Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes

Beyond that, Garrett said the move was driven by concerns – shared by many educators – that much of the homework students are assigned – especially in math – is needlessly repetitive, takes too long to complete and hasn't adapted to the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence.

The response to Garrett's announcement was swift — and overwhelmingly positive. The message is the district's most "liked" post on Facebook by far this year, with hundreds of shares — many of them by parents from neighboring parishes asking how they could get their own schools on board.

The scope of the district's no-homework guidance is new, but it follows a trend that educators and researchers have been noticing for years: More teachers are moving away from homework.

Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

More homework was also associated with negative attitudes about school for younger children in the study.

"The best educators figured out a long time ago that we can control what we can control," and that's what happens during the school day, Superintendent Garrett said, not homework. "There has been a shift away from it naturally anyway, and I felt like this made it equitable across our entire school system."

In math especially, students need practice

The debate over homework has swung back and forth for more than a century, and the tide of public opinion has shifted every few years. It's likely to continue changing for a simple reason: Researching homework is a challenge.

There's no good way to isolate the amount of time spent on homework and its effects on students, because it may take one student five minutes to complete the same math problem that another student spent 45 minutes on. That extra time doesn't necessarily result in the struggling student performing better than the student who grasped the assignment more quickly.

However, just like playing the violin or hitting a baseball, or any other skill that requires training, there is evidence that students need practice to master academic subjects, particularly in math.

Some experts worry the overall decrease in homework could be a problem for math achievement, at a time when math scores across the country are already at a dismal low.

"The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don't want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home," said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher who has studied homework.

The effects of AI on homework

Generative artificial intelligence has added a new wrinkle to the homework debate, too. More than half of teens said they used chatbots to help with schoolwork, and 1 in 10 said they used virtual assistants to do all or most of their schoolwork, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

A different survey of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center found that 40 percent said homework assignments had decreased over the past two years, and of those, 29 percent said it was because students' use of AI had lessened the value of homework.

Between 1996 and 2015, very few fourth graders — between 4 and 6 percent — reported being given no math homework the previous night, according to surveys from the Nation's Report Card. By 2024, that percentage was up to more than a quarter. There was a similar trend for eighth graders.

Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the Center for Policy and Action at the National Parents Union, a nonprofit that advocates for parents, has seen this trend in her own fourth grader's public elementary school class in Vermont, whose teacher doesn't assign homework.

"The thing they point to is that it's an equity issue, and not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students," said Smith.

She believes, however, that students should do some homework without the help of their parents. "I would make the argument that if a kid is really far behind in school, that's an equity issue. They need the additional time to practice."

Smith said she and her mother create their own homework now for her son: reading exercises and flash cards in math. Kids, she said, "need more practice. … Sometimes, you do have to practice the boring stuff, like math."

Not everyone feels this way about homework. For Jim Malliard's two children in Franklin, Pa., adverse experiences at school became a barrier to completing homework.

"It became a fight because the kids had so much school-based anxiety from trauma and bullying at school that they didn't want to deal with school when they got home," said Malliard, whose kids attended a public high school.

Malliard, who writes about education issues and is a full-time caregiver to his wife, doesn't think his children were overburdened with homework at their school, but he also doesn't believe they were benefiting from it.

"The teachers would tell us homework only takes 15 minutes a night — sure, if a kid sits there and does it right away and is attentive and wants to do it," Malliard said. "It was getting to be an hour for us."

He eventually enrolled his children in a virtual charter school, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 schooling.

How much is enough?

Over the years, research has attempted to answer the thorny question of how much homework is appropriate, with varying degrees of success.

Education groups and researchers generally recommend 10 minutes of homework each night per grade level. But it's almost impossible to assign work that will take every student the same amount of time to complete, and research has shown there are harmful effects from too much time spent on homework.

A survey published in 2014 out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,300 students in high-performing California high school schools found that the benefit of homework for high school students plateaus after two hours a night. Beyond that, the researchers found, it can lead to more stress and poor sleep.

Research on homework tends to focus on the amount of time students spend on it rather than the quality or purpose of the assignments, said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is the co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

One option worth considering, Epstein said, is to design homework that has a specific purpose but is perhaps shorter than traditional homework assignments. Giving students the opportunity to practice is important, she said, particularly in math, where concepts build on each other and move relentlessly forward throughout the year.

"The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework," Epstein said. "Better homework in math might be knowing the fact that kids don't have to be practicing for hours, 10 to 20 examples," when they could establish mastery in less time.

When students are completing math homework on their own but doing the problems incorrectly, some educators say it takes longer to reteach them the right way in class the next day.

Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, said her district has taken the approach recommended by Epstein, of focusing on the quality of homework while assigning less of it.

Rather than long "drill and kill" worksheets she remembers from her time as a student, Birhanzel said elementary students in the district might have a reading assignment, a few math problems and a small writing sample. "It's more purposeful and less intensive," Birhanzel said.

In Louisiana's LaSalle Parish, Superintendent Garrett said that to account for the lost practice time, he has given math teachers permission to slow down their instruction and give students time in class to practice concepts, even if that means they don't cover as much content during the school year.

"We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed. We'll see," he said. "This might be something that helps us in the long run."

This story was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Contact writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.