Abolish homework

After years of teachers piling it on, there's a new movement to ... Abolish homework
Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer - Sunday, October 8, 2006 (San Francisco Chronicle)

High school teacher Phil Lyons has become a heretic: He refuses to assign homework. At Palo Alto's Gunn High School, where he teaches world history and advanced-placement economics, his no-homework policy leaves many new students anxious and their parents aghast, at least initially.

"At back-to-school night every hand goes up, and they bombard me with various versions of the same question -- 'What are you doing?' " Lyons says. "This year I pre-empted it by opening with an explanation of why homework is a failed approach, and why their kids will actually learn more without it."

He also noted that his students achieved a 94 percent pass rate on the advanced-placement test, one of the highest in the country -- and a success rate that has risen since he jettisoned homework assignments. Like Lyons, a growing minority of educators and researchers are calling for an end to homework as we know it -- and some are out to abolish it altogether.
Vigorous scrutiny of the research, they argue, fails to demonstrate tangible benefits of homework, particularly for elementary students. What it does instead, they contend, is rob children of childhood, play havoc with family life and asphyxiate their natural curiosity. Learning becomes a mind-numbing grind rather than an engaging adventure. In an era of more rigorous academic standards and vertebrae-straining backpacks, most American schools seem to be assigning more homework in earlier grades. For two decades, experts have propelled this trend with dire warnings that students in nations such as Japan are besting Americans because they diligently do more homework.

Even the youngest students have begun sweating over worksheets. In Prince George County, Md., a school superintendent famously suggested that preschools were frittering away time better spent on academics by having their little ones nap. In the Bay Area, tutoring companies began tailoring services to a new pool of clients who had just mastered tying shoelaces.
An AP-AOL Learning Services Poll released earlier this year showed that most parents and teachers say children are getting the "right amount" of homework -- an average of from 79 minutes per night in elementary school to 105 in high school. And those who were dissatisfied said they preferred not less but more.

The perceived failures of creative spelling and "there-is-no-right-or-wrong-answer" math have made Americans wary of any newfangled educational fad that seems to encourage slacking. No homework, indeed. Yet a rebellion against homework is brewing.

"The preponderance of research clearly shows that homework for elementary students does not make a difference in student achievement. It is hard to believe that a strategy used so extensively has no foundation," principal David Ackerman of Oak Knoll Elementary in Menlo Park wrote in a letter to parents this autumn as he put the brakes on homework. Two new books read like manifestos against what authors consider an avalanche of unproductive take-home assignments. Their titles lay their beliefs on the line: the research critique "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn, and the more anecdotal "The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish.

At the same time, an international comparison by two Penn State professors has concluded that junior high students who scored highest in math tended to come from countries where teachers assign relatively little homework -- including Denmark, the Czech Republic and (take note) Japan. Conversely, the lowest-scoring students came from countries where teachers assign tons of homework, such as Iran, Thailand and Greece.