The Canary Collective’s new piece, Homework and Harm: How Discrimination Follows Disabled Students Home, captures something families of disabled children know by heart: the school day rarely ends at dismissal. When accommodations fail, the unfinished work is sent home, transforming evenings into a second shift of struggle, supervision, and shame.
When access is deferred to after hours
Homework is often framed as practice or enrichment, yet for many disabled students it is simply uncompleted classwork—a quiet indicator that access was missing during the day. Instead of redesigning instruction, schools export their inaccessibility into the home, leaving parents to act as unpaid educational assistants and children to absorb the message that their difficulty is personal rather than systemic.
The family becomes the fallback system
This dynamic erodes trust and burdens families with the work of inclusion. Parents are pressured to enforce compliance, while schools maintain the appearance of fairness. In reality, homework in these contexts functions as a mechanism of discrimination: a way of making families carry the cost of unaccommodated learning.
The myth of merit and the right to rest
Decades of research have shown homework offers no academic benefit for younger students and limited gains even in high school. What it reliably produces is exhaustion, conflict, and a deepening sense of inadequacy. For disabled students, it punishes the very barriers schools are meant to remove. Education is a right, not a reward for extra endurance.
A call for humane schooling
Disabled children deserve to end their day with dignity—free to rest, to play, and to belong without condition. Meaningful inclusion means meeting needs in the moment, not deferring them to the dinner table.
Read the full essay at The Canary Collective. Because no child should carry an institution’s failures home in their backpack.
-
Institutional gaslighting of caregivers
You refuse to forget, because forgetting would mean abandoning your child’s reality—and you have already watched too many adults do that with a straight face and a professional tone. You refuse to downplay what has happened, because the harm is not theoretical—it lives…
