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Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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August 16, 2021

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in

by Sara M Moniuszko

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide-range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas over workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework .

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy work loads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace, says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression.

And for all the distress homework causes, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night.

"Most students, especially at these high-achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school ," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely, but to be more mindful of the type of work students go home with, suggests Kang, who was a high-school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework, I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the last two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic, making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized... sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking assignments up can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

©2021 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Why I Think All Schools Should Abolish Homework

H ow long is your child’s workweek? Thirty hours? Forty? Would it surprise you to learn that some elementary school kids have workweeks comparable to adults’ schedules? For most children, mandatory homework assignments push their workweek far beyond the school day and deep into what any other laborers would consider overtime. Even without sports or music or other school-sponsored extracurriculars, the daily homework slog keeps many students on the clock as long as lawyers, teachers, medical residents, truck drivers and other overworked adults. Is it any wonder that,deprived of the labor protections that we provide adults, our kids are suffering an epidemic of disengagement, anxiety and depression ?

With my youngest child just months away from finishing high school, I’m remembering all the needless misery and missed opportunities all three of my kids suffered because of their endless assignments. When my daughters were in middle school, I would urge them into bed before midnight and then find them clandestinely studying under the covers with a flashlight. We cut back on their activities but still found ourselves stuck in a system on overdrive, returning home from hectic days at 6 p.m. only to face hours more of homework. Now, even as a senior with a moderate course load, my son, Zak, has spent many weekends studying, finding little time for the exercise and fresh air essential to his well-being. Week after week, and without any extracurriculars, Zak logs a lot more than the 40 hours adults traditionally work each week — and with no recognition from his “bosses” that it’s too much. I can’t count the number of shared evenings, weekend outings and dinners that our family has missed and will never get back.

How much after-school time should our schools really own?

In the midst of the madness last fall, Zak said to me, “I feel like I’m working towards my death. The constant demands on my time since 5th grade are just going to continue through graduation, into college, and then into my job. It’s like I’m on an endless treadmill with no time for living.”

My spirit crumbled along with his.

Like Zak, many people are now questioning the point of putting so much demand on children and teens that they become thinly stretched and overworked. Studies have long shown that there is no academic benefit to high school homework that consumes more than a modest number of hours each week. In a study of high schoolers conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), researchers concluded that “after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.”

In elementary school, where we often assign overtime even to the youngest children, studies have shown there’s no academic benefit to any amount of homework at all.

Our unquestioned acceptance of homework also flies in the face of all we know about human health, brain function and learning. Brain scientists know that rest and exercise are essential to good health and real learning . Even top adult professionals in specialized fields take care to limit their work to concentrated periods of focus. A landmark study of how humans develop expertise found that elite musicians, scientists and athletes do their most productive work only about four hours per day .

Yet we continue to overwork our children, depriving them of the chance to cultivate health and learn deeply, burdening them with an imbalance of sedentary, academic tasks. American high school students , in fact, do more homework each week than their peers in the average country in the OECD, a 2014 report found.

It’s time for an uprising.

Already, small rebellions are starting. High schools in Ridgewood, N.J. , and Fairfax County, Va., among others, have banned homework over school breaks. The entire second grade at Taylor Elementary School in Arlington, Va., abolished homework this academic year. Burton Valley Elementary School in Lafayette, Calif., has eliminated homework in grades K through 4. Henry West Laboratory School , a public K-8 school in Coral Gables, Fla., eliminated mandatory, graded homework for optional assignments. One Lexington, Mass., elementary school is piloting a homework-free year, replacing it with reading for pleasure.

More from TIME

Across the Atlantic, students in Spain launched a national strike against excessive assignments in November. And a second-grade teacher in Texas, made headlines this fall when she quit sending home extra work , instead urging families to “spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside and get your child to bed early.”

It is time that we call loudly for a clear and simple change: a workweek limit for children, counting time on the clock before and after the final bell. Why should schools extend their authority far beyond the boundaries of campus, dictating activities in our homes in the hours that belong to families? An all-out ban on after-school assignments would be optimal. Short of that, we can at least sensibly agree on a cap limiting kids to a 40-hour workweek — and fewer hours for younger children.

Resistance even to this reasonable limit will be rife. Mike Miller, an English teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., found this out firsthand when he spearheaded a homework committee to rethink the usual approach. He had read the education research and found a forgotten policy on the county books limiting homework to two hours a night, total, including all classes. “I thought it would be a slam dunk” to put the two-hour cap firmly in place, Miller said.

But immediately, people started balking. “There was a lot of fear in the community,” Miller said. “It’s like jumping off a high dive with your kids’ future. If we reduce homework to two hours or less, is my kid really going to be okay?” In the end, the committee only agreed to a homework ban over school breaks.

Miller’s response is a great model for us all. He decided to limit assignments in his own class to 20 minutes a night (the most allowed for a student with six classes to hit the two-hour max). His students didn’t suddenly fail. Their test scores remained stable. And they started using their more breathable schedule to do more creative, thoughtful work.

That’s the way we will get to a sane work schedule for kids: by simultaneously pursuing changes big and small. Even as we collaboratively press for policy changes at the district or individual school level, all teachers can act now, as individuals, to ease the strain on overworked kids.

As parents and students, we can also organize to make homework the exception rather than the rule. We can insist that every family, teacher and student be allowed to opt out of assignments without penalty to make room for important activities, and we can seek changes that shift practice exercises and assignments into the actual school day.

We’ll know our work is done only when Zak and every other child can clock out, eat dinner, sleep well and stay healthy — the very things needed to engage and learn deeply. That’s the basic standard the law applies to working adults. Let’s do the same for our kids.

Vicki Abeles is the author of the bestseller Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation, and director and producer of the documentaries “ Race to Nowhere ” and “ Beyond Measure. ”

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What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

The National PTA and the National Education Association support the “ 10-minute homework guideline ”—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students’ needs, not the amount of time spent on it.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

What’s the Right Amount of Homework? Many Students Get Too Little, Brief Argues

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Arguments against homework are well-documented, with some parents, teachers, and researchers saying these assignments put unnecessary stress on students and may not actually be helping them learn.

But a new article for the journal Education Next argues that many American students don’t have too much homework—they have too little.

Anxiety about overscheduled students with upwards of three or four hours of homework a night has overshadowed another problem, writes Janine Bempechat, a clinical professor of human development at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development: Low-income students aren’t getting enough homework, and they may be suffering academically as a result.

“Eliminating homework is probably not as big a problem for high-income kids, because they have parents who will expose them to what they may not be getting after school,” Bempechat said in an interview with Education Week . “It’s lower-income students who are hurt the most when people argue that homework should be entirely eliminated.”

A widely endorsed metric for how much homework to assign is the 10-minute rule. It dictates that children should receive 10 minutes of homework per grade level—so a 1st grader would be given 10 minutes a day, while a senior in high school would have 120 minutes.

