Stop Homework

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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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.

I am always look­ing for schools that have home­work opt-out poli­cies, but they seem to be few and far between. Last Novem­ber, I posted a link to a school in Aus­tralia with an opt-out policy.

A reader who has been try­ing to get opt-out poli­cies at her children’s Alberta schools recently sent me a link to an Alberta school with an opt-out policy.

It reads:

St. Andrew’s School staff and school coun­cil spent con­sid­er­able time review­ing home­work. The dia­logue was in depth and revealed many ideas and points of view both with staff and with parents.

As a school com­mu­nity, we came to the fol­low­ing under­stand­ing. Par­ents are the prime edu­ca­tors for their chil­dren, and as such have impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ties as to the per­sonal and edu­ca­tional growth of their chil­dren. Thus par­ents must decide what is in the best inter­est of their chil­dren in regards to home work.

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Here’s a good home­work pol­icy from a newly opened school in Aus­tralia. The pol­icy includes an “opt-out” clause, a clause I think all poli­cies should con­tain. It states, “In recog­ni­tion of other demands on our stu­dents, we sup­port indi­vid­ual stu­dents, with par­ent sup­port, for­mally ‘opt­ing out’ of the set homework.”