Innovative Homework Policy in the News

Today’s blog is inspired by an article I read that described an elementary school in a low income community where the principal instituted a “no homework” policy. The policy restricts homework to a recommended half hour of reading each night. The children are assisted in finding books that they would like to read. The early results are positive and I am inviting the principal to give us feedback and continuing feedback about how it works.

I’m a psychologist and I look at things from the perspective of human behavior more than education per se.  In my book, The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents,Student and Teachers, I have a chapter on organizational factors. I don’t think one can understand human behavior without looking at it in the context of the systems in which people operate. This applies to both adults and children.

One problem with homework, in particular, and education, as a whole, is that we try to make things happen without considering the systems effects. In general, people function best when natural hierarchies are respected. In the school, those hierarchies involve a line of authority from the school board, to the superintendent, to the principal, to the teachers, and to the students. At home, the hierarchy involves relationships between the parents and their children. When homework supplants the authority of the parent, we have problems. When politicians impose outside standards and methods of teacher evaluation that supplant the principal’s authority, we have problems as well.

This does not mean teachers cannot assign homework, as long as the assignments are rational and the authority of the parents remains unchallenged. This does not mean that society cannot set expectations as long as the direct relationships that exist between principals and teachers, teachers and students, remain the central component of the teaching process.

What I like about this principal’s decision is that she appears to have accepted the fact that the home is out of her control. Further, she has a low income district with parents who care deeply about their children, as all parents do, but may not have the means to create environments that will support what teachers typically demand that their students do. So instead of pressuring people to be different than they are, she creates a homework policy that is manageable and productive with the realities of her situation (by the way, I think this is a good policy for children from families of means as well).

Further, the focus is on “recommended” reading, not “mandated” reading. That simple shift from demands enforced through severe penalty systems to a simple, but good ideas about how the child can spend a half hour in that child’s time at home makes all the difference in the world.

I offer my thumbs up to this principal for her good ideas and look forward to hearing more about how her approach is working out.

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Dr. Kenneth Goldberg, is the author of The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Teachers, and Students, published by Wyndmoor Press.