It’s hard to say exactly how closely American teachers hew to those guidelines. A 2013 study conducted by the University of Phoenix found that high school students are assigned about 3.5 hours of homework a night . But results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment found that 15-year-olds in the U.S. say they have much less than that—about six hours of homework a week .

But the averages obscure the range in assigned work between low-income and high-income students, Bempechat argues. According to the PISA results, disadvantaged students in the U.S. spend three hours less a week on homework than advantaged students (five hours versus eight hours).

Some students may be receiving even less than that. In interviews with low-income students at two low-performing high schools in northern California, Bempechat and her colleagues found that most students reported receiving what she called “minimal homework": “perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night.”

This is a problem, she writes, because high-quality homework—the kind that allows students to problem solve and comes with clear instructions and strategies for working through difficult problems—helps students develop key academic skills. Some research supports this claim: In a 2004 study , researchers at Columbia University and Mississippi State University found that homework can prepare students with the perseverance they would need to hold jobs in the future.

The research on whether homework leads to increased academic achievement is mixed: a 2006 meta-analysis found that at-home assignments led to increased scores on some tests in some grades , but other studies show no relationship for elementary age students.

But goal-setting, self-regulation, and “resilience in the face of challenge” can all be learned through homework, said Bempechat. These skills only become more important as students progress into higher grades with greater expectations for learner autonomy, she said.

Some critics of homework raise concerns that assigning outside work puts low-income students at a disadvantage, because their parents may not be able to offer as much guidance as higher-income parents.

Bempechat writes that it’s more important that parents support homework completion rather than give hands-on help with assignments . She cites a 2014 study by researchers at the City University of New York that found that low-income parents providing structure around homework was a significant predictor of middle school students’ math grades .

But other barriers to home-based assignments persist for low-income students, including the “homework gap:" the inequality between students who have internet at home and those who don’t, and the difficulty that students without access face in completing assignments. About 40 percent of students didn’t have internet access at home as of 2015. But most teachers—70 percent—assign homework that requires connectivity, according to a 2016 survey from the Consortium for School Networking, a national association for school technology leaders.

Teachers should be mindful of the resources students have at home, said Bempechat, and not assign work that requires tools they don’t have—whether that be internet access or even crayons and markers.

Image: Getty

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.

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As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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How Much Homework Is Too Much for Our Teens?

Here's what educators and parents can do to help kids find the right balance between school and home.

Does Your Teen Have Too Much Homework?

Today’s teens are under a lot of pressure.

They're under pressure to succeed, to win, to be the best and to get into the top colleges. With so much pressure, is it any wonder today’s youth report being under as much stress as their parents? In fact, during the school year, teens say they experience stress levels higher than those reported by adults, according to a previous American Psychological Association "Stress in America" survey.

Odds are if you ask a teen what's got them so worked up, the subject of school will come up. School can cause a lot of stress, which can lead to other serious problems, like sleep deprivation . According to the National Sleep Foundation, teens need between eight and 10 hours of sleep each night, but only 15 percent are even getting close to that amount. During the school week, most teens only get about six hours of zzz’s a night, and some of that sleep deficit may be attributed to homework.

When it comes to school, many adults would rather not trade places with a teen. Think about it. They get up at the crack of dawn and get on the bus when it’s pitch dark outside. They put in a full day sitting in hours of classes (sometimes four to seven different classes daily), only to get more work dumped on them to do at home. To top it off, many kids have after-school obligations, such as extracurricular activities including clubs and sports , and some have to work. After a long day, they finally get home to do even more work – schoolwork.

[Read: What Parents Should Know About Teen Depression .]

Homework is not only a source of stress for students, but it can also be a hassle for parents. If you are the parent of a kid who strives to be “perfect," then you know all too well how much time your child spends making sure every bit of homework is complete, even if it means pulling an all-nighter. On the flip side, if you’re the parent of a child who decided that school ends when the last bell rings, then you know how exhausting that homework tug-of-war can be. And heaven forbid if you’re that parent who is at their wit's end because your child excels on tests and quizzes but fails to turn in assignments. The woes of academics can go well beyond the confines of the school building and right into the home.

This is the time of year when many students and parents feel the burden of the academic load. Following spring break, many schools across the nation head into the final stretch of the year. As a result, some teachers increase the amount of homework they give. The assignments aren’t punishment, although to students and parents who are having to constantly stay on top of their kids' schoolwork, they can sure seem that way.

From a teacher’s perspective, the assignments are meant to help students better understand the course content and prepare for upcoming exams. Some schools have state-mandated end of grade or final tests. In those states these tests can account for 20 percent of a student’s final grade. So teachers want to make sure that they cover the entire curriculum before that exam. Aside from state-mandated tests, some high school students are enrolled in advanced placement or international baccalaureate college-level courses that have final tests given a month or more before the end of the term. In order to cover all of the content, teachers must maintain an accelerated pace. All of this means more out of class assignments.

Given the challenges kids face, there are a few questions parents and educators should consider:

Is homework necessary?

Many teens may give a quick "no" to this question, but the verdict is still out. Research supports both sides of the argument. Personally, I would say, yes, some homework is necessary, but it must be purposeful. If it’s busy work, then it’s a waste of time. Homework should be a supplemental teaching tool. Too often, some youth go home completely lost as they haven’t grasped concepts covered in class and they may become frustrated and overwhelmed.

For a parent who has been in this situation, you know how frustrating this can be, especially if it’s a subject that you haven’t encountered in a while. Homework can serve a purpose such as improving grades, increasing test scores and instilling a good work ethic. Purposeful homework can come in the form of individualizing assignments based on students’ needs or helping students practice newly acquired skills.

Homework should not be used to extend class time to cover more material. If your child is constantly coming home having to learn the material before doing the assignments, then it’s time to contact the teacher and set up a conference. Listen when kids express their concerns (like if they say they're expected to know concepts not taught in class) as they will provide clues about what’s happening or not happening in the classroom. Plus, getting to the root of the problem can help with keeping the peace at home too, as an irritable and grumpy teen can disrupt harmonious family dynamics .

[Read: What Makes Teens 'Most Likely to Succeed?' ]

How much is too much?

According to the National PTA and the National Education Association, students should only be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. But teens are doing a lot more than that, according to a poll of high school students by the organization Statistic Brain . In that poll teens reported spending, on average, more than three hours on homework each school night, with 11th graders spending more time on homework than any other grade level. By contrast, some polls have shown that U.S. high school students report doing about seven hours of homework per week.

Much of a student's workload boils down to the courses they take (such as advanced or college prep classes), the teaching philosophy of educators and the student’s commitment to doing the work. Regardless, research has shown that doing more than two hours of homework per night does not benefit high school students. Having lots of homework to do every day makes it difficult for teens to have any downtime , let alone family time .

