Hitting the Books: Is Homework Really Necessary?
By Kim Pleticha
Parent:Wise Magazine, August 2007
Elaine Cunningham* never gave homework much thought. She recalled it being a necessary annoyance back when she was a student, but certainly not something about which she ever seriously complained.
That is, until she became a parent.
When her six-year-old son came home in the second week of school with 120 math problems and four spelling worksheets to complete by Friday, she was stunned. It seemed like far too much homework for a first grader.
“[He] screamed and cried for an hour,” Mrs. Cunningham recalls.
To help him focus, she sat with her son in the school’s library for an hour every day after school and did the homework with him. Still, he couldn’t finish it.
Six months into the year, she discovered that her son was missing 10-minutes of recess each day as punishment for failing to complete his homework.
“I didn’t find out about this until he told me,” she says. “And I just lost it.”
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The heavy homework load didn’t come as a complete surprise: Mrs. Cuninngham’s son attended Highland Park Elementary, an AISD school known for its rigorous homework, as well as its National Blue Ribbon status and its excellent TAKS test scores.
The punishment, however, was a different story.
Like most schools, Highland Park’s homework policy is clearly outlined in its school handbook. Students in first grade are expected to spend a maximum of 20-minutes per night on homework (that level increases to 40-minutes for second grade and 60-minutes for third-through-fifth grades). The guidelines also state that students do not have to finish an assignment if their actual “time-on-task” exceeds the grade level maximum (unfinished homework requires a parental signature). The handbook also is clear: “there will be no penalty assessed” if students do not complete assigned homework.
Mrs. Cunningham followed the handbook’s guidelines and had spoken to her son’s teacher about the homework. She had been told it was OK for him not to finish it. So finding out he had been missing recess nearly all year angered her.
“Maybe they don’t consider it punishment,” she said. “But I do.”
That’s when Mrs. Cunningham became somewhat of a homework crusader.
“I would love to see [homework] in elementary school go away,” she says. “[The kids] have short attention spans, anyway, and if they’re at school nine hours, by the time they get home they’re only awake for a couple more hours — let them go out and play.”
The Case Against Homework
Mrs. Cunningham’s situation isn’t unique: the debate over homework has been raging since children began attending public school. Back in 1901, the California Civil Code outlawed “home study” for any child age 15 or younger; in the 1930s, homework was banned after the American Child Health Association classified it as child labor.
Recently, the books The End of Homework (2000), Closing the Book on Homework (2003), The Case Against Homework (2006) and The Homework Myth (2006) have revived the debate. Each argues that homework is unnecessary at best and detrimental to children’s learning at worst. They offer countless anecdotes from parents—all similar to Mrs. Cunningham’s experience—of children who are frustrated, angry and, in some cases, have lost their desire to learn.
The End of Homework fired the first anti-homework shot of the 21st century. Written by Dr. Etta Kralovec, an associate professor of education at the University of Arizona, and journalist John Buell, the book explores the history of homework and how it is used in modern classrooms. Dr. Kralovec argues that homework is bad for families because it cuts into their already meager time together; further, it robs children of their childhoods because it forces them to work when they should be playing.
The book made national headlines, including a cover story in Time magazine. And this was before the 2001 implementation of No Child Left Behind, which imposed tougher standards, assessments and accountability on the nation’s public schools—changes that resulted in an increase in homework at many schools nationwide.
The End of Homework resonated with many parents, including Sara Bennett, author of The Case Against Homework. Ms. Bennnett, a soft-spoken mother of two with a strong moral compass, had grown increasingly frustrated with the homework assigned by her children’s teachers. In particular, she was upset that most of her fellow parents did their children’s projects for them. Ms. Bennett refused to do this for her own children, insisting that the two did the work themselves. She was stunned when her children were penalized for this. (At one point, a project her son did for an open house was placed in an out-of-sight location because the teacher said it wasn’t good enough to showcase.)
“So I was very skeptical about homework and I just didn’t see any benefit in it,” Ms. Bennett told Parent:Wise Austin. “I am a lawyer [so] I started to do a lot of reading and I couldn’t find anything that said homework was beneficial for young kids.”
That’s exactly what prompted Alfie Kohn to write his book, The Homework Myth. In it, he argues that homework should be abolished not only at the elementary school level, but at all levels, because it serves no purpose other than to frustrate children and destroy their love of learning.
“Homework may be the greatest single extinguisher of children’s curiosity,” he said in an interview with Parent:Wise Austin. “It appears homework is all pain and no gain.”
Mr. Kohn, who has authored 10 previous books on parenting and education, says parents assume that homework will help children learn better, improve their achievement, and help them develop independence and self-discipline. But, he says, the research doesn’t support this. In fact, both he and Ms. Bennett cite study after study they say fail to provide a causal relationship between homework and achievement. As for claims that homework helps kids learn responsibility, Mr. Kohn adamantly disagrees
“What you’re really teaching here is mindless obedience,” Mr. Kohn says of homework. “What we’re teaching them to do is follow orders without question.”
