Smart School Superintendent: No Homework For Elementary School Kids; Just Read Nightly
Kids today get more homework in elementary school -- in a single week -- than I did throughout most of high school. (I was learning -- it was just learning of my choice and not the school's, in the countless books I read that were not assigned to me.)

From what I see, kids' homework often gets done in concert with the parents. So, a parent works all day, does stuff around the home, and then...homework time! What gets lost is outside time and free time to develop independence and the resilience that a lot of kids in colleges now seem to lack.

About the reading thing, Valerie Straus writes in the WaPo:

Elementary school students in one Florida school district are going to find a welcome new -- but controversial -- policy when they return to school for the 2017-2018 school year next month: no traditional homework.

They are being asked to do one thing to help them academically: Read for 20 minutes a night.

Heidi Maier, the new superintendent of the 42,000-student Marion County public school district in Florida, said in an interview that she made the decision based on solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students.

(That may seem like something of a no-brainer, but in the world of education, policymakers are notorious for making a great deal of policy without knowing and/or caring about what the best research shows.)

The policy will apply to all elementary school students in the district -- about 20,000 -- but not to middle or high school students. Maier, an expert on reading acquisition who started running Marion schools in November after serving as lead professor of teacher education at the College of Central Florida, said she is basing her decision on research showing that traditional homework in the early years does not boost academic performance but reading -- and reading aloud -- does.

There's another problem -- one I suspect is partly due to Common Core:

Maier cited the work of Richard Allington, an expert on reading acquisition, who has researched and written extensively on how to teach students to read.

"The quality of homework assigned is so poor that simply getting kids to read replacing homework with self-selected reading was a more powerful alternative," Allington said in an email. "Maybe some kinds of homework might raise achievement but if so that type of homework is uncommon in U.S. schools."

Here's a fourth-grader sounding off in the stupid government-mandated testing:

I do see a problem of reading assigned as homework -- psychologically, does it turn it into a grind? There's some research I read that suggests that -- can't remember what it is at the moment.

Also, 20 minutes? Maybe they wanted a standard that they thought everybody could meet. My mom read to me constantly when I was a kid, and as soon as I could read, I was rarely not reading -- even when I was riding my bike. (That didn't end well -- early reading-while-driving accident.)

via @AdamMGrant