How do we respond to students' needs?

As an educator and parent, I can honestly say that oftentimes there is a mismatch in what teachers perceive as only taking 15 minutes and what really takes 45 minutes to complete. If you too find this to be the case, then reach out to your child's teacher and find out why the assignments are taking longer than anticipated for your child to complete.

Also, ask the teacher about whether faculty communicate regularly with one another about large upcoming assignments. Whether it’s setting up a shared school-wide assignment calendar or collaborating across curriculums during faculty meetings, educators need to discuss upcoming tests and projects, so students don’t end up with lots of assignments all competing for their attention and time at once. Inevitably, a student is going to get slammed occasionally, but if they have good rapport with their teachers, they will feel comfortable enough to reach out and see if alternative options are available. And as a parent, you can encourage your kid to have that dialogue with the teacher.

Often teens would rather blend into the class than stand out. That’s unfortunate because research has shown time and time again that positive teacher-student relationships are strong predictors of student engagement and achievement. By and large, most teachers appreciate students advocating for themselves and will go the extra mile to help them out.

Can there be a balance between home and school?

Students can strike a balance between school and home, but parents will have to help them find it. They need your guidance to learn how to better manage their time, get organized and prioritize tasks, which are all important life skills. Equally important is developing good study habits. Some students may need tutoring or coaching to help them learn new material or how to take notes and study. Also, don’t forget the importance of parent-teacher communication. Most educators want nothing more than for their students to succeed in their courses.

Learning should be fun, not mundane and cumbersome. Homework should only be given if its purposeful and in moderation. Equally important to homework is engaging in activities, socializing with friends and spending time with the family.

[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids' Health .]

Most adults don’t work a full-time job and then go home and do three more hours of work, and neither should your child. It's not easy learning to balance everything, especially if you're a teen. If your child is spending several hours on homework each night, don't hesitate to reach out to teachers and, if need be, school officials. Collectively, we can all work together to help our children de-stress and find the right balance between school and home.

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Yes, there is a limit to how much homework your child should do

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As more students in high school take advanced classes and Common Core guidelines have made kindergarten an academic experience, many parents feel like their children have too much homework.

So how much is too much, and what can parents do about it? Education Matters spoke to experts in the field to answer these questions.

How much homework should my student be doing?

LAUSD has suggested time allocations for students’ homework, and it suggests assigning homework only four days a week. The guidelines aren’t mandatory.

The middle- and high-school homework policy notes ”Special consideration must be given to students in honors, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, School for Advanced Studies (SAS) and highly gifted classes and programs.”

The California state Parent Teacher Assn. encourages local PTAs to work with districts to come up with homework guidelines.

What is the point of homework?

That depends on what grade your child is in. In elementary school, homework is mostly about establishing responsibility, said Katie McGrath, LAUSD’s director of elementary instruction. That includes teaching children to follow directions, learning how to be accountable for keeping homework safe, completing it, and turning it in.

Homework should reinforce lessons students have already learned in class. Perhaps, says Harris Cooper, a Duke psychology professor who studies homework, it includes a bonus question that takes the concept one step further -- preparing students for the next day’s lesson.

In middle school and high school, homework takes on the role of being important to academic achievement, Cooper said. Homework improves academic outcomes, up to a point. Research suggests that middle school students who complete 60 to 90 minutes of homework per night perform as well on standardized tests as the students who spend more time, Cooper said. In high school, that cutoff is at two hours of homework per night.

What’s the “10-minute rule”?

For years, teachers have been using the so-called “10-minute rule” to figure out homework targets. It’s the idea that with each grade of elementary school, a child’s average homework per night should increase about 10 minutes, said Cooper, who has researched this trend.

What do I do if there’s too much homework?

Parents can talk to or email teachers if there is consistently too much homework, or if it’s too difficult. If enough parents speak to the teacher, there might be a pattern that emerges that a teacher can address, either by covering the subject more in class or by assigning different homework. It could also be an opportunity to talk about tutoring or academic help options for a student.

It’s also OK to prioritize sleep and health over homework — LAUSD’s homework policy says that homework can count for only 20% or less of a student’s grade, so skipping an assignment in favor of being healthy once in awhile won’t affect the overall grade too much. Just address the underlying problem before it becomes a pattern.

What is a parent’s role?

Parents should be emotionally supportive and can help explain concepts, but stop short of solving a problem.

“It should really be the student’s responsibility to do homework with the parent playing a minor supporting role,” said Erika Patall, a University of Texas at Austin educational psychology professor who studies student motivation.

Parents can have a conversation with students at the beginning of the year to discuss when the students will do homework, where they’ll do it (it can be helpful to have a designated homework spot in the house, for example), and how students will best budget their time.

Researchers say it’s important for students to feel like they have autonomy and to feel responsible for their homework, as opposed to feeling like someone else is controlling them.

What can teachers do?

Like parents, it helps for teachers to give students a choice, Patall said. She has conducted research and found that when teachers gave students the option between two different assignments on the same topic, students performed better on that unit test and felt more competent and confident.

It also helps if students understand the purpose of homework. Listen to students’ feedback, and explain why this particular piece of homework is important, Patall said, and what role it plays in the lesson.

Is it normal to hate homework?

“Everybody hates homework,” said Janine Bempechat, professor of human development and psychology at Wheelock College in Boston. She interviews students about homework and educational experience.

That includes high-achieving and low-achieving students alike, Bempechat said.

Some parents hate homework too — kids parrot their parents’ behavior, so they’re less likely to react positively if their parent has a negative attitude toward homework.

And homework can be both lonely and exhausting, especially after six hours in school, Bempechat said. Parents can implement little reward systems for completing tasks, like 10-minute breaks to watch a YouTube video or ride a bike around the block.

Can my kid get homework help?

Yes. Depending on the time of day and the teacher, students or parents can email teachers with specific questions if they’ve exhausted other options. Don’t always expect a response, but the teacher will know that your kid is trying, and will be able to address the specific problem.

Here is a list of free tutoring programs throughout L.A. County . There are also homework hotlines that help students struggling with specific problems. Harvey Mudd College has a number that 4th- through 12th-grade students can call for help on science and math problems.

Reach Sonali Kohli on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli or by email at [email protected].

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Sonali Kohli is a former Los Angeles Times reporter. A product of Southern California, she grew up in Diamond Bar and graduated from UCLA. She worked as a metro reporter for the Orange County Register and as a reporter covering education and diversity for Quartz before joining The Times in 2015.

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The learning network | do you have too much homework.

Do You Have Too Much Homework?

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

• See all Student Opinion »

Some schools and school districts are taking a hard look at how much homework is assigned and how valuable it is for student learning. How much homework do you have, on average, each night? Is it a burden for you? Does it mostly help you learn the material and skills you are being taught? Does some of it seem like “busy work”?

