Stop Homework

I recently started a group on facebook (please join) where I heard from April Peacock, a mother of a third grader from Pennsylvania. She was looking for advice on how to respond to her son’s teacher, who had sent home a high stakes testing practice booklet, with instructions to the parents on how to review with their children.

High Stakes Testing Isn’t Beneficial
by April Peacock

Yesterday, I received a packet from my third grade son. The front letter says the following:

Dear Parent Helpers,
Attached is this week’s PSSA Practice Packet to review with your child. As always your help and assistance in your child’s education is so important. This is one way you can help show them what they are doing in school is important.

Remember to review the packet with your child. Make sure they read the story and questions carefully before trying to figure out the answers. A little each night works well. The answer key is included for your reference. Research has shown (Ashbaugh, 2009) that when parents practice with their children in high stakes testing, students do much better.

Please fill out and return the paper below to your child’s teacher on 2/1. Do not return the packet.
Third Grade Teachers

Week # 1
Student’s Name
Time spent on this packet with student _______________ mins per day.
Were you able to finish the packet? Y N
Please list anything that your child did not understand, so that we can review it in the classroom.

Here is my dilemma: I’m glad that they make the material available to us, but I don’t feel that “high stakes testing” is beneficial and I resent that I am required to fill out a form stating exacting how long I practiced with my child. I dislike them telling me how to spend my time.

Does anyone have an good responses to this? I would like to send in a short letter with references, etc., but I don’t want to sound upset. Basically, I want my letter to be just as PC as theirs. My Case Against Homework book is packed away because we just moved.

Today’s post is by Laura, an intellectual property and reinsurance attorney in Chicago with three children ranging in age from 5 years to 4.5 months. A long history of LD and ADD makes effective education one of her hot button issues. She wrote a lengthy letter to her daughter’s kindergarten teacher explaining her position on homework.

Homework is Detrimental to Long Term Success
by Laura

Dear Kindergarten Teacher,

I am writing regarding the progress report we received for Libby this past week, specifically the home assignments to her. The primary purpose of this letter is to outline our position regarding home assignments for our five year old. We expect this letter should be included in her school records. Principal _____ is copied on this letter; please feel free to provide it to any administrator who has a valid reason to read it.

I understand assigning homework at all grade levels is Chicago Public School policy; however, I strongly believe that homework at the kindergarten level, absent specific deficiencies, is detrimental to long term educational success. A significant number of longitudinal studies show homework, especially in the younger years, increases family strife, increases the child’s stress level and does not provide a lasting gain in test scores. I agree that the lessons learned in the classroom should be reinforced at home, but I believe we do that adequately by showing how what was learned in the classroom is used in real life and in fact homework interferes with our ability to do that.
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Last year, I posted a piece by a parent of a middle schooler in Massachusetts, who had asked, to no avail, that her child be allowed to opt out of the Renaissance Learning’s Accelerated Reader program.

Today, she provides an update.

Our School’s Use of the Renaissance Learning’s Accelerated Reading Product Has a Detrimental Effect on Our Children’s Desire to Read
by a Middle School Parent

Our middle school uses Renaissance Learning’s Accelerated Reader quiz product to verify that students are reading books at home. Scores on the 10-20 question fact-recall quizzes are then applied directly to students’ English/Language Arts grades.

AR is widely used in schools in the U.S. and around the world, often in conjunction with prize incentives and awards to “top readers.” Some schools, like ours, use it as part of a reading grade for students’ “free reading” at home – which is separate from in-class reading and literature instruction – despite the company’s clear statement in its supporting material that quiz scores are not meant to be reading grades. I am sharing this here because I know we are not the only parents who are concerned about the unintended consequences of this and similar well intentioned but potentially damaging requirements that turn children’s at-home pleasure reading into a chore.

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Torri Chappell, a teacher and mother from San Anselmo, California, has written here before about her experiences advocating for homework reform. When something strikes Torri as being wrong, she doesn’t hesitate to speak up, either in letter or in person.

Recently, when her School District had a meeting to talk about the school facility, Torri was on hand to talk about the importance of not only where children learn, but also what they learn.

What and How our Children Learn is More Important than Where They Learn
by Torri Chappell

We have two facility issues in Ross Valley resulting from abundance…an abundance of children and an abundance of assessments.

The first facility issue is regarding the facilities WHERE our children will learn. We have an abundance of students.

The second facility issue is regarding the district’s facility in making uninformed decisions about WHAT and HOW our children learn.
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Diana Toma is an artist and the mother of a pre-schooler and a second-grader who attends a public school in Atlanta, Georgia – a school which encourages parents to volunteer at least 10 hours a year. Before they moved to Atlanta, her daughter had attended an alternative school in Brooklyn, New York, where there was no curriculum, homework, or grades and where the focus was on play. Diana, who hails from Romania, writes here about her experiences talking with her new daughter’s teacher about homework and education.

When Parents and Teachers Work Together, Our Lives are Easier
by Diana Toma

When I went to meet my daughter’s teacher at the new school, I have to admit I was going with some preconceived ideas. Everybody at the Brooklyn alternative school had told me that public schools are to be avoided like some sort of “educational hell on earth.” I was scared to have those opinion confirmed. Plus I was afraid that the teacher would judge me because my daughter was “behind” in many of the skills that the public school students in Georgia had.

When I sat down with her and had a conversation, I was pleasantly surprised that she was willing and ready to listen to what I had to say. I told her where my daughter is coming from. The teacher told me that she hadn’t ever had any contact with alternative schools, and she asked me questions about it and listened carefully to what I had to say. I quickly got that she was really interested in who my daughter is and what methods would work or not with her. After all, that is all I could ever wish from any teacher!

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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.