The administration recently announced it is instituting homework-free periods for the upcoming academic year, setting aside one free weekend each semester and barring tests and projects from coming due immediately following a school break.
The Great Homework Debate has raged almost since the first student took stylus in hand to carve the prehistoric forerunners of our ABC's.
In one corner are popular books with titles such as "The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children and Limits Learning," and "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing."
On the other are teachers and administrators who value at-home assignments as a way to reinforce the day's lessons, and who believe that good homework assignments (emphasis on "good") can strengthen school-family ties and help children do better in school.
The Princeton public school district seems to have found a healthy middle ground.
The administration recently announced it is instituting homework-free periods for the upcoming academic year, setting aside one free weekend each semester and barring tests and projects from coming due immediately following a school break.
Superintendent Steve Cochrane explained that the motivation is to give students an opportunity to mentally step away from the demands of homework, possibly allowing them to pursue interests and passions outside of school.
MORE: Creating a 'home' for homework
Princeton is hardly the first New Jersey school district to jump on the ban-the-homework bandwagon. West-Windsor Plainsboro made the decision last year to designate four no-homework nights throughout the 2014-2015 school year.
The previous year, Hopewell Valley schools also applied the brakes, limiting the hours of homework students in elementary and middle schools face each night.
Feedback has been generally positive, the districts report.
It may be hard for parents, no stranger to late-night dates with the chemistry or calculus books, to wrap their heads around the newfangled freedom their kids are experiencing - even on such a limited basis.
But we welcome the trend as an appropriate compromise: Keep the homework coming, but also appreciate that stressed-out, sleep-deprived youngsters are not the best receptacles for learning.
In this model, responsibility rests with the teacher to create home-based assignments that spark the imagination and encourage students to delve more deeply into what they've learned that day.
Twenty, 30 or 50 math problems, all demonstrating the same principle, are clearly overkill. One hundred pages of American history, ditto.
The goal should be to engage young learners, not beat them into the ground.
In Princeton, Cochrane hopes to launch a district-wide dialogue on the pros and cons of homework: how much is too much, what works and what doesn't. He's encouraging teachers and administrators to voice their views.
We hope he'll reach out to students and their parents, too. Their input as stakeholders is equally valuable.