Winnie Hu reports on a “homework revolution,” in which some schools and districts are rethinking their policies on and approaches to homework:

Galloway is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades. “There is simply no proof that most homework as we know it improves school performance,” said Vicki Abeles, a mother of three from California, whose documentary “Race to Nowhere,” about burned-out students caught in a pressure-cooker educational system, has helped reignite the antihomework movement. “And by expecting kids to work a ‘second shift’ in what should be their downtime, the presence of schoolwork at home is negatively affecting the health of our young people and the quality of family time.” So teachers at Mango Elementary School in Fontana, Calif., are replacing homework with “goal work” that is specific to individual student’s needs and that can be completed in class or at home at his or her own pace. The Pleasanton School District, north of San Jose, Calif., is proposing this month to cut homework times by nearly half and prohibit weekend assignments in elementary grades because, as one administrator said, “parents want their kids back.” Ridgewood High School in New Jersey introduced a homework-free winter break in December. Schools in Tampa, Fla., and Bleckley County, Ga., have instituted “no homework nights” throughout the year. And the two-year-old Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a program for gifted and talented elementary students, has made homework optional: it is neither graded nor counted toward progress reports. “I think people confuse homework with rigor,” said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School’s principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom.

Students: Tell us about your homework. How much time do you spend per night on assignments? Do your homework assignments tend to reinforce your learning in class, or does it generally feel like a useless requirement? Have any of your teachers changed their homework policies or limit the homework they assign? Do you ever have optional or individualized homework? If it were up to you, what would your school’s homework policy be, and why?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

I’m a 9th grade student at BCA and the homework amount is awful. For the entire year of social studies, you know those long charts in the textbook, yeah, I had to copy each and every one for homework. Homework? More like a torture course. I didn’t have any time for myself because I had those charts, had to read chapters of a book for English, with Math, and I had no time for anything. I came home at 4pm and finished homework by 2am. We couldn’t go to dinners because I had too much homework. I couldn’t talk to my mom, dad or sister. Every time I asked them something the first thing they go is “did you finish your homework?” And I didn’t. Even my sister was acting like my mom after a while. So yes. I think I have too much homework. And no. It doesn’t really help (unless it’s learning how to use math formulas). I just copied everything i saw without any of the actual information being absorbed just to be done with the work. Homework ruined my life.

Alright, well it depends on what kind of homework you get. At my middle school, I get math homework everyday, but it’s not the kind of homework from which you don’tlearn anything. They are problems where we apply what we learned in class. I never get Texas History homework and when I do, it’s just reviews for our test. In Science our only homework is the occsional project. Of course, we have to work hard on those, so it takes some time, but we don’t get projects everyday. The only class where I think the homework is overdone is LA (language arts). Since I am in the gifted class, all we do is project after project after project. And they all require hard work (staying up till 12, creativity, etc.) Just because we are gifted, our teacher thinks we should be able to produce oustanding out-of -the-box work on every single project. I never actually learned anything in LA. During our persuasive unit, we did a mock presidential election, which I thought was great, but she never had us exclusively work on persuasion. Of course, it was there, in fact it was the most prevalent aspect, but we never did anything to build on our technique of persuasion. The whole year, our LA teacher has taught us how to get by on 6 hours of sleep, drai our brains dry of creative, outstanding, huge projects, and write reader’s responses.

So in MY middle school, homework really depends on how YOU decide to have it. We have a good amount of homework (I wouldn’t say it was THAT much) but it really depended on if you finished it in school… if if you wanted to keep it as HOMEwork…

I usually have homework at night. Studying spellings words is a given. Other homework is really stuff I didn’t finish in class. My teachers try to not assign homework when there is a school-wide event in the evening. Because of a learning disability, my teachers either modify my homework or let me turn things in that would be late for others, but not for me. I have awesome teachers and go to a great school! //www.hammonsmarketing.com/health

The homework quantities at my Catholic high school are, I believe, on the reasonable end of a lot. Most students spend between one and three hours each night, depending on the courses and teachers. However, a survey found that most of us get very little sleep and that half of the freshmen and two thirds of sophmores and juniors had suffered physically because of stress. The reason for this is the extra curricular activities. When my parents were younger, one could get into very good colleges without being the star of the sports team or school orchestera. Now, students are pressured to excel in as many activities as possible. More than 75% of the students in my school are on at least one sports team, many of which practice from the end of school until as late as 8pm. I play four instruments and participate in debate and the community service club. Other students have jobs, or have responsibilities at home. When someone is practicing music or sports, or working for five hours every night, one to three hours of homework becomes a much greater burden than it would otherwise be.

I agree with Brina, homework ruined my life as well. Our school gives out so much, and I am only in 7th Grade!!!!! I know I’m in honors, so I shouldn’t complain, but we should be getting harder work, not more work!!!!! Each teacher claims they only give about 20 minutes of homework a night, but in reality, its like an hour. I’m usually working from the time I get home 4:20 until at least midnight. It’s just too much! I should really be getting more sleep than I am already getting- it’s just not healthy to get 6-7 hours of sleep each night. There was not one night this school year (besides Fridays) that I was not studying or doing homework while in dinner or even out to eat! The teachers also never consider all the evening activities typical middle schoolers would have… It’s just such a pain to have to carry all that homework pressure around when you have to go somewhere or play a sport. As a matter of fact, my little brother longs greatly for us to play legos together (remember them? from the carefree days?), but I just dont have time! In addition, I don’t obtain any knowledge as well from doing homework. I’m a type of learner that once I see it and practice it a few times in class or review it a few times, it’s in my head. I don’t need some type of review to remember it. I feel homework should just be something that if someone feels they need to do it, they should to review. I can’t believe I actually have time to write this review- actually, I don’t- I have two projects due, from the same class, with only 2 1/2 days of school left! This is unfair- I have so much work due, and I’m literally scrambling around, making sure I did all of my work, until the last day of school It’s just insane. Please do something about it.

I’m happy people are finally seriously analyzing the excessive homework situation and determining whether it actually helps kids learn and retain or not. I work at a Montessori Middle School where the only homework assigned is work the students couldn’t finish during the week. Usually, as long as kids are on task at school, they get the rest of their time to do things they love by themselves or with their families.

Montessori schools are an interesting voice in this type of debate. //www.waterfrontmontessori.blogspot.com

At my old school, I got a lot more homework. At my new prep school, I get less. The difference: I spend much more time on my homework at my current school because it is harder. I feel as if I actually accomplish something with the harder homework, even if it means I don’t go to bed until 2 every night (it’s junior year it’s not that far from the norm).