The Benefits of Homework
Education researchers who study the effects of homework on children bristle at these statements. Dr. Janine Bempechat, a Harvard-educated professor who currently conducts research at Wheelock College in Boston, is one of those people. Her research routinely is castigated by Mr. Kohn and other anti-homework activists because she states, quite emphatically, that homework not only improves children’s achievement, it is imperative to it. In her studies of low-income children, she has found that those who do homework gain skills that are imperative to achievement: persistence, diligence, and the ability to delay gratification. Dr. Bempechat says these skills take many years to learn, which is why it’s smart for teachers to assign homework beginning in elementary school.
“You cannot expect a student when they turn 15 to suddenly turn on all of the self regulatory skills that they will need to get through high school—To my mind, it makes so much more sense to train those skills over many, many years,” Dr. Bempechat says. “The ability to be disciplined and be persistent: those kinds of skills, the strength of character, aren’t gifts that you can wrap up and put under a Christmas tree.”
Dr. Bempechat’s research also suggests that kids who do homework prepare themselves for the challenges of adulthood better than those who do not do homework. Although she understands why some parents would want to abolish homework and therefore make their children’s lives happier—she herself is a mother of two and says she is astounded by the amount of homework her high school daughter receives—she says the desire to eliminate homework is misguided. Homework helps kids develop resiliency against hardship and challenge, she says, and also teaches them important life lessons.
“Who doesn’t want to see children happy? I want my children to be happy! But you can’t be happy all of the time,” she says. “You sometimes have to do stuff that sucks. The lesson learned [from homework] is that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like. That’s life.”
Dr. Bempechat is careful to point out, however, that homework must be developmentally appropriate. She agrees with anti-homework activists who call for limiting homework in elementary school: they are correct, she says, when they say the research doesn’t support heavy homework loads for young children.
The best research on this topic has been conducted by Dr. Harris Cooper, Director of the Program in Education at Duke University. Dr. Cooper has spent 30-years conducting meta-analyses on homework research, which means he reviews all of the studies published on the topic and looks for trends. His studies are statistically sophisticated but easy to read; they also have received prestigious education awards, including the 2007 American Education Research Association Award for Outstanding Research Review.
When asked what the research says, Dr. Cooper is clear: homework absolutely improves achievement. However, its benefits cease after a certain point—generally defined as ten minutes per grade. So, children in first grade should have no more than 10-minutes of homework; children in 8th grade, no more than an hour and a half. Anything more than that not only won’t help them, it may hurt them, he says.
Parents or educators who are expecting hours of homework to improve the achievement of young children are going to be disappointed, he says. But, that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t be doing homework, only that the amount and type should be appropriate for their developmental level.
“What’s important is that teachers should avoid either extreme: don’t give up on it but don’t pile it on,” Dr. Cooper told Parent:Wise Austin. “Neither will be in the best interests of the child.”
Making Homework Relevant
Dr. Cooper’s 10-minute theory (which he is careful to point out was suggested to him by a middle school teacher 20-years ago) is well known in the education world. In fact, all of the school districts in Central Texas ascribe to it. However, because schools are under pressure from No Child Left Behind to improve student achievement, as measured by standardized test scores, some schools assign more than the recommended 10-minutes per grade. As well, many parents demand that their children receive extra homework to prepare them for college—something Alfie Kohn calls “Preparation H”: preparing kids for Harvard.
That’s certainly the case in the Eanes School District. The district has some of the best test scores in the state—and also some of the most demanding parents when it comes to homework. The district feels strongly that homework should be relevant to, and appropriate for, each child, so it encourages its teachers to differentiate assignments—in other words, to assign homework that can be done differently by different children.
“That way, you give kids power over what they do— so instead of doing all of the problems, they can do only the 10 hardest,” says Bill Bechtol, assistant superintendent for curriculum instruction in the Eanes ISD. “To make it challenging and interesting, that’s the key—it’s a fine balance.”
Mary Alvirez, the academic program supervisor for Austin ISD north elementary schools, says homework primarily should be used to reinforce what kids have already learned in the classroom.
“You don’t want to give them homework on something they haven’t been taught and can’t do – that would be frustrating,” she says.
However, she is clear that if the point of homework is to reinforce what kids have learned in class, teachers needn’t assign an excessive amount. “In my opinion it would not take 40 problems, you could do that in 10,” she says, referring to Highland Park’s first grade math homework.
