mom

Look­ing back at my daughter’s expe­ri­ence in the pub­lic school, I think her prob­lems began when she got high scores on the stan­dard­ized tests and was labelled “gifted”. I have become increas­ingly skep­ti­cal of the fol­low­ing oft-repeated slogans:

1.) “Gifted kids are bored because the work is too easy.” Not nec­es­sar­ily. Some­times gifted kids are bored because the work is just too boring.

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Denise Hills, a geol­o­gist, and her hus­band, a col­lege geol­ogy pro­fes­sor, live in Tuscaloosa, AL with their two chil­dren, a first grader and a three-year-old. Last year, when her son was in kinder­garten at the local pub­lic school, he didn’t get recess. Mid-year, Denise wrote a let­ter to the prin­ci­pal and local school board, express­ing her con­cerns, but she never heard back.

This year, things are better.

Recess is Impor­tant
by Denise Hills
Tuscaloosa, AL

I wrote a let­ter last year to my son’s prin­ci­pal and the school board about the lack of recess at my son’s school. I quoted research (infor­ma­tion that I received through this blog, mostly), and gave an impas­sioned plea to let my son run around for even just a few min­utes a day! I heard noth­ing back from the school board, and only had a cur­sory call from the prin­ci­pal. The end of the year was rapidly approach­ing, and I knew that noth­ing was going to change for that year.

This year, I was deter­mined to pur­sue things more rig­or­ously, for my son’s sake. He’s a VERY active boy, and ends up in trou­ble because he can’t sit still. Recess helps with that. So, at the start of the year, in a new school, I looked at his sched­ule. Sigh. No recess.

So, I dug out the let­ter I wrote last year and revised it, and got ready to send it to his prin­ci­pal. How­ever, I ran into my son’s teacher before I sent the let­ter, and am I glad I did! She told me that they do have recess, they just can’t call it recess. They are required to have a cer­tain num­ber of instruc­tional min­utes per day, and recess doesn’t count towards that. There’s no time in the sched­ule for recess, so they call it some­thing else (I’m not let­ting on as to what they call it, because I don’t want them to lose it!).

Yay! My son is get­ting recess! But I wanted to know if this is going to go away next year, so I still wanted to bring it up with the prin­ci­pal. Luck­ily, we have a fab­u­lous, approach­able prin­ci­pal at this school. When I voiced my con­cerns about recess with her, she imme­di­ately said that it is her com­mit­ment that EVERY child in her school, from grades 1 – 5, gets recess EVERY day. She is the one who has told the teach­ers how to imple­ment it and still main­tain the required “instruc­tional” min­utes. What a change from the pre­vi­ous prin­ci­pal, who essen­tially told me she couldn’t do anything!

I’ve spo­ken with the prin­ci­pal a bit about what we can do to help change things across the dis­trict, not just at our school, because while I’m thrilled that my son has recess, I want every child to have recess. We have a new school board now, so I’m hop­ing that will be a good start­ing point for my project to get recess insti­tuted at all our local schools, and maybe even even­tu­ally at all schools in the state! Wish me luck!

The day I wrote about the Mil­leys, par­ents from Cal­gary, Canada, who nego­ti­ated a con­tract with their children’s school allow­ing their chil­dren to opt-out of home­work, the national press asked me to put it in touch with the Mil­leys. Since then, the Cana­dian news­pa­pers, radio, and TV have reported the story, all of the cov­er­age pos­i­tive and supportive.

I hap­pened to be in Toronto last week and was thrilled to open the Toronto Globe and Mail to dis­cover an edi­to­r­ial, Peace on the Home Front, sup­port­ing the Mil­leys and sug­gest­ing that “school boards could eas­ily cur­tail home­work until Grade 9 with­out fear of edu­ca­tional harm. Younger stu­dents could thus be encour­aged to read at home, play sports or music and spend more stress-free time with their family.”

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(I’ll be gone until Monday)

Last year, I posted a piece by Torri Chap­pell, a teacher and mother from San Anselmo, Cal­i­for­nia, who wrote about some of the suc­cess she had had in advo­cat­ing for school reform.

Two weeks ago, the high school in her com­mu­nity hosted a show­ing of Race to Nowhere, a doc­u­men­tary film that I’ve writ­ten about before. (I’m an adviser and appear in the film.). Torri was both­ered by the dis­cus­sion fol­low­ing the screen­ing and sent the fol­low­ing let­ter to her local newspaper.

To the Edi­tors
from Torri Chappell

What really mat­ters in the life of a child? What really mat­ters in the life of an adult? What does it mean to be ‘suc­cess­ful’? Happy? These are the ques­tions that I wish adults would hon­estly ask them­selves and more impor­tantly ask their children.

Last Thurs­day Drake High School hosted a screen­ing of the new doc­u­men­tary, Race to Nowhere by Vicki Abeles. This film bravely and hon­estly depicts the neg­a­tive effects of our society’s push to make our chil­dren ‘suc­cess­ful’. It is pow­er­ful, heart wrench­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. I applaud Drake High School for pro­vid­ing this screen­ing to the com­mu­nity, to which hun­dreds of peo­ple of all ages attended.

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