This
year’s Brown Center Report on American Education updates a study on homework presented
in the 2003 Brown Center Report. That study was conducted at a time when
homework was on the covers of several popular magazines. The charge then was
that the typical student’s homework load was getting out of control. The 2003 study
examined the best evidence on students’ homework burden and found the charge to
be an exaggeration.
Now,
a little more than a decade later, homework is again under attack. In 2011, the
New York Times ran
a front page story describing “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, especially in elementary grades.”
A
September 2013 Atlantic article, “My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me,” featured a
father who spent a week doing the same three or more hours of nightly homework
as his daughter.
The
current study finds little evidence that the homework load has increased for
the average student. Those with a heavy burden, two or more hours of homework
per night, do indeed exist, but they are a distinct minority.
The
maximum size of the heavy homework group is less than 15%, and that’s true even
for 17-year-olds. In national polls, parents are more likely to say their
children have too little homework than too much. And a solid majority says the
amount of their children’s homework is about right.
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