“Parents are correct in saying that they didn’t get homework in the early grades and that their kids do,” says Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and director of the education program at Duke University. One homework fact that educators do agree upon is that the young child today