The response to Garrett’s announcement was swift and overwhelmingly positive. The message is the most “liked” in the district post on facebook by far this year, with hundreds of actions, many of them from parents from neighboring parishes asking how they could incorporate their own schools.
The scope of the district’s guidance on no homework is new, but it follows a trend that educators and researchers have been noticing for years: More and more teachers are giving up homework.
Federal survey data show that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth- and eighth-grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining over the past decade.
Some educators and parents say this is a good thing: Students shouldn’t spend six or more hours a day in school and still have extra homework to complete at home. But homework research is complicated.
Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework they perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study published in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay, and the Netherlands found that lower-achieving students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even a year later.
Other studies, however, suggest that homework has minimal results on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 American students led by a Duke University researcher found that a greater amount of homework assigned in the elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers found small positive gains in class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of assignments students completed.
In the study, more homework was also associated with negative attitudes toward school in younger children.
“The best educators discovered 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. “Anyway, there has been a natural move away from this, and I felt like this made it equitable across our school system.”
Especially in math, students need practice.
The homework debate has swung back and forth for more than a century, and the tide of public opinion has turned every few years. It’s likely to keep changing for one simple reason: researching assignments is challenging.
There is no good way to isolate the amount of time spent on homework and its effects on students, because it can take one student five minutes to complete the same math problem that another student spent 45 minutes on. That extra time does not necessarily result in the struggling student performing better than the student who took on the task 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 mathematics.
Some experts worry that the overall decline in homework could be a problem for math achievement, at a time when Math scores nationwide are already at a slight low..
“The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don’t want to waste time in the classroom practicing, 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 also added a new twist to the homework debate. More than half of teens said they used chatbots to help with homework and 1 in 10 said they used virtual assistants do all or most of their schoolwork, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
A different survey of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center found that 40 percent said homework had decreased over the past two years, and of those, 29 percent said it was because the students’ use of AI had learned the value of the task.
Between 1996 and 2015, very few fourth graders (4 to 6 percent) reported not being given math homework the night before, according to Nation’s Report Card surveys. By 2024, that percentage had increased to more than a quarter. There was a similar trend for eighth graders.
Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the National Parents Union Policy and Action Center, a nonprofit parent advocacy organization, has observed this trend in her own fourth-grade son’s class at a public elementary school in Vermont, whose teacher does not assign homework.
“What they point out is that this is an issue of equity and that not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students,” Smith said.
She believes, however, that students should do some homework without their parents’ help. “I would say that if a child is too far behind in school, that’s an equity issue. They need extra time to practice.”
Smith said she and her mother now create their own assignments for their son: reading exercises and math flashcards. Children, he said, “need more practice… Sometimes you have to practice boring things, like math.”
Not everyone feels this way about homework. For Jim Malliard’s two children in Franklin, Pennsylvania, adverse experiences in school became a barrier to completing homework.
“It became a fight because the kids had so much school anxiety from the trauma and bullying that they didn’t want to deal with school when they got home,” said Malliard, whose children attended a public high school.
Mallard, who writes about educational issues and is a full-time caregiver for his wife, he doesn’t believe his children were overloaded with homework at school, but he also doesn’t think they were benefiting from it.
“Teachers were telling us that homework only takes 15 minutes a night; of course, if a child sits there and does it right away, they are attentive and want to do it,” Malliard said. “It was getting to be an hour for us.”
She eventually enrolled her children in a virtual charter school, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 education.
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.
Educational groups and researchers generally recommend 10 minutes of homework each night per grade level. But it’s nearly impossible to assign homework that takes the same amount of time for all students to complete, and research has shown that spending too much time on homework has detrimental effects.
A survey published in 2014 by Stanford University that analyzed more than 4,300 students from high-performing California high schools found that the benefit of homework for high school students plateaus after two hours per night. Beyond that, the researchers found, it can lead to more stress and lack of sleep.
Research on homework tends to focus on the amount of time students spend on it rather than the quality or purpose of homework, said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is co-director of the Center for School, Family and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
One option worth considering, Epstein said, is to design tasks that have a specific purpose but are perhaps shorter than traditional tasks. Giving students the opportunity to practice is important, he said, particularly in math, where concepts build on each other and advance tirelessly throughout the year.
“The interesting question people need to consider is not whether there should be more homework, but whether there should be better homework,” Epstein said. “A better task in math might be knowing that kids don’t have to practice for hours, doing 10 to 20 examples,” when they could establish mastery in less time.
When students complete math homework on their own but solve problems incorrectly, some educators say it takes longer to reteach them the correct 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 assignments and assigning less.
Instead of long “drill and kill” worksheets that he remembers from his time as a student, Birhanzel said the district’s elementary students could have a reading assignment, some math problems and a small writing sample. “It’s more useful and less intensive,” Birhanzel said.
In LaSalle Parish, Louisiana, Superintendent Garrett said that to make up for 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 it means they don’t cover as much content during the school year.
“We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than running around and covering each of the things listed. We’ll see,” he said. “This could be something that helps us in the long run.”
