Let­ter to the Edi­tor of a Local Newspaper

Today’s post is a let­ter that appeared in the Sackville Tri­bune Post on May 8, 2007. I’ve been cor­re­spond­ing with the author, Amanda Cock­shutt, since the pub­li­ca­tion of The Case Against Home­work and Amanda and I were on a Cana­dian radio pro­gram together in the Fall. Amanda, who lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, is the CEO of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­teomics, a small biotech com­pany, and part time lec­turer at Mount Alli­son Uni­ver­sity. She has 3 chil­dren, ages 12, 8 and 6. In the win­ter, Amanda per­suaded the prin­ci­pal of her children’s ele­men­tary school to have two sep­a­rate one-week trial peri­ods with­out home­work. When it was over, the school did not abol­ish home­work, but it did insti­tute some home­work pol­icy changes, includ­ing no home­work the nights of major events and two weeks per year where there would be no home­work other than reading.

Let­ter to the Edi­tor
by Amanda Cockshutt

Chil­dren are assigned daily home­work from the time they start kinder­garten at the ripe old age of five. Is it really nec­es­sary? Does home­work pro­mote bet­ter learn­ing or even higher test scores?

I have been both­ered by home­work for the past 7 years. At times it has been a nui­sance, at other times it has elicited out­right mutiny (com­plete with kick­ing and scream­ing) in my house­hold. I started to seri­ously ques­tion the value of home­work when our fam­ily spent a year in Swe­den. My old­est child, then 7/8 attended a Swedish school that assigned one math sheet on Mon­day to be returned Fri­day as the only home­work. School ran from 8:10 am until 1 pm. My child went from an Eng­lish read­ing level of Curi­ous George to beyond Harry Pot­ter, went from only a few words of spo­ken Swedish to being a flu­ent speaker and reader of Swedish chap­ter books and she cov­ered the entire Cana­dian math cur­ricu­lum that year. The last spike in the home­work cof­fin for me, was the dis­com­fort I felt telling my kids to put down the book they were read­ing or come inside from play­ing and do their home­work. It was time to do my own homework.

Read­ing a hand­ful of books (“The End of Home­work”, “The Case Against Home­work” and “The Home­work Myth”) and a num­ber of research arti­cles (includ­ing the review arti­cle “The Effec­tive­ness of Home­work”), I learned that there is no evi­dence that home­work improves aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment for ele­men­tary school stu­dents. No pub­lished research has shown that time spent on home­work causes an improve­ment in aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance or achieve­ment. Should schools have the right to infringe on home life in the absence of solid research to jus­tify the practice?

All three of Sackville’s pub­lic schools assign nightly home­work that stu­dents are required to do. Fail­ure to com­plete home­work is reflected on stu­dent report cards and often results in deten­tions at the dis­cre­tion of the teacher. Most schools fol­low the “ten minute rule”, mean­ing that an aver­age child would spend 10 min­utes per grade level per night on home­work. This ten minute rule was invented by edu­ca­tional researcher, Har­ris Cooper, who demon­strated that home­work has no effect on aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment for young stu­dents, which is curi­ous indeed. The ten minute rule is based on no research what­so­ever.
Fur­ther­more, admin­is­ter­ing and assess­ing home­work con­sumes valu­able teacher time. It also intro­duces the com­plex­ity of teach­ing a class where some of the stu­dents have com­pleted the home­work and some have not. This often trans­lates into class time being wasted for the dili­gent stu­dents whose home­work is completed.

Another seri­ous con­se­quence of home­work is the phys­i­cal strain of lug­ging it home every night. Physi­cians rec­om­mend that chil­dren carry no more than 10% of their body weight on their backs. A run­ning tally of my old­est child’s back­pack (includ­ing a mod­est lunch, and not includ­ing extra gym clothes and shoes) has her back­pack weigh­ing between 15 and 22 pounds, far in excess of 10% of her weight!

