Our School Got Rid of Required Homework — Here’s What Actually Happened
The back-to-school email arrived on a Tuesday evening in August. Subject line: Important Changes for Third Grade. I opened it expecting a reminder about water bottles or a note about the new pickup line. Instead, it said that starting this fall, the school would no longer require homework packets for grades K–5. No weekly spelling worksheets. No math review sheets. No reading log due every Monday morning.
My first thought: that’s going to be a fight at pickup.
For as long as I’d been a parent at this school—six years—homework was just background noise. The blue Friday folder. The pencil pouch with the multiplication flashcards. The overdue email from the classroom aide. My oldest daughter spent many Sunday nights in tears over double-digit addition problems. My younger daughter had a reading log that turned every bedtime story into a negotiation: “That was eleven minutes. You need four more.”
We were all tired of it. But I still worried. Would she fall behind? Was the school giving up?
For the first two weeks, nothing dramatic happened. The kids came home with backpacks full of library books and the occasional art project. The folders were nearly empty. One permission slip, a cafeteria menu, nothing else. My daughter started reading at night because no one was timed. At first she read less. Then she read more.
I remember an October evening when she wasn’t coming to dinner. I found her under a blanket fort with a graphic novel from the school book fair, three chapters past where she normally stopped. In second grade, she used to set a timer for fifteen minutes and close the book the second it went off. Now she didn’t look up when I called her name.
The teachers explained the reasoning at the first parent meeting. The principal kept it simple. She said, “We were spending more time tracking homework than teaching with it. We’re not saying kids shouldn’t practice skills at home. We’re saying the packet isn’t working.”
That was the moment I started to come around. Because she was right. The packets were graded, but most of them weren’t really the kids’ work. The parents were doing the tricky word problems. The kids were copying from a sibling. The reading log rewarded kids who had a parent who remembered to sign it, not kids who actually read. The few kids who did everything themselves were already on grade level. The kids who needed practice were the ones who didn’t have help, and they were the ones getting docked for not turning it in.
When the school got rid of the homework packets, they also got rid of the consequences that went along with them. No more missing recess for a forgotten folder. No more “Fun Friday” exclusion. No more emails about missing assignments. I didn’t realize how much of the week was spent on that stuff until it was gone.
My daughter’s third-grade teacher told me something in November that stuck with me. She said, “I used to spend two hours every Sunday sorting and grading homework. Now I spend those hours planning small reading groups. I know my students better than I ever did in October.”
That’s not a knock on homework as an idea. There are teachers and schools where it works. But for our school, the trade-off was clear. We were trading children’s evenings for a stack of worksheets that didn’t tell anyone anything new. The teacher didn’t know what a kid learned from the worksheet. She only knew whether it came back. And all it measured was whether someone at home had twenty minutes and a working printer.
For parents who want to move away from required homework, or who are just trying to survive a school that still sends it, there are a few things that helped me understand what was happening.
One, expect a transition period. For a few weeks after the packets stopped, many kids did less schooly stuff at home. Some parents interpreted that as backsliding. It wasn’t. They were resetting. The brain isn’t a machine that automatically ramps down from homework to nothing without a little mess in between.
Two, ask what replaces it. The school didn’t just say “no homework.” They said “read, play, and spend time with your family.” That sounds soft, but it’s actually specific. Reading at home is still expected—it just isn’t measured. Teachers sent home a one-page list of prompts for family conversations you could have while cooking or walking the dog. They were optional. We used maybe three of them all year.
Three, don’t grade anything that comes from home. The teachers made it clear that nothing sent home would ever be collected or graded. That was the part that made it sustainable. If you’re a teacher who wants to try a lighter homework load, the grades part is the thing parents need to hear upfront. Not “homework is optional” but “homework will never affect your child’s grade.” That changed the whole energy.
There were still parents who were unhappy. At the February board meeting, one father stood up and said he was concerned that kids “need practice in the third grade.” He had a point. The school’s answer was to point families to free online practice tools and printable packets for any parent who wanted to use them. No requirement. No tracking. The kids who needed extra support got it through small-group instruction at school, not through another worksheet at the kitchen table. My neighbor still sends her son to a tutor once a week. I’m not sure if that’s because of the no-homework policy or because of her mother-in-law. Probably both.
I’ve been at this school for six years, and the weirdest part is how quickly normal changes. My oldest daughter was in fourth grade when the packets stopped. She still asks about homework at the start of each year, half hoping it’ll come back. She likes structure. The younger one doesn’t mention it at all.
It’s not perfect. There are days I wonder if they’re getting enough practice with spelling, or if the kids who aren’t reading enough at home are going to hit a wall later. The school tracks reading levels three times a year, and the numbers haven’t dropped. But I’m still watching. I don’t think a single policy change fixes anything forever.
Last week, I was at the school book fair and saw a pile of those old reading logs in a recycling bin in the library. For a second I felt a pang of nostalgia. Then I remembered my daughter crying over a timer at the kitchen table because she didn’t want to stop reading to fill in a box.
We don’t have that problem anymore.
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