Kids and parents dislike math homework, so teachers are scrapping it. Will students be better off?

“A few days into the new semester this January, the LaSalle Parish school district in rural Louisiana made a pronouncement: There would be no more homework. None of the 2,500 students in this district — from the youngest learners up through high school seniors — are required to do schoolwork at home this semester. Parents can request practice problems if they’d like, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but that work won’t be mandatory or graded. Homework assignments, it turned out, were among the biggest sources of complaints Garrett had heard from parents and students over the years. “When there was a negative feeling about school, it usually stemmed from what kids are bringing home, the frustrations they feel completing that, and that parents and guardians feel trying to help them complete it,” he said in an interview. 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 Garrett has noticed over the years: More teachers are moving away from homework. “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, 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.” Indeed, federal survey data suggests 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 , while others suggest it has minimal outcomes on academic performance, particularly for young children. The debate over homework has raged 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 violin or sports 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. 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 . Related: The building blocks of math that students need to excel — but aren’t always getting 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: Twenty-two percent of eighth grade math teachers reported assigning no math homework in 2024, up from 4 percent in 2015. 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, noting she believes students should also do some homework independently. “And 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,” and homework provides that, Smith said. For young children, homework is also a way to more directly include parents in the learning process, Smith said. Sitting down and practicing reading with her son was how Smith learned he was struggling to read, despite good grades on his report card . “Report cards are not always a reflection of whether kids are on grade level,” she said. “When you give kids opportunities to practice learning at home, parents can actually see what’s going on.” Related: Parents trust report cards more than test scores — with consequences for kids Smith said she and her mother, both of whom are former teachers, create their own homework now for her son: reading exercises and flash cards in math. She’s heard from other parents at the school who are also frustrated with the lack of homework. “I think they need more practice, and I think learning can be fun — it should be fun,” Smith said. “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, Pennsylvania, 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 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.” The conflict over homework was the final straw that resulted in Maillard pulling his kids out of their neighborhood school for a virtual charter school in 2019, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 schooling. At the cyber school, they had no schoolwork beyond what they were expected to do during the school day, which is how it should be, Malliard said. Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education . Debates about homework have existed for as long as schools have been assigning it. It’s never been overly popular: Kids (generally) hate doing it and parents (largely) don’t enjoy helping them do it. In 1880, the Boston school board president, Francis A. Walker , was able to get the district to ban most instances of math homework by describing something many parents nearly 150 years later can still relate to: “Over and over again, I have had to send my own children, in spite of their tears and remonstrances, to bed, long after the assigned tasks had ceased to have any educational value and had become the means of nervous exhaustion and agitation.” California provided perhaps the biggest example of a homework ban in the U.S. in 1901, when the state outlawed homework for children under 15. Over time, and particularly during the Cold War , anti-homework sentiment faltered as researchers and legislators worried the U.S. was falling behind its international peers academically. 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 there are harmful effects from too much time spent on homework. A study out of Stanford University found that the benefit of homework for high school students plateaus after two hours a night ; beyond that, 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, according to Epstein, 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 these considerations, along with the challenges posed by AI, all factored into the decision to get rid of homework this semester. But the biggest reason was that most parents and students simply do not want it. To account for the lost practice time, Garrett said, he has given his math teachers permission to slow down their instruction and give students time in class to practice math concepts, even if that means they don’t cover as much content during the school year. At the end of this semester, they’ll evaluate how well it worked. “We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed. We’ll see,” Garrett said. “This might be something that helps us in the long run.” Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org . This story about math homework was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter . The post Kids and parents dislike math homework, so teachers are scrapping it. Will students be better off? appeared first on The Hechinger Report .

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