Stop Homework

I always encour­age par­ents to write thank you notes when they appre­ci­ate some­thing that a teacher or admin­is­tra­tor has done. (There are a few exam­ples in The Case Against Home­work.) Shelli and Tom Mil­ley, the cou­ple from Cal­gary, Canada who recently nego­ti­ated an opt-out-of-homework con­tract with their children’s school, wrote a beau­ti­ful let­ter to the prin­ci­pal and teach­ers at Prince of Wales School in Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada, because they liked their piece in the Decem­ber 2009 issue of the Ontario Prin­ci­pals’ Coun­cil Jour­nal.

Let­ter to Jan Olson, Ms. Col­lett, Ms. Dickie and Ms. Miller
Prince of Wales School, Bar­rie, Ontario, Canada
from Shelli and Tom Mil­ley
Jan­u­ary 19, 2009

I recently read your arti­cle, Putting a Halt on Home­work in the Ontario Prin­ci­pals Coun­sel Exem­plary Lead­er­ship in Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion Mag­a­zine. I am writ­ing to applaud you and all the teach­ing staff at the Prince of Wales School in Bar­rie, Ontario. Your hard work in exam­in­ing the research on the value of home­work and ques­tion­ing whether or not it should be required at all must by itself be con­grat­u­lated but then to go on and spend many more hours focus­ing on cre­at­ing and imple­ment­ing teach­ing strate­gies that meet the needs of all stu­dents with­out the use of home­work is exem­plary. As you are no doubt aware, there is much lit­er­a­ture on the sub­ject of home­work, but, lit­tle or none on how schools can oper­ate with out it. To this end, you have led the way in cre­at­ing a sys­tem that works. As you stated in your arti­cle, “We need to stop try­ing to reform edu­ca­tion and, instead, rein­vent it”.

Your efforts and meth­ods are influ­enc­ing hun­dreds of par­ents, teach­ers, edu­ca­tors and admin­is­tra­tors not only across Canada and the United States but all over the world. They undoubt­edly influ­enced our fam­ily through­out our jour­ney on the mat­ter of home­work. The sta­tis­tics that your school has kept in stu­dent achieve­ment with­out the use of home­work speaks vol­umes. Clearly, you have “got it right”.

As a par­ent who spent almost three years read­ing the research, try­ing to edu­cate our children’s school and oth­ers and try­ing to find a solu­tion for our own fam­i­lies nightly home­work pains, I appre­ci­ate your time and hard work. I am thank­ful that my three year jour­ney recently resulted in my chil­dren, with our parental con­sent, being granted the right to “opt out” of home­work. We, as par­ents, now have the right to deter­mine those things that what we believe are in our children’s best inter­est out­side of school hours. Our chil­dren and fam­ily are no longer stressed from the nightly intru­sion of home­work – espe­cially graded home­work – and we are now able to pro­vide our kids with time to read, time to work on their weak areas, prac­tice math facts, musi­cal instru­ments, engage in extracur­ric­u­lar and reli­gious activ­i­ties and what ever else life throws our way. How­ever, opt­ing out of home­work is clearly not the opti­mal solu­tion. In my view, doing what you have done is the only way. Like you stated in your arti­cle it places all chil­dren on a “level play­ing field”.

Please do not under­es­ti­mate the pos­i­tive influ­ence that you have had and con­tinue to have on par­ents, teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors and dis­tricts and most of all on the students.

Posted in category Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on January 20, 2010 at 8:18 pm
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