I’m a student from Indiana. I go to a public school, and at my school I get about 1 to 2 hours of homework per night. When I have in-school projects, I usually have about 2 to 3 hours because I try to do them at home. But, on average, I get my homework done by 5. Compared to many of you, I have little homework. I also do extra work to help me understand the material better. Because of this, I am doing very well in my school, but other students in my school aren’t doing so well. I found out that, on average, they do about ½ to an hour of homework per day. I’ve also noticed that they rush through it and don’t try to understand it. Then, they found out that this little amount of work affects them a lot by lowering their grade, and also, they don’t understand the material. But they don’t do anything about it and continue these ways. I think that schools should keep the same amount of homework, or maybe increase the amount of homework. Of course, some might say, “If we give them more work, won’t they rush through that as well?” To prevent this, homework should be harder to do so that students can’t rush through it. For example, teachers can give questions that aren’t hard, but take a long time to do. I say that homework shouldn’t be greatly reduced or eliminated because if the schools do reduce or eliminate homework, students’ grades might slowly drop. I think that having more homework will help me get smarter and maintain my grades, rather than having no homework and starting to fail.

I’m a freshman in high-school and usually I have 1-2 hours of homework everyday. There is not a day where I don’t have homework. (I have all Pre-AP classes.) If I have a project(s), then I have 4-5 hours of homework.

I am in 8th grade, in advanced classes, and in 2 honors classes for high school credits. For Algebra 1 honors I get 1-2 hours of homework each night. It’s crazy, and I am good at math. My friends that are okay at math take 3-4 hours a night for that class. My mom e-mailed the teacher about the homework madness and he said,”I am just teaching and giving to the state standards(Florida).” If that is the standards then I have no life.

I am a junior at CNG in Bogota, Colombia. I have been in the school all my life, and homework had never been an issue. I used to spend about 1 hour each night doing homework and for me it was very relaxed. But this year I don’t know what happened to our school and I am getting excessive amounts of homework. Now i spend from 2-3 hours doing homework each night and when I’m done I’m exhausted and go straight to bed and have no time to do anything else. To make matters worse i feel most of the homework assignments that are given to me don’t help me reinforce my learning in class. It is just extra work that should be done at school. I don’t think that students should leave school to get to their houses and do more work. In my case the homework assignments I have force me to go to bed at very late hours of the night. This is not healthy for a student because the next day they won’t work as well as if they had slept for the recommended 7-8 hours. I’ve had to cancel some extracurricular activities many times this year because of the excessive amount of homework I have this year. “I think people confuse homework with rigor,” said Donna Taylor. The statement given by Donna Taylor in Winnie Hu’s article is very true. Some teachers do confuse homework with rigor and therefore give their students tons of homework. Finally I would like to say that I think my school should change their homework policy and give us less homework. Homework is supposed to help us not make us suffer and get stressed.

When I was a freshman, I hardly had any homework (besides algebra II which didn’t take too long anyways). I even had all honors classes. Now that I’m a sophomore, I’m taking AP U.S. history, pre-calc, band, american lit, spanish II, and honors chemistry. The only homework I regularly get is AP history. I get about an hour and a half per night for that class, but it is a college level course. The other classes are hit and miss for homework.

This answer is obvious, its YES! I am an eighth grader at a public school, and I seriously think the teachers there think we do not have any social lives. I have hours of homework. And it is only middle school. All this stuff we do not even need to know! I occasionally just cry because I really want to hang out with my friends so bad, but I have to do homework. I want to play with my pets, but too much homework. I want to do a lot of things, but always too much homework. There should be a rule, only 20 minutes of homework allowed per night!

Yes. It’s ridiculous. On average i get about 10-14 pieces of homework a week. This results in me having to spend around 2-3 hours monday to friday doing homework, and 1-2 hours on saturday and sunday. School isn’t just 9-4 monday to friday anymore, it’s 9-9 monday-sunday.

I usually have at least 3 hours of homework a night, no including projects and studying. I feel that this is too much. I’m often up until 11 at night doing it and I have to get up a 5:30 for school. Last year, I had a huge project dumped on my and I don’t think I slept at all that night. Maybe 2 hours. Tops. I got pretty sick from it. I don’t know. My body just shut down. It wouldn’t move and I was soo cold as I remember. I went to the doctor’s and that was that, I guess. I feel that some work is busywork, but not all. I like doing labs and answering those questions. I find almost ALL math homework to be busywork. It’s REALLY easy, but SO TIME-CONSUMING. It’ll take me an hour to do 30 problems because I have to show all the work and the process, etc. History and English questions CAN reinforce the learning. I don’t think it always does, but in some cases, yes.

I am in the 10th grade and i get about 50 problems in geometry 3 pages of notes in chemistry (we have to write our own notes in chemistry for homework) 15 questions in world history and a 3 page essay in AP english all in one night i just think that is way to much homework for one night i get out of school at 3:05 and have to go to bed at about 10:00 thats just like six hours to do all that homework plus i still have to do chores and eat and stuff so realy we only get like four hours a day to do all this homework and my geometry teacher says and i quote “I DONT GIVE A DAMN IF YOU WHERE AT THE HOSPITAL, IF YOU WERE SICK, OR SOMEONE DIED YOU NEED TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK NO EXCEPTIONS” she also does not accept late work finish missed testsor anything and if she forgets to grade a test or something its ok for her grading papers is her homework but its ok for her! if i did not have to deall with all the stress of homework i think i would do better in school.

The main problem that occurs with homework is that teacher are oblivios to exactly how long it takes to accomplish. I spend a longer amount of time on homework because I am a prefectionist and so a question that would take an average person 10 min would take me 15- 20. Now, If I got say, 9-12 assignments a week (each assighnment taking aproximatly 1 hr to accomplish) it would be alright. However, I have been getting 3 hr. long projects and 14 other assignments due in a week. I start my homework at 4:00 and don’t stop untill 6:30 and I’m only in 7th grade. Many people I know in highschool don’t get as much as I do. I belive that before a teacher assignes homework they should make shore that it doesn’t take more than an hour and that all of their homework combined for a week doesn’t take more than 9hrs. Though ‘young’ and ‘immature’ children do have lives outside of school.

A little homework isn’t such a bad thing. Problem is, I haven’t been given “a little homework” since sixth grade. The main thing I see is teachers giving homework because they think it helps us learn. When they give us things to do that we’ve never done even in class that we are graded on, 20 minutes of homework can easily turn into 1 or 2 hours of research online. They give homework because they’re expected to, not because it actually does anything.

Also, the teachers seem to think that their class takes precedence over every other class. In honors, I expect reasonable homework, not busy work. We go to school for 8 hours right after we wake up. We go home and get homework that takes us 10 hours straight… sorry, not going to work out. Every teacher sees an hour of their homework as one hour of homework. Multiply that times 7, guys. even better, add a job, sports and clubs (which are all required to get into a decent college.) into the mix. and you mock us and give us detentions for being tired in the morning and hungry before lunch… what’s sleep? I’ve never tried it. Dinner? I think I had that once. All I know is work. I live weekend to weekend, summer to summer.