Given the lack of research demon­strat­ing the effec­tive­ness of home­work, par­tic­u­larly at the ele­men­tary school level, com­bined with the urgent demands for increased phys­i­cal fit­ness to bat­tle child­hood obe­sity, it is time that we demand account­abil­ity from our schools. Years of research show that time spent on home­work is not lead­ing to greater aca­d­e­mic gains. Chil­dren should spend their pre­cious spare time pur­su­ing their own inter­ests like prac­tic­ing the piano, play­ing out­side, read­ing for plea­sure, or sim­ply relax­ing. Schools should refrain from med­dling with fam­ily life for no valid rea­son and leave the choice of how to spend time at home up to the family.

Please tell edu­ca­tors and school admin­is­tra­tors that it’s time to stop this foolishness.

Amanda M Cock­shutt, PhD
Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­teomics N.B. Inc.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers, Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on May 15, 2007 at 11:22 pm
| 26 Comments »

26 Comments on “Let­ter to the Edi­tor of a Local Newspaper”

  1. Harold Jarche » Stop homework in Sackville says:

    […] read Amanda Cockshutt’s let­ter to our local news­pa­per last week, and now Sara Ben­nett at Stop Home­work has posted it in its entirety. The pres­sure that Amanda, and oth­ers, have put on school autorities […]

    May 16th, 2007 at 6:31 am
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  2. Mike Gloss says:

    One of the things that has stressed me has been the amount of home­work given to chil­dren dur­ing vaca­tion time.
    My fam­ily couldn’t go on the trip we planned because my daugh­ter had to do a seri­ous book report and as well watch some­thing that was going to be on TV dur­ring the vaca­tion.
    There was no pos­si­ble way my daugh­ter could read this book which was about 300 pages as well as go to florida, and then do a report on the TV show that was on tues­day.
    Home­work has harmed our fam­ily life. The stress just gets worse and worse. I’m think­ing about hir­ing an older stu­dent to do the home­work from now on. I recomend this to everyone.

    May 17th, 2007 at 10:51 am
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  3. Sara Bennett says:

    I think vaca­tion home­work is a very good place to start a con­ver­sa­tion with the school/teachers about home­work. Did you talk to the teacher who assigned that home­work? Did you let her/him know that you had to can­cel your plans because of home­work? I think every adult can under­stand the need for a break and, once you remind the teachers/school that your kids need a break, too, they’ll rethink their assignments.

    In The Case Against Home­work, you’ll find a lot of argu­ments for why vaca­tion home­work is par­tic­u­larly detri­men­tal and sam­ples of let­ters and con­ver­sa­tions you can have with your child’s teacher.

    I hope your daugh­ter doesn’t get sum­mer homework.

    May 17th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
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  4. amy says:

    im not from amer­ica im from lon­don. i think home­work is hard in year 6 because the teacher doesn’t tell us what to do.

    November 25th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
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  5. DION/jeremiah says:

    can u help us stop home­work PLEAZE HELP US!!!!!!!

    February 21st, 2008 at 5:12 pm
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  6. lee says:

    there should be a big stop to homwork

    June 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
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  7. kt says:

    i hate school because of home­work. i think that if i had no home­work then i would quite enjoy school.i can never relax or have any­time to revise on what i have done that day at school or read a book.ican’t really go out much to get exer­cise or help with things like cook­ing and it also gets in the way of my gui­tar prac­tice. please stop hmwk :’(

    October 8th, 2008 at 11:58 am
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  8. Suzy Luv says:

    I am doing a per­sua­sive Essay on ban­ning home­work and how home­work is bad for chil­dren. I have learned many things and ALL of my research leads back to Sara Ben­net, Nancy Kalish, or Alfie Kohn. I had no idea that there had been this much research. I am def­fi­nately a vic­tim of late night home­work and tears over loads of home­work. I can relate so well to all the research i have done. I have a.d.d. and when i take med­i­cine to pay more atten­tion in class i tend to be even more stressed in the after­noon when the med­i­cine has worn off and its time for homework.

