Stop Homework

The president of the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends in Australia (an independent community based organization formed in 1947 to represent the parents of children participating in state school education within Tasmania) has started a campaign to stop teachers from assigning homework in elementary and high schools. According to an article in news.com.au, she said, “I really want someone to show me homework is beneficial. If it is not, I don’t think we should be having it. I don’t want to see kids coming home and doing useless homework. I want them outside playing. There are quite a few reports out there saying it might not be beneficial - so why are we doing it?”

When parents at Addison Elementary School in Palo Alto, California, brought to their principal’s attention the reduction of homework at Oak Knoll Elementary in Menlo Park, the principal responded by refining its homework policy as well. According to an article in Palo Alto online, the principal stated, “”I was blindsided about the anxiety that seems to be around homework. We took a very deliberate non-reactive approach to educating ourselves and the parents about homework. Parents really want children to have a typical childhood with unstructured time to play, piano lessons, boy scouts, and family time.”

In addition, the District is also reviewing homework policy. According to the Palo Alto school district Director of Elementary Education, “We don’t want homework to be extensive in the elementary school. We also want to be sure that the assignments have a purpose, and they’re not busy work.”

Yesterday, the CBS Nightly News picked up the story of the homework ban at The Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park, California, and asked whether Oak Knoll is at the forefront of a homework revolution. I hope so. After a short ad, you can watch the story here.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, some San Francisco Bay area schools are responding to the requests of elementary and middle-school parents to cut back on homework. The Oak Knoll Elementary school in Menlo Park has mostly banned homework, except reading, occasional projects or catch-up work. Bubb Elementary, in Mountain View relaxed its homework regimen, and Addison Elementary in Palo Alto and the Berryessa School District in San Jose are discussing the issue. And one school, Ohlone Elementary in Palo Alto tries to get children to manage their time during the day. And then they assign homework to the parents: to spend 15 minutes a night talking with their children.

According to an article in Newsweek,

Principals and teachers around the country are growing increasingly concerned with what they call the fourth-grade slump. The malaise, which can strike children any time between the end of the second and the middle of fifth grade, is marked by a declining interest in reading and a gradual disengagement from school. What’s causing it? Some say fourth graders get distracted by videogames, organized sports and after-school activities. Others worry that kids are burning out. No Child Left Behind has created an intense push to teach kids the fundamentals of reading. “We kill them with tests in third grade. By fourth grade, they’re tired,” says Gina Defalco, a fourth-grade teacher in Fredericksburg, Va. The slump was first noted in the 1960s, but with schools under pressure to show that kids in all grades are improving, administrators are taking a fresh look at the problem.

Read the rest of the article here.

When I started this blog last summer, one of my first entries was about schools that had cut back on summer homework. There, I wrote about the principal of Needham High, Paul Richards (whom I had interviewed for The Case Against Homework), an educator who’s concerned about the amount of stress today’s students face.

Paul Richards was in the news again recently because he put an end to the tradition of publishing the honor roll in the local newspaper, a move which subjected him to ridicule on national TV. But, according to Richards, high schools stress contributes to increased incidents of suicide, eating disorders, drug abuse, and other self-destructive behaviors.

According to the Boston Globe, Richards recently outlined several new initiatves to combat stress among students, including surveying students about their anxieties; consulting the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; and forming a stress-reduction committee of students, parents, and teachers. He also said he’d ask teachers to be more flexible in their assignment deadlines, noting that college professors often hand out a syllabus at the start of a semester that list windows of time to turn in projects and reports. And he plans to ask teachers to make sure they clearly state the objective of assignments, so that students are not left feeling they’re doing busywork.

Read the entire article here.

Here’s a funny article from The New York Sun about supermodel Christie Brinkley’s take on homework.

According to an article by a Wall Street Journal reporter, some of the most elite elementary and high schools across the country are changing their homework policies, limiting the amount of work assigned by teachers or eliminating it altogether in lower grades.

In Greenville, South Carolina, the 74-school district reduced the amount of time students had to spend on assignments each night and limited how much homework could count toward a final grade. At Sparhawk, a private school in Amesbury, Massachusetts, homework was eliminated until January of third grade. At Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, juniors will now spend 10 days in history class writing a required thesis–work which they previously did at home. At Harvard-Westlake, an independent middle and high school in Los Angeles, homework now has a three-hour per course, per week limit, and anonymous surveys are given out every semester to gauge the workload.

The movement towards reduced homework, according to the article, is being fueled by both The Case Against Homework and The Homework Myth. Still, though, national statistics show that the amount of homework is continuing to grow.

Read the entire article to get more ideas on what you might want to ask for at your school.