The lucky students at one Portland elementary school got the good news when they started school this week: There will be no homework whatsoever.

Instead this is what the school urges students to do in the evenings and on weekends: Play outside. Cuddle with your parents. Play board games with your siblings. Pick up a favorite book to read or be read to. Run around and be as active as you can.

Why ban homework? A team of teachers at Cherry Park Elementary in the David Douglas school district in East Portland dug into the research and found that, while high school students learn more when they do homework, for elementary pupils, there is little to no evidence homework does any good.

Principal Kate Barker says assigning regular homework isn't a fabulous idea at any elementary school, but especially not at Cherry Park, where at least 75 percent of students live at or below the poverty line and families speak more than 30 different languages.

"We find that homework really increases that inequity," Barker said. "It provides a barrier to our students who need the most support."

Barker's No. 1 goal for parents? To interact with their children in a positive manner. "So often when students come home with homework, it's not the most positive interaction for parents and children," she said.

Even the school's past practice of requiring students to log 25 to 30 minutes reading or being read to evoked more sense of drudgery than joy at times, she said.

"We are going to continue to encourage families to read with their children, but not with the reading logs coming back and forth," she said.

"We know that is one of the No. 1 indicators of success is the amount of time children spend being read to or reading for others. And I don't know of anybody that doesn't love to be read to. But when you tie a reading log to it, it just changes the flavor," she said.

Barker says the school will carefully monitor if students are making enough academic progress and will tweak things if they are not. But making better use of the school day, not assigning homework, will be the strategy if change is needed, she said.

Teachers got on board with the no-homework policy once the rationale was explained, Barker said. Parents have been 100 percent in favor of the change.

And the students? They, she said, "are cheering."

-- Betsy Hammond