Ever wonder why kids hate school? because it destroys us. breaks us down. It’s something we shouldn’t take for granted, but it’s so hard to feel like it’s doing us good when it feels so bad. All we have to look forward to is getting out of there. But if we ever say we hate school, that makes us ungrateful slackers, melodramatic whiners and rotten teenagers that want to laze around doing nothing all day.

So hard to be a student these days.

Im a sophomore and there is a plethora amount of homework its crazy especially from Ap World History in which im always getting projects and english sometimes i stay up late till 12 am and then continue my homework at school during breakfast sometimes students in grade levels below mine have to stay after school and during school for something that was called “wallstreet” and now is called”college prep”so you can imagine how many times some students have to stay after school for homework especially those in more advanced classes than the others like I am.

I’ve been on the accelerated track at my high school, and homework has never been an issue for me up until my junior year. I feel as though lately my homework load has more than doubled and frankly I don’t see the full use of it. Being a teenager, school is obviously a huge priority, but I feel that it shouldn’t take away from high school experiences. I have a job, and I do participate in a competitive sport, and I would like to be able to handle it all. What always ends up throwing me off is that 12 page outline for biology, or those verb translations for italian. I feel like nowadays every teenager has to two of three things; good grades, an active social life, and a healthy amount of sleep. Farewell, sleep.

yes!i think some teachers give students to much home work.they should relize we have six other periods were we get work.i think some teachers should not give as much work as they do.

I think my school is good right now because the students don’t get alot of ho9mework because it’s all mostly classwork so the teachers can help us out and everything. There are some teachers that do give alot of homework sometimes but it’s only if your behind or need to catch up really fast.

In my opinion,Ithink I get too much homework sometimes.Sometimes it’s so difficult my mom can’t figure it out.Once,I had to spend 2hours on one math assignment!Since I’m a seventh grader,the required amount is a little over an hour.For L.A.,I usually need to read for 20 minutes.But with my brain processing tests,I’m advanced in reading.(but I already know that).Since I have ADD,it makes it harder.I have to spend 90 min. On hw.It should be illegal.

What's Next

Do Schools Give Out Too Much Homework Now? Yes, They Do, and it Needs to Stop

• By Emily Summers
• January 14, 2020

With more than 60% of students from high school and college seeking counseling for a variety of conditions ranging from general anxiety to clinical depression, all of which induced by school and studies, it’s safe to say that our country’s children are stressed out more than they should be. In fact, more and more students in the high school level are starting to report stress levels that rival that of adults working in officers, in some cases even exceeding those stress levels.

But what’s got them so riled up? The answer: Homework. Now, before you go full boomer and say “homework was more difficult back in my day!”, let’s make one thing clear: today’s educational system is far more advanced , complex, and even more difficult than it was a couple of decades ago.

Is There Too Much Homework in High School?

Of course, sometimes homework is necessary, but if it cuts into a child’s social, family, and down time, it borders on the cruel and unnecessary. Children should NOT be subjected to what-is-essentially training to be overworked in the corporate world. But how long does the average high school spend on homework? 3 hours a night. That’s 3 hours a night per class to complete, so it’s no wonder that our high school students are getting less than the National Sleep Foundation’s required 8 to 10 hours of sleep every night, with 68% of high school students reportedly getting less than 7 hours of sleep on the weekdays.

And that’s not even an exaggeration: in between a full day’s worth of school work, extracurricular activities, and homework, a high school student’s life is almost designed to be stressful. Sure, the point of all those activities is to turn them into an educated, well-balanced individual, but at what expense? A modern-day American student might know how to solve for X and throw a pigskin to the end zone, but what good is all of that if they’re haggard all the time and constantly deprived of sleep?

And what of the parents? It’s not like they can just leave their kids to the wolves: most parents (the responsible ones, at least) will want to help their kids with the influx of work they’ll be doing once they hit 9 th grade, as if a full day’s work and commuting wasn’t enough. All to fulfill antiquated ideas of course fulfillments and state-mandated credit requirement.

But rather than focusing on busy work, why not focus on things that actually matter , like fulfilling learning standards while maintaining positive mental health?

Educators across the country need to rethink homework, why they need to give it and what kind of work they should be giving our children.

Is Homework Even Necessary?

With the amount of stress students go through, it’s tempting to curse the person who invented homework . But take note: it’s not all bad.

Homework now can seem like unnecessary busy work instead of actual learning materials, but before we get further into this topic, let’s be clear: some homework is necessary (although researchers are still waiting for conclusive evidence for homework’s necessity).

What researchers can agree on, however, is that any type of school work that is purposeful, appropriately challenging, and aligned with the student’s interest truly is beneficial: not only does it teach the lesson for that subject, it also improves study habits, establishes self-discipline, and develops independent problem-solving skills and critical thinking.

However, if homework is mind-numbingly tedious, without purpose (other than to fulfill a quota), and overwhelming, then it becomes detrimental: not only will it demotivate a student from learning, it can also affect the way they view school, negatively affect their learning retention, and eventually turn them off completely to that subject.

Unfortunately, many schools across the country use homework as a way of creating extra class time beyond what is mandated by the state. Not only is this inefficient, it’s needlessly cruel. If a teacher is using homework as an excuse to make your child do their job for them, you need to contact your child’s school and set up a meeting. Homework should be a tool that supplements lessons, not replace lessons as a whole.

How Can We Make Homework Better?

The National PTA suggests that high school students should have a maximum of 2 hours of homework per night , a far cry from cramming 18 hours’ worth of schoolwork into 4-5 hours after school. We can do better by demanding that schools revisit their requirements for students and reconsider lessening the amount of required homework they give students.

As for the teachers, it’s time to treat homework not as busywork but as actual tools to help students learn more about your subject. It doesn’t have to be fun per se, but it should be inspiring enough for your students to take a more active role in your class the next day. Homework should stoke the fires of creativity and instill a spirit of inquisitiveness; homework shouldn’t be a chore that students dread doing, nor should it be an impossible activity designed to confuse them or punish them.

Homework should include activities that reinforce what they learned throughout the class and not something that combines lessons for the next day with activities designed to test what they’ve learned on their own. Not only is that tedious and inefficient, it’s also a lazy way to teach.

For parents, get a better idea of what your child is going through by taking the time to sit down with them to listen to their concerns . Keep an open mind and avoid being dismissive; this is the best way for your teenage child to open up and is an opportunity for them to practice critical communication skills with people they can trust (i.e. their parents).

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Emily summers.

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Too much homework?

Who doesn’t remember seemingly endless afternoons on weekdays, or worse, on weekends, spent tied to one’s desk at home laboring over homework?

Or who doesn’t remember rushing through breakfast on a school day to finish an assignment due that day?

For many a student and adult, memories of school are replete with horror stories of many hours spent laboring over homework—including projects and crafts—while daylight slowly dimmed and the sounds of one’s playmates enjoying themselves outside faded with dusk.

