Dreams can come true, and a school district in Florida is proof of that. 

 

Florida's Marion County School District will be introducing a ban on primary school homework as of September 2017. 

 

The young students will be asked to simply read for 20 minutes each evening instead, which seems like a pretty fair deal.

 

The kids will be allowed to select their own reading material, but teachers and guidance councillors will help them make these decisions. 

 

“If you can read well, everything else comes,” said Kevin Christian, a spokesperson for the district told WFTV Eyewitness News 9 - and he's not wrong. 

 

 

While daily homework won’t be part of the curriculum, Christian said that teachers will still occasionally assign things like research papers or science projects.

 

Heidi Maier, who is the school district’s new superintendent, told the Washington Post that the decision was based on research by Richard Allington, who is an education professor at University of Tennessee.

 

Allington has argued that reading can boost younger students’ academic performance more than assigning them traditional homework.

 

 

“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 told the Post.

 

“Maybe some kinds of homework might raise achievement, but if so that type of homework is uncommon in U.S. schools.”

 

The new Marion County policy will apply to all 20,000 primary  school students in the district but not to older students in secondary schools. 

 

What do you reckon, mums?

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