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. Sara has a 17-year-old son and a 14-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. Since the publication of her book, 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 Director 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 and at The New York Review of Books. She lives with her husband, Joe, and two children, Julian and Sophia, in Brooklyn, NY.
