“The essential thing in all of this is not necessarily how much time you spend in school or out, but what you do with that time,” Hatch told. The changes made from the way instruction was handled in past years are key as to whether or not the program will succeed, according to Thomas Hatch, an associate professor of education and co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at the Teachers College at Columbia University. In addition to extended recess periods, the school is intending to provide more targeted learning time for struggling students in the form of small group instruction and one-on-one sessions with teachers. “We constantly hear from educators that they need more time.” - Jacqueline Reis, media relations coordinator for Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education “We want them to hang out with families, have dinner, do extracurricular activities and go to bed.”
“We are doing this not because we don’t think kids need homework, but because we think we are giving kids very rigorous instruction for eight hours,” Glasheen told. Now the school hopes that the no-homework policy, coupled with an extended, eight-hour school day – which for some of its younger students is two hours longer than past years – will raise performance in the classroom. Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester said last year that only one in three children in Holyoke public schools are reading at grade level, while Glasheen noted that 98 percent of the student body is enrolled in a free or assisted lunch program. “My school in particular has made slight gains, but my kids are well below the proficiency line,” Glasheen told. The kindergarten through eighth grade school in western Massachusetts is part of a public district that went into receivership in April 2015 after the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education labeled it chronically underperforming. “At my school, it was like ‘go big or go home,’” said Jacqueline Glasheen, the principal of Kelly Full Service Community School in Holyoke. There are two words all students love to hear from their teacher: ‘no homework’.Ī Massachusetts school is saying just that to students as they are returning to classes, but it’s not being done entirely to create extra time for after-school fun in the last few days of summer – it’s part of a bid to turn around less-than-stellar performance.
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