Stop Homework

Sara Ben­nett is the co-author of The Case Against Home­work: How Home­work Is Hurt­ing Our Chil­dren and What We Can Do About It and the founder of Stop Home­work, a not-for-profit project (affil­i­ated with The Alliance for Child­hood) that is devoted to chang­ing home­work pol­icy and prac­tice. She is an advi­sor to, and appears in, the doc­u­men­tary film, Race to Nowhere.

Sara has an 18-year-old son and a 15-year-old daugh­ter, and she has been an anti-homework activist from the time her older child entered first grade. She has suc­cess­fully orga­nized par­ents to change home­work pol­icy and has exten­sive expe­ri­ence in talk­ing with teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors about the home­work prob­lem. Sara has lec­tured and appeared on dozens of tele­vi­sion and radio pro­grams in the United States and Canada, includ­ing The Today Show, the CBS Evening News, the Michael Medved show, and National Pub­lic Radio, and she has coun­seled hun­dreds of par­ents and edu­ca­tors on home­work reform. She has also been a keynote speaker and pan­elist at national and regional con­fer­ences and spo­ken to many par­ent and teacher groups. (If you would like Sara to speak at your school, par­ent group, or con­fer­ence, please email her.)

Until 2004, Sara worked as a crim­i­nal appeals attor­ney at the Legal Aid Soci­ety of New York City, where she was the Chair of the Wrong­ful Con­vic­tions Project. She is an expert in the post-conviction rep­re­sen­ta­tion of bat­tered women and the wrongly con­victed. Her suc­cess­ful cases include win­ning clemency from the Gov­er­nor of the State of New York for a bat­tered woman who had killed her abuser, free­ing a man who spent 13 years in prison for a mur­der he hadn’t com­mit­ted, and win­ning parole for a woman who spent 27 years in prison for a crime she hadn’t com­mit­ted. Sara has lec­tured at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Law School and Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, she has been pro­filed in The New York Times, Defend­ing Those Not Likely To Be Called Choir Boys (sub­scrip­tion required), and her cases have been fea­tured in The New York Times, The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, News­day, 60 Min­utes II, Date­line NBC, the Today Show, and Good Morn­ing Amer­ica. Prior to law school, Sara worked as a jour­nal­ist at LNS News Ser­vice and as a type­set­ter at The New York Review of Books. She lives with her hus­band, Joe, and two chil­dren, Julian and Sophia, in Brook­lyn, NY.