Well, for learners today and in the near future, such memories may soon fade into forgetfulness, if some legislators and lobby groups have their way.

For Tutok to Win party list Rep. Sam Verzosa, Filipino students these days are “overworked,” alleging that a child spends as much as 10 hours in school on weekdays. Some years back, global education assessments placed Italian learners as the most overworked, with nine hours spent on homework a week.

A global review reveals, however, that time spent on school assignments does not translate into better grades for students or better results for educational outcomes nationwide. Italy’s ranking in international assessments was relatively low in a 2014 study. While students in South Korea, whose education system ranked number one in the world in the same review, only spend 2.9 hours on homework weekly.

And of course, we all know the dismal ranking of Filipino students in similar international assessments, with learners landing at the bottom, or very near the bottom, of rankings, even when compared to much poorer countries.

It makes sense, then, for Verzosa to propose a “no homework law” that would prevent teachers from giving homework to elementary and high school students during weekends so that the children could “rest and recharge.”

This isn’t the first time that a cap on assignment loads has been attempted. A 2010 Department of Education (DepEd) memorandum circular advised teachers to limit the giving of homework to public elementary school students to a reasonable quantity on weekdays, while no homework is to be given on weekends. At least three bills were in fact filed to institutionalize this for all elementary and high schools across the country.

But in the intervening years, despite efforts to institute a “no homework” policy on weekends, these have remained pending before the House basic education and culture committee.

“The Filipino youth are overworked and yet the Philippines is trailing behind other countries,” Verzosa said in his privilege speech. He cited reports that the average intelligence quotient of Filipinos was 81.64, while the global average IQ was 100. The Philippines ranked 111th out of 199 countries in average IQ.

In addition, said Verzosa, the country has the highest dropout rate among Southeast Asian countries, with lack of interest in school as one of the reasons cited. “This only shows that school is not fun anymore,” he said.

This plays against a background of the “learning losses” that children worldwide experienced as a result of the school lockdowns enforced in the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Philippines, with one of the longest such lockdowns in the world, certainly felt the toll, with “blended learning” proving to be a dismal failure, especially in areas with bad communications infrastructure.

Our educational crisis also takes place amid a history of failed policies that have resulted in our current crisis. A report by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), observes that students are “not truly learning but merely progressing” through the school system. The study linked the “unofficial” policy of mass promotion of students to poor learning outcomes.

PBEd executive director Justine Raagas said that there is an apparent misunderstanding among participants about the concept of “No child left behind” which “led to the literal practice of passing students” or promoting them to the next grade level regardless of their competencies. Teachers, it seems, prefer to pass on the responsibility of ensuring a student’s competency to the next grade teacher.

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Amid these seemingly insurmountable problems besetting the education system, the DepEd and policymakers should make sense of the many well-meaning proposals to address the learning losses and the poor quality of public education. Bills like the no-homework-on-weekends and that which seeks to revise or abolish the K-12 program must be thoroughly discussed, not only by legislators but by the education sector itself, to see if these will really help improve the education of our children or just become additional distractions. It’s about time the DepEd, Congress, and other education stakeholders get their act together and do their own homework.

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Do teachers give too much homework?

Victoria Sordi , Writer | October 19, 2021

                Personally, I believe teachers give too much homework. I also believe that teachers plan their assignments to give them at the same time as other teachers to see if students will be able to delegate it all. This is easy for some, but some students have anxiety and trouble at home. Therefore, they can be really smart students but once they get home they can not get anything done which will make their grades tank. Children are no longer allowed to be children, and instructors should stop assigning schoolwork entirely. We’re attempting to transform them into grownups ahead of schedule. I feel that lockers and book bags should be phased out and that if a hard copy book is required, it could be shared by the class or purchased digitally. There should be no more book or charge costs, and all homework should be completed at school so that teachers may assist kids who require assistance. There are far too many parents who have no idea how to help their children with their schoolwork at home. Every door should have a metal detector that enables everyone inside the school. That way, we’ll be able to keep our kids.

                 If you ask nearly any child about homework, they will tell you that they dislike it because it takes up their time or because they already have work to do at school, so why should they do extra at home? However, some children enjoy homework since it allows them to learn more about a subject; however, even children who enjoy homework recognize when it is excessive. Because most students have more than one teacher, a teacher should not hand out an excessive amount of homework. And most kids have responsibilities at home and must put off school work until later, which exhausts pupils because they work all day at school, then some more at home, before having to do schoolwork at home. “I think they need to communicate more on what homework they’re giving and their deadlines so students can focus on doing a good job on the work instead of just getting it done the homework been too much,” said Anonymous. Many students moan about how much homework they usually have, but teachers often tell them that they are exaggerating and that they should simply get on with it.

                 Every night, students are given a large amount of homework, and the majority of them must balance their schoolwork with their extracurricular activities. Teachers, according to the majority of students, assign much too much homework. According to Jackie Cronin, “They give way too much and I have no time after sports and having dinner and showering and being tried because we have to wake up at 6:30 am.“ Participating in these activities adds to the stress of completing their assignments. Excessive homework has been linked to high-stress levels, a lack of balance in children’s lives, and physical health issues such as ulcers, migraines, sleep deprivation, and weight loss. When kids return home from practice or games late at night, they still have all of their schoolwork to complete before going to bed, and many may stay up late attempting to complete it all. Luke Augeri states, “I think too much homework we should not have because people spend 7 hours in school already and shouldn’t have to do more at home. And people have sports and other activities.“ Another sign that pupils have too much homework is that they never have time to rest. When they arrive home, they spend hours doing schoolwork. Students should devote 10 minutes per grade level to homework each night. That amounts to 10 minutes of homework in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade, and 120 minutes of homework in the final year of high school. Despite the fact that this is what is meant to happen, studies reveal that students work on assignments far longer than they should, leaving them with no free time. Students labor on schoolwork from the time they arrive home until they retire to bed, leaving little time for other activities.

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Teachers should give out less homework

Faisa Mohamed

Teachers should give out less homework because many students have other responsibilities outside of school and by reducing homework, students have proven to get more sleep which leads to better physical and mental health. So instead of benefiting students’ learning, it can actually be detrimental to it.

Faisa Mohamed , Staff Writer January 9, 2023

First and foremost, excessive amounts of homework can be detrimental to students’ mental and physical health. It can lead to increased stress and anxiety, as well as sleep deprivation and other health problems. When students are overwhelmed by too much homework, they may become burnt out and lose motivation to learn. I believe that teachers should give out less homework because many kids have work or responsibilities outside of school and don’t deserve to be overworked. By reducing homework, students have proven to get more sleep which leads to better physical and mental health. So instead of benefiting students’ learning, it can actually be detrimental to it. Homework doesn’t necessarily always equate to higher achievement.  

