Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader-that was new.” Parents’ expectations were also an issue. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. “The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. Read: My daughter’s homework is killing me
They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work-and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.īut not without pushback. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. America has long had a fickle relationship with homework.
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