Stop Homework

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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Today’s post is by Cynthia Schultz, a a former teacher with a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and concentrations in English and Special Education. She was educated and taught in Minnesota, one of the few states where she feels education still matters. A single mom by choice, with a daughter she adopted from Kazakhstan in 2003, Cynthia’s 8-year-old daughter attends one of the top public elementary schools in the city. Cynthia says, “I have great respect for the principal and the teachers but refuse to believe they’re omniscient.”

I Got the Principal To Move My Daughter to a Second-Grade Class with a More Flexible Teacher
by Cynthia Schultz

For the first time all year, my daughter got off the bus smiling on Wednesday. Not the manic “I got my way” or “I’m so special” smile but the smile of an 8 year old who had a good day.

A happy smile may seem small but it was the culmination of 9 weeks of pain, frustration, tears, accusations, meetings and more meetings, doubts, fears, promises (broken and kept), and meltdowns (not all of them my daughter’s).

From the first, I felt that my daughter’s classroom assignment was wrong for her. The teacher was very controlling, causing my daughter to rebel. She came home with 40 – 50 math problems per night, 20 spelling words

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