    November 6th, 2008 at 11:39 am
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  9. Annonoymous says:

    Home­work takes away from what being a child is all about, enough said. I went out­side today, but all I could think about is that I needed to go inside because I had to do home­work. PLEASE SARA BENNET HELP US STOP HOMEWORK.

    April 29th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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  10. Anonymous says:

    you are coool

    May 11th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
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  11. Denise says:

    With all the cap­i­tal­iza­tion and punc­tu­a­tion errors, looks like we may need more homework!

    September 8th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
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  12. HomeworkBlues says:

    Denise, rather I might ven­ture to add that all those errors prove more edu­ca­tion is needed in the class­room. Get as much done there as pos­si­ble. While you have the kids. While they are fresh. That’s what they are there for. Busy home­work has no place in the home.

    My daugh­ter doesn’t make those errors. May we be excused, please? I’ve said this a thou­sand times but it bears repeat­ing. At the risk of run­ning in cir­cles. What she wanted to do every after­noon in ele­men­tary was read a novel, write a novel. She wanted to read and write! Is there a bet­ter way to rein­force good writ­ing, nur­ture read­ing? Why is this such an issue? To me, it’s a no brainer.

    She also wanted to build, take appli­ances apart to see how they work, draw, and play out­side, cre­at­ing an imag­i­nary school and build­ing fortes. Why is easy but tedious and oner­ous home­work more valu­able than self-described pursuits?

    September 8th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
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  13. HomeworkBlues says:

    Meant to say self-PRESCRIBED. But described works too!

    September 9th, 2009 at 12:41 am
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  14. Anonymous says:

    At the risk of your wrath, I must say I dis­agree. Home­work is a good way for teach­ers to eval­u­ate how each stu­dent is under­stand­ing the mate­r­ial being taught. In class a stu­dent may believe they under­stand the work, or may be afraid to ask for more help in front of their peers. Once the stu­dent goes home and must work through some math prob­lems or fig­ure out a recur­ring theme in a book on their own it may become obvi­ous where they need more help, what they have grasped and what they have not. With out this check in place a stu­dent may come to test time and end up fail­ing it because they never got the concept.

    October 5th, 2009 at 11:40 am
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  15. PsychMom says:

    I just have to ask.…what does it mean, to you, if the child doesn’t do the home­work? What do you do in this case?

    Do you give grades related to homwork?

    October 5th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
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  16. Matthew says:

    Anony­mous said: “Home­work is a good way for teach­ers to eval­u­ate how each stu­dent is under­stand­ing the mate­r­ial being taught.”

    Is it? A few days ago, I spent about 30 min­utes teach­ing my 4th grader expo­nents because he either didn’t get it in class or the teacher didn’t cover them thor­oughly before assign­ing the home­work. My wife spent 1 to 2 hours lead­ing him through a book report this week­end, typ­ing at the key­board while prompt­ing through almost every sen­tence of the report (this is the first time for a full book report). The end result in no way shows what the stu­dent learned or was capa­ble of from what he was taught in school.

    Why were we so involved? Because in both cases our son was in tears when he didn’t know how to pro­ceed. Other than being left won­der­ing whether my son is in too high of a math class or home­work is being assigned that hasn’t been cov­ered in class (against county pol­icy), I at least felt good that my son did learn from the math. But the book report left me very uncom­fort­able with the level of our involve­ment. Writ­ing and analy­sis skills a def­i­nitely good, but I just don’t think 9 year olds are capa­ble of the orga­ni­za­tion skills needed to inde­pen­dently write a full book report. And the teacher will never learn that if every other par­ent did what we did (and I’d guess most do; the stu­dents whose par­ents don’t will end up get­ting downtracked).

    My favorite teacher this year? One of my 8th grader’s teach­ers who said that any assign­ment (includ­ing tests) is eli­gi­ble for extra credit if the stu­dent goes back and cor­rects mis­takes after they are graded and that he’s avail­able any time to help with ques­tions, includ­ing email on the weekends.

    To him, the most impor­tant thing is that his stu­dents come out of class hav­ing learned the mate­r­ial (or at least had the oppor­tu­nity to do so).