Muntaha Ibrahim, a student at South, thinks there’s too much going on in most students’ lives to stress about homework. “Teens are stressed and overwhelmed.” They are more likely to have problems focusing on topics for extended periods of time. Many students have family problems at home and some are babysitting their younger siblings when they don’t have time for homework. It can be difficult to make homework a priority when you have other responsibilities. Some students have jobs to financially help their parents. Students of color especially often have expectations from their families that they contribute to the household. When you consider inequities in students’ home lives, giving out the same homework to students becomes much more complicated. 

In addition, homework doesn’t motivate people, it just causes extra work and stress. In fact, it might make a student less interested in the subject because they feel overwhelmed. When students do end up doing homework, it is often only to get a good grade, not to actually learn the content. Aisha Ahmed said, “Too much homework can cause students to lose interest in the class because students doing a lot of homework, they’re not able to do their other work properly and wind up losing focus in class.” Despite this, there are also disadvantages to not giving students homework. In some cases, homework gives students the time that they don’t get in class to work and be independent on their own time. Giving homework is teaching in its own way, so students can learn on their time. As a teacher though, it’s effectively their job to do most of the teaching so students’ lives aren’t centered around school and homework.

A potential solution to this situation is that teachers give out homework only if students don’t finish all of their work in class. This way students can complete their unfinished classwork, but it is not so much that it is overwhelming or  too much stress. This may improve students’ mental health. This also benefits teachers because students are more likely to finish their work without feeling overwhelmed.

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Christian • Dec 6, 2023 at 10:21 am

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School Life Balance , Tips for Online Students

The Pros and Cons of Homework

Updated: December 7, 2023

Published: January 23, 2020

Homework is a word that most students dread hearing. After hours upon hours of sitting in class , the last thing we want is more schoolwork over our precious weekends. While it’s known to be a staple of traditional schooling, homework has also become a rather divise topic. Some feel as though homework is a necessary part of school, while others believe that the time could be better invested. Should students have homework? Have a closer look into the arguments on both sides to decide for yourself.

Photo by  energepic.com  from  Pexels

Why should students have homework, 1. homework encourages practice.

Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills. Homework helps make concepts more clear, and gives students more opportunities when starting their career .

2. Homework Gets Parents Involved

Homework can be something that gets parents involved in their children’s lives if the environment is a healthy one. A parent helping their child with homework makes them take part in their academic success, and allows for the parent to keep up with what the child is doing in school. It can also be a chance to connect together.

3. Homework Teaches Time Management

Homework is much more than just completing the assigned tasks. Homework can develop time management skills , forcing students to plan their time and make sure that all of their homework assignments are done on time. By learning to manage their time, students also practice their problem-solving skills and independent thinking. One of the positive effects of homework is that it forces decision making and compromises to be made.

4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication

Homework creates a connection between the student, the teacher, the school, and the parents. It allows everyone to get to know each other better, and parents can see where their children are struggling. In the same sense, parents can also see where their children are excelling. Homework in turn can allow for a better, more targeted educational plan for the student.

5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time

Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can’t see it in the moment.

6. Homework Reduces Screen Time

Many students in North America spend far too many hours watching TV. If they weren’t in school, these numbers would likely increase even more. Although homework is usually undesired, it encourages better study habits and discourages spending time in front of the TV. Homework can be seen as another extracurricular activity, and many families already invest a lot of time and money in different clubs and lessons to fill up their children’s extra time. Just like extracurricular activities, homework can be fit into one’s schedule.

The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad

1. homework encourages a sedentary lifestyle.

Should students have homework? Well, that depends on where you stand. There are arguments both for the advantages and the disadvantages of homework.

While classroom time is important, playground time is just as important. If children are given too much homework, they won’t have enough playtime, which can impact their social development and learning. Studies have found that those who get more play get better grades in school , as it can help them pay closer attention in the classroom.

Children are already sitting long hours in the classroom, and homework assignments only add to these hours. Sedentary lifestyles can be dangerous and can cause health problems such as obesity. Homework takes away from time that could be spent investing in physical activity.

2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home

While many people that think homes are a beneficial environment for children to learn, not all homes provide a healthy environment, and there may be very little investment from parents. Some parents do not provide any kind of support or homework help, and even if they would like to, due to personal barriers, they sometimes cannot. Homework can create friction between children and their parents, which is one of the reasons why homework is bad .

3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job

School is already a full-time job for students, as they generally spend over 6 hours each day in class. Students also often have extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or art that are just as important as their traditional courses. Adding on extra hours to all of these demands is a lot for children to manage, and prevents students from having extra time to themselves for a variety of creative endeavors. Homework prevents self discovery and having the time to learn new skills outside of the school system. This is one of the main disadvantages of homework.

4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results

Endless surveys have found that homework creates a negative attitude towards school, and homework has not been found to be linked to a higher level of academic success.

The positive effects of homework have not been backed up enough. While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements.

It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework. Extra school time does not necessarily mean better grades — quality must always come before quantity.

Accurate practice when it comes to homework simply isn’t reliable. Homework could even cause opposite effects if misunderstood, especially since the reliance is placed on the student and their parents — one of the major reasons as to why homework is bad. Many students would rather cheat in class to avoid doing their homework at home, and children often just copy off of each other or from what they read on the internet.

5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone

The general agreement is that students should not be given more than 10 minutes a day per grade level. What this means is that a first grader should be given a maximum of 10 minutes of homework, while a second grader receives 20 minutes, etc. Many students are given a lot more homework than the recommended amount, however.

On average, college students spend as much as 3 hours per night on homework . By giving too much homework, it can increase stress levels and lead to burn out. This in turn provides an opposite effect when it comes to academic success.

The pros and cons of homework are both valid, and it seems as though the question of ‘‘should students have homework?’ is not a simple, straightforward one. Parents and teachers often are found to be clashing heads, while the student is left in the middle without much say.

It’s important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of homework, taking both perspectives into conversation to find a common ground. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is the success of the student.

Related Articles

Letter to the editor: Schools give too much homework

The increasing volume of homework assigned to students is a growing concern that requires immediate attention.

I believe it is a big issue due to it stressing students out and causing them to crunch their time every day after school trying to fit in after-school activities like sports and extracurricular activities and also other things they may have to do every day. It has affected students in many different ways and even causes them to cheat or not actually try on their homework due to their busy schedule, not being able to fit in all their homework as well. 

The article “This is why we should stop giving homework” from the Human Restoration Project explains how families feel crushed by their children's work overload and trying to help them and figure it out. This issue is important because it's causing children to get in the habit of cheating and just trying to find answers from their classmates because they're doing it every day as a daily habit. It stresses out parents and makes their home life harder. 

I believe that everything that students need to learn should be taught and practiced at school. I think there should be no such thing as homework, and most school-related things other than studying should be done at school.

A way that could help this issue is teachers teaching and practicing everything in class to make it where kids don't need to bring their schoolwork home. 

Jason Thain, Green