Stop Homework

The Eva Sim­mons Ele­men­tary School in North Las Vegas insti­tuted a new pol­icy in Jan­u­ary, encour­ag­ing par­ents to make sure their chil­dren read every night and prac­tice their math skills using a web­site resource. “One size fits all home­work is just not a best prac­tice for our stu­dents,” said the prin­ci­pal, in defend­ing the deci­sion to elim­i­nate the tra­di­tional nightly home­work assign­ments. Any home­work that is sent home will be geared toward the indi­vid­ual child. Read more here.

I was heart­ened to read the Com­ment posted by a teacher in response to the piece I ran two weeks ago, The Trou­ble With Kinder­garten.

I want you all to know that there are cor­ners of hope for early child­hood edu­ca­tion. I teach kinder­garten at a char­ter school in San Diego CA: the San Diego Coop­er­a­tive Char­ter. We believe that chil­dren learn best through a part­ner­ship between par­ents and educa­tors. My stu­dents learn through play and explo­ration, as chil­dren were designed to do. My job is to know each of them well enough to be able to struc­ture learn­ing expe­ri­ences that will best meet their needs. Just as in the main stream kinder­gartens I’ve expe­ri­enced, some of them read and write at the end of the school year, and some of them do not, but they all love school, have learned to nego­ti­ate and get along with their class­mates, and are excited about learn­ing. Our cur­ricu­lum is the CA state stan­dards, but our day is filled with blocks, guinea pigs, singing, gar­den­ing, clay, rain­forests, outer space, dress up, swings, sto­ries, draw­ing, and questions.

Our school, which serves chil­dren in grades K through 8th, was started by par­ents and edu­ca­tors who saw how chil­dren were being short changed by the typ­i­cal pub­lic schools. It was hard work, but oh so ful­fill­ing. If you want a bet­ter learn­ing expe­ri­ence for your child, and ALL the chil­dren, find out what you can do to cre­ate alter­na­tives. You’ll be glad you did.

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Although I am an opti­mist and believe whole­heart­edly that schools will change, espe­cially if par­ents and stu­dents speak up, I can still get dis­cour­aged at how slowly things change. So I was thrilled when a reader sent me a link to School for Tomor­row, a new pri­vate 6 – 12 school in Rockville, Mary­land, that cites The Case Against Home­work in the FAQs dis­cussing the school’s home­work pol­icy. Dis­cov­er­ing some­thing like that, and a school that is really inter­ested in tap­ping in to kids’ inter­ests, makes all the work feel worthwhile.

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.

In Sep­tem­ber, I wrote about par­ents in Pam Beach County, Florida, who were up in arms about the School Board’s new pol­icy allow­ing for 60 min­utes of home­work in 3rd grade and 90 min­utes in 4th and 5th. Home­work was just one of their con­cerns. The oth­ers included fre­quent test­ing, a cal­en­dar of skills that teach­ers were to cover at a required pace, and mon­i­tor­ing by dis­trict staffers who would visit teach­ers’ class­rooms to make sure they are fol­low­ing the program.

The par­ents banded together, set up their own web­site, Par­ents for Edu­ca­tional Reform, and more than 1,000 par­ents and teach­ers packed the School Board meet­ing last week to protest and voice their concerns.

The upshot: school con­trol has been returned to the indi­vid­ual schools, which will get to decide whether they want to imple­ment any of those policies.

The les­son to be taken: there’s strength in num­bers and we should all orga­nize in our own communities.

Today’s guest blog­ger, Jeff Val­ure, a math teacher with 12 years’ expe­ri­ence, the last 10 at a pub­lic mid­dle school north of New York City, is the father of two boys, one of whom just started nurs­ery school. He’s upset to find out that his local kinder­garten assigns home­work four nights a week and is “dread­ing” next year. Jeff has started a peti­tion for a homework-free week to coin­cide with TV Turn-Off Week at home​work​free​.org.

A Math Teacher Speaks Out – Why I Stopped Assign­ing Home­work and Am Peti­tion­ing for a Homework-Free Week
by Jeff Valure

The past few years I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with my lit­tle guinea pigs – er – stu­dents. Three years ago I decided that so much time was spent on home­work, check­ing it, read­ing answers, going over prob­lems, that I would be able to get much more done in class if I did away with it. After all, I get a pre­cious 46 min­utes a day with these kids. Do I want to spend that time on book­keep­ing or do I want to inter­act with them in a more edu­ca­tion­ally pro­found way? How often do you get to work with the guid­ance, aid, and encour­age­ment of an “expert” in the field? Why waste that time?

Of course my stu­dents are used to home­work, they barely grum­ble when they get an assign­ment over the week­end. The idea of not hav­ing home­work is as scary as it is excit­ing. There are lots of uncer­tain­ties. Will they be able to keep up with the course­work? Will their grades be impacted? How will it affect their per­for­mance on stan­dard­ized tests?

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The post that has gen­er­ated the most Com­ments ever is I Hate Read­ing Logs by FedUp Mom. If you scroll through, you’ll notice that teach­ers have chimed in, some rethink­ing their own home­work prac­tice, oth­ers defend­ing it. I was par­tic­u­larly struck by the open­ness of a teacher from Vir­ginia, who found the post while look­ing for a read­ing log, and ended up rethink­ing logs altogether.

I also thought the teacher made a very good point about the impor­tance of keep­ing all dis­cus­sions between teacher and par­ent as cor­dial and as respect­ful as possible.

I’ll Make My Read­ing Logs Optional
by a Vir­ginia Teacher

I acci­den­tally came upon this web­site when search­ing for read­ing logs to give to my stu­dents this year for home­work. This blog has really made me rethink the valid­ity of the entire idea and really home­work in gen­eral. Read­ing the com­ments from so many frus­trated par­ents has been insight­ful, because I hon­estly never thought about how home­work can invade a child’s home/after-school life. I applaud the par­ents who advo­cate for their kids and the tremen­dous weight home­work can put on their shoul­ders. As a teacher, I want par­ents to feel like part­ners in the class­room and hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions like this one can only help kids get the best edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ences pos­si­ble. The last thing I want to do is to stress my stu­dents out, so I’ll prob­a­bly make the read­ing logs optional.

One thing I noticed by this site is a dis­tinct divide between teach­ers and par­ents and while I do think dis­cus­sion is impor­tant, it seems to get hos­tile. There are huge assump­tions being made on both sides. I think teach­ers and par­ents BOTH need to have a gen­eros­ity of the spirit. I am not, and have never been inter­ested in doing harm to any stu­dent in my class — that’s not why I teach. In the same way, I don’t think con­cerned par­ents are try­ing to “ter­ror­ize” teach­ers. There has to be mid­dle ground on which teach­ers and par­ents can both feel validated.

I think this is impor­tant to keep in mind: Teach­ers have kids for 7 hours a day for only 9 months. Par­ents have kids for a life­time. Par­ents are a child’s first teach­ers and par­ents know their kids the best. I believe good, effec­tive teach­ers honor this. It is very sad to me that so many fam­i­lies have expe­ri­enced such neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences with pub­lic schools, espe­cially because kids and their opin­ion of school and learn­ing are caught in the crossfire.

I will def­i­nitely have a dif­fer­ent mind­set about home­work going into this new school year.