    October 5th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
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  17. PsychMom says:

    Matthew: And isn’t so hard to resist teach­ing it to them? I was con­fronted with that this week­end with math as well. Find the perime­ter and the area…I know how, but the child appar­ently does not. Am I sup­posed to teach it? Appar­ently not because the child is sup­posed to have cov­ered this, but she doesn’t have a clue.

    We left it undone. My daugh­ter was mad at me for not helping.….….great.
    And my ques­tion is…what if the par­ent doesn’t know how to do the task? What then?

    October 5th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
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  18. FedUpMom says:

    You know, one rea­son for a home­work mora­to­rium is that it would force schools to con­front how much teach­ing they actu­ally do. Schools in “good” dis­tricts rou­tinely out­source the actual teach­ing to par­ents, as Psy­ch­Mom and Matthew describe, and as I expe­ri­enced myself.

    It’s not rea­son­able to expect an ele­men­tary school stu­dent to teach her­self math out of a text­book at home. This is where Mom and Dad step in and do the teach­ing that should have been done at school, dur­ing the day, when the child was still rea­son­ably fresh.

    October 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
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  19. Anonymous says:

    “Should home­work be banned at all local schools?“I think that teach­ers and stu­dents have both had enough with all of the home­work being given to students.Teachers have lives out of school to and barely have enough time to grade school­work let alone homework,students have lives also and bal­anc­ing school and sports to the best of their abil­ity is hard even if they try their hard­est some­times they just can’t cope with all of the work being given.Most peo­ple don’t have to do sports to not be able to keep up with home­work but peo­ple also play instru­ments and need to prac­tice for shows and recidals.“I play piano,play basketball,softball,and soc­cer to get in shape and some­times i show up to school with no home­work because i had a game or prac­tice or even lessons that night.“As you can tell peo­ple just like me all over the world are suf­fer­ing for this but in a sports is a plus because you can actu­ally go to col­lege for any sport.“I wish every night to be able to go to col­lege for bas­ket­ball because i love the sport so much.“I hope though that us stu­dents and teach­ers can change the schools into mak­ing us have so much home­work or bet­ter yet any home­work at all.I hope you can post this for and infor­ma­tional term towards schools and chil­dren all over the coun­try.
    –Ali Nickley

    November 23rd, 2009 at 9:12 am
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  20. sarah werring says:

    A per­cent of peo­ple said that “home­work should be banned”.Another said that “Home is for fam­ily not homework”

    November 23rd, 2009 at 9:28 am
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  21. mckinzie says:

    i think that home­work makes it hard for kids to do out­side of school activ­i­tys!
    for exam­ple my girl takes bal­let and is really intoo it. but she had so much home­work one day that she couldnt go and she was up late. the next day at school she could hardly stay awake!

    this is ridiculous!

    January 6th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
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  22. Anonymous says:

    home­work is stress­ful and doesnt even have a point!

    February 23rd, 2010 at 6:14 pm
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  23. Anonymous says:

    school is bad enough but not that bad. but.…. school + home­work equal­sAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­H­HHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SCHOOL AND HOMEWORK STINK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    February 23rd, 2010 at 6:17 pm
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  24. Anonymous says:

    Where can i find the review arti­cle “The Effec­tive­ness of Homework”?

    February 25th, 2010 at 11:54 am
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  25. sam says:

    I HATE HOMEWORK IT HARD & WE & WE GET LOT OF IT. One of the things that has stressed me has been the amount of home­work given to chil­dren dur­ing vaca­tion time.

    February 28th, 2010 at 9:04 am
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  26. SAMMY says:

    home­work is hard & no one likes hw, all the peo­ple are right about wath they said about hw & if we for­get to do our hw we would get in to a huge trou­ble. our par­ent would ground if they heard that we didn’t do our hw & got into a huge trouble.PLEASE STOP HW.
    IAM FROM IRELAND.

    February 28th, 2010 at 9:15 am
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