Elementary School Abolishes Homework

Gaithersburg Elementary School in Maryland has abolished homework. Not reduced it, not reformed it — abolished it. Instead, every student is asked to read a book for about 30 minutes a night. That is the entire assignment.

When Stephanie Brant became principal, she and her staff audited the take-home work. "We started looking, and really, it was a lot of worksheets," she said. "And the worksheets didn't match what we were doing instructionally in the classroom." The verdict: the school was sending work home not because it helped, but because it felt obligated to send something.

With the school district's permission, Brant replaced it all with a single instruction — read.

Fifth grader Ann Urrutia had regular homework as a second-grader; then it disappeared. Asked whether she misses the math worksheets, she pointed out the obvious: "We do [the math problems] in school." She estimates she reads about 30 minutes a night — exactly the principal's goal.

Parents seem mostly relieved. "When [my son] comes home, he has relaxing time," said Luz Gomez, mother of a third-grader. "And I think kids need that relaxing time." Angela Atherton, another parent, recalled her daughter coming home the previous year with a reading calendar, checking off each night's 30 minutes.

The school also rethought the library. In most elementary schools, the whole class visits the library once a week, each kid grabs two books, finishes them in a night or two, and the books ride around in backpacks until the next visit. At Gaithersburg, students get hall passes to visit the library daily — and end up reading far more books.

Here is the striking part: the scores did not fall. In the 2010–2011 Maryland proficiency exams, fifth graders scored about 72 percent proficiency in math and 81 percent in reading — solid numbers made more impressive by the student body. Roughly 70 percent of Gaithersburg's students come from homes where English is not the primary language, and 82 percent qualify for free or subsidized lunch.

The experiment raises an uncomfortable question for the worksheets-industrial complex: if nightly homework is mostly busywork disconnected from classroom instruction, what exactly is it for? At Gaithersburg, at least, the answer they landed on was books.

As reported by Fox 5 DC in September 2012; the original broadcast page is no longer online.