When our difficult child was 14, we had to give up not only the homework battle but also the going to school battle. difficult child run away from school on his first day of Kindergarten and truancy was an issue ever since. And it didn't help that we delivered him to school, to his class room and to his seat in mornings. He just ran away during the day, if he wanted. He even had an aide to keep him in school in one point, but difficult child has always been quick and agile and the aide was not. He easily literally outran her. After trying everything we could think of, we were in the point there CPS was considering taking difficult child into a care and sending him to the Residential Treatment Center (RTC) with it's own confined school. That would had cost our county around 10 000 dollars a month, difficult child would have not gotten teaching in his level (he did well academically, he just didn't go to class) and would have been living and learning from kids, who had much more serious behavioural issues than he had. Our county was not too eager to pay quite that much to get difficult child actually have his butt on the seat in the classroom and to teach difficult child all the criminal skills he would had learned so in the end we were all saved by psychiatrist's (mostly bogus) diagnosis of school phobia that allowed difficult child to go to school when he wished and play truant when he didn't. As long as he made great grades and showed up often enough to those classes there he needed to actually do something (art, music, crafts, home economy, foreign languages, PE he covered with winning school some medals in competitions between the schools in track and field and skiing, I'm not sure how many actual PE class he actually went, not many I think), everyone just turned the blind eye to where he spent his days.
Certainly not a perfect plan, but only one that worked with our difficult child. And surprisingly enough, he not only made it through the compulsory education, he is (hopefully) graduating from High School (not officially compulsory around here) in less than three months (and having his last final exam in just few weeks, after that it is just waiting results) with very high grades. How he has managed to avoid actually showing up in school more than absolutely necessary, juggling his homework and substitutive assignments with least possible effort and usually late, doing it all during the last year and half while living three hours away from his school, is just a state of the art exhibition. To keep sane I have absolutely declined to even think about how he does manage his school and just checked that grades are what we expect (our deal is, that we don't interfere as long as grades stay up.) Now he only has his finals left and about those I do stress some. And when he moved to his current city (to play sport) his team promised to look after and help him with schooling (standard procedure) and his poor positional coach has taken that to the heart even when we told him not to bother and that he will just work himself to ulcer if he tries to look after difficult child's school work. I don't know who of us is most eagerly waiting it to be over. Probably the coach. I'm still counting weeks, difficult child is counting days and the coach is already counting hours left to the end of the last exam...