Stop Homework

According to an article in The New York Times, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report showing that as students read less for fun, their reading test scores are declining. In addition, “performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.”

One of the reasons kids don’t read for pleasure, according to a 2006 study by Scholastic/Yankelovich is homework.

So many readers have pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal How Homework Is Hurting Our Family by Jeff Opdyke that I’m posting it here. He begins:

I hate school!

Yes, I know that’s a bit immature for someone 41 years old. But it’s true. I hate school — so much so that my wife, Amy, and I have hired a college student to help our fifth-grade son manage his schoolwork a few times a week.

It’s not that we can’t do the work with him, or that we don’t want to. Just this evening we helped him study for a reading test, and over the weekend I was quizzing him on customary and metric units of measurement one day and biological definitions the next.
Read the rest of this entry »

A math teacher at Hilliard Memorial Middle School in Ohio has started assigning homework to parents. Her rationale: “It’s stressing the importance of schoolwork, and it’s good for the kids to say they know something that their parents don’t.” According to an article in The Columbus Dispatch, the “assignments ask students to show their parents how to solve the problems. Then, both parent and child work the problems. Parents are not required to complete the assignments and students can use their siblings, neighbors or teachers, but [the teacher] prefers Mom and Dad do the work.” Read the article here.

(Here are my earlier posts about teachers assigning homework to parents: original, followup.)

There’s a good article in last week’s New York Magazine on the importance of sleep and how decreased sleep in children and teenagers affects academic performance and emotional stability. Read the article here.

According to an article in The New York Times, an English teacher at a Montclair, New Jersey, high school assigns regular homework to the parents. Since September, the teacher

has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online. If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.

Are you ready for homework from your child’s teacher? Let me know by posting a comment. If enough of you respond, I’ll send the comments to the teacher.

A Jewish day school in Los Angeles, Temple Israel of Hollywood, has basically abolished homework for its K-6 students. According to an article in The LA Times, Eileen Horowitz, the head of the school, stated,

“It became apparent that some of what we were doing was silly. Why should our children spend time doing fill-in-the-blank assignments or writing spelling words five times?” She is confident that her students will acquire all the good study habits they’ll need from working on long-term projects inside and outside the classroom, from their daily reading and from other assignments they’ll still be required to do occasionally.

* * *

“Maybe they can build a treehouse or go for a bike ride around the neighborhood,” Horowitz said. “Let’s give them a chance to play. Let’s give them a chance to dream.”

Welcome back to Stop Homework. I’ve enjoyed the respite from blogging, just as many of you have enjoyed a homework-free summer.

Over the summer, I received a grant from a non-profit foundation to help fund my stop homework project. This is fantastic news, because it allows me to devote more time to helping all of you change homework policy and practice.

Also, the paperback version of The Case Against Homework arrived in bookstores last week. This is also great news, because the book is now more affordable.

And one more piece of good news: Washington Post reporter, Jay Mathews, who calls himself “Mr. Homework,” wrote an article in early August calling for an end to homework for elementary school students. Considering that earlier last year Mathews denounced the message of The Case Against Homework, it was exciting to see him change his mind. Let’s hope other pro-homework people change their minds as well.

On the highly popular website, boingboing.net, Cory Doctorow gives a rave review to The Case Against Homework. He also discusses his own schooling:

I was lucky enough to attend excellent, publicly funded alternative schools through my educational career. We had homework, but we were also given a lot of time for free play, and a lot of free rein to choose our subjects and design our curriculum — I remember spending half of the fourth grade working my way through two or three math textbooks and the other half designing and writing a parody of MAD Magazine, to the exclusion of all other work. The next grade I followed the class for most of the semester, except when I didn’t. In high-school, I took a year off, moved to a little house in Mexico, and wrote stories. All of this stuff contributed more to my learning than any amount of worksheets and homework ever could have.

Coincidentally, I attended the same publicly funded alternative school–SEED in Toronto, Canada–albeit many years before Cory. And, like Cory, I attribute my nontraditional schooling (including the end of high school, college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and law school at Rutgers, Newark), to my love of learning. All of those schools allowed students to figure out what they wanted to study, find mentors for themselves, and engage in independent study. I only wish today’s students were allowed that same time to engage in pursuits of their own choosing.