Stop Homework

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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Almost two years ago, I wrote about Shelli and Tom Mil­ley, the par­ents of three chil­dren in Cal­gary, Alberta, who were try­ing to change home­work pol­icy and, at the very least, get an opt-out pol­icy for their own chil­dren. At that point, the two lawyers had already been dis­cussing the issue with the school for over a year, had got­ten the school to appoint a home­work com­mit­tee and had even got­ten Shelli as one of the mem­bers of the com­mit­tee. When it was clear the com­mit­tee wasn’t really going to be very inde­pen­dent, Shelli resigned.

She and her hus­band, how­ever, con­tin­ued to seek sup­port for a bet­ter home­work pol­icy, and were basi­cally a 2-person task­force of their own, writ­ing let­ters, enlist­ing sup­port from com­mu­nity mem­bers, teach­ers, and mem­bers of the School Board, and get­ting advice from Vera Good­man, author of Sim­ply Too Much Home­work (and a Cal­gary res­i­dent her­self), Jan Olson, the prin­ci­pal of the Bar­rie, Ontario school I wrote about last week which had elim­i­nated home­work, and me.

And now, just yes­ter­day, the Mil­leys’ tena­cious­ness paid off. The school finally agreed that their chil­dren could opt-out of home­work alto­gether. The Mil­leys have allowed me to share their opt-out agree­ment. You can read it here.

Last week, I got an email from Laura Reeger North, a mother of three from Mid­land, Texas, who was a teacher for five years in an alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion pro­gram before the birth of her last child. Laura, who gave me per­mis­sion to reprint her emails and use her name, wrote to me last week and told me that, after read­ing an excerpt from The Case Against Home­work, she

found the courage to say ENOUGH. We will no longer be a slave to the threat of a bad grade for not doing mean­ing­less home­work over things we have already learned. We will con­cen­trate on learn­ing sub­ject mat­ter and learn­ing the lessons of life we have aban­doned along with our fam­ily life due to point­less homework.

I have repeat­edly been told that my chil­dren need to do this home­work to learn to fol­low the rules. There is a much bet­ter way to teach them the impor­tance of respect and respon­si­bil­ity through the expe­ri­ences of fam­ily life and hav­ing the time to talk and lis­ten to my chil­dren. Is this an extreme reaction-maybe.

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