Socio-Economic Differences
While all of the districts in Central Texas say they support differentiated homework assignments, the reality is that most teachers do not have the time to assign and grade different homework for 20 or more children per class. So what ends-up happening is that children are assigned a standard homework amount—a certain number of worksheets or assignments per week—and it’s up to parents (or the kids, in the cases of middle and high school students) to decide whether the assignments are appropriate.
What this means is that homework levels vary wildly from school to school. And, generally speaking, schools in higher socio-economic areas assign more homework than schools in lower socio-economic areas, according to the research.
“[The overabundance of homework] is a disease of the upper socio-economic strata—it’s like this mass hysteria that we’ve all gotten into,” says Dr. Cathy Vatterott, an associate professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Studies are mixed with regard to whether students are actually receiving more homework these days: a 2003 Brookings Institution report said homework levels are about the same today as they were 20 years ago; however, a 2006 Canadian study suggested that homework levels have increased 30%. What is clear is that students in higher socio-economic schools tend to receive more homework, and this concerns anti-homework advocates—but not for the obvious reason. Instead, they worry that the push for more homework in higher socio-economic schools will end-up creating an even larger achievement and income gap later in life.
“If homework has any beneficial effect, then it’s going to privilege the privileged because those kids have more access to educated parents, books and computers,” says Mr. Kohn. “But if homework, as I suspect, isn’t terribly useful…then we shouldn’t be assigning it to anyone.
This argument angers Dr. Bempechat, who has devoted her research to studying the achievement of low-income children. Using low-income children to push an anti-homework agenda belittles how hard many parents in lower socio-economic areas work to ensure that their children receive a strong education, she says, while doing nothing to help the achievement levels of low income students.
“Inequality is there but getting rid of homework is not the solution to foster a level playing field,” she says. “On the contrary, we need to make sure schools in low income areas are challenging their kids.”
This doesn’t mean an end to homework, but a different way of doing it, says Dr. Vatterott. She acknowledges that using homework to determine a child’s grade can be discriminatory for lower income kids, who may not have a home environment that is conducive to doing homework or whose parents may not have the education to assist them with difficult assignments. Dr. Vatterott recommends that all schools implement after-school homework support programs: places where kids can go for an hour or so to receive homework help or to quietly study. The programs do not cost a lot of money, but they yield high results in terms of the achievement and self-esteem of the children who participate in them, she says. She admits that anti-homework activists find this solution unacceptable, because it lengthens the school day. However, she believes it is an important step in bridging the achievement gap between low and high socio-economic children.
“I think what those kids miss, those who never do homework, is a sense of efficacy in completing homework independently,” she says. “There is a self satisfaction that comes from that, so that’s why I don’t think we should just not give homework.”
What’s a Parent to Do?
Elaine Cunningham felt the same way, which is why she didn’t want to tell her son to simply give-up on the homework assignments. However, she also didn’t want him to struggle for hours on end to complete assignments that were excessive and developmentally inappropriate. Punishment for not completing the assignments, in the form of missing recess, was simply unacceptable to her. So she met with her son’s teacher and devised a special homework plan: her son would do a set number of math and vocabulary problems each night and that was all. Further, he would not be punished for doing fewer problems than his classmates.
The plan worked: although her son still struggled with homework, the abbreviated amount was easier for him to complete, and doing so gave him a sense of satisfaction and improved his overall self esteem.
Now, each year, Mrs. Cunningham meets with her son’s teachers, explaining that he cannot handle copious amounts of homework and that he needs differentiated assignments.
“I’m not looking for special treatment, but I do want them to know what works for him, the issues we’ve had, and how to handle those issues,” she says.
Her requests have been welcomed by her son’s teachers. In fact, Mrs. Cunningham says, all of her son’s teachers have told her they wish they could decrease the homework levels for all of their students, but doing so in the past has resulted in parental complaints. So now, they decrease homework only on an individual basis, and only when parents ask. Mrs. Cunningham says this taught her an important lesson.
“The major thing that parents should know,” she says, “is that they have to be the advocate for their kids.”
Advocating for Kids
It’s a statement with which those in favor of homework and those who would like to see it abolished both agree. What they can’t agree on is what form that advocacy should take.
Anti-homework advocates say parents should band together and put pressure on school districts to decrease or eliminate homework district-wide, rather than on an individual basis.
Those who believe homework improves achievement and self esteem say parents should advocate for more relevant and age-appropriate assignments.
In the end, the 100-year-old debate over homework may never be resolved. But, it has the potential of finding common ground, because both sides firmly agree on one fundamental point: that homework should not destroy a child’s enthusiasm for learning.
“If you think the more [homework] the better, then that’s doing children a disservice,” Dr. Bempechat says. “It doesn’t address what you should really be concerned about, which is helping your children find meaning and love in learning.”
*Elaine Cunningham is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of her son, who is still a student at Highland Park Elementary School.