Stop Homework

Opt­ing out of home­work means going into your school and nego­ti­at­ing a no-homework arrange­ment for your chil­dren. While not many peo­ple have even con­sid­ered this, shouldn’t children’s time at home belong to them and not to the school?

Need some backup? While I don’t know of many peo­ple who have tried this, here are two schools that have adopted home­work opt-out poli­cies. (If you know of any oth­ers, please let me know.)

A school in Aus­tralia has writ­ten an opt-out clause into its home­work policy:

[I]n recog­ni­tion of other demands on our stu­dents, we sup­port indi­vid­ual stu­dents, with par­ent sup­port, for­mally “opt­ing out” of the set homework.

A school in Alberta, Canada also has an opt-out clause in its home­work policy:

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.

Home work will con­tinue to be offered by the school. The home­work will be cre­ated with the express intent of sup­port­ing stu­dent learn­ing. Should a par­ent wish to limit or elim­i­nate home­work for a child they are invited by teach­ers to meet to iden­tify the level of home­work that will be done at home.

Stu­dents are not to be penal­ized in any fash­ion for this parental choice. Stu­dent respon­si­bil­ity for assigned activ­i­ties that can be com­pleted in class will remain.

And then there’s the Mil­ley fam­ily of Cal­gary, Alberta, which nego­ti­ated its own dif­fer­en­ti­ated home­work plan. You can read all about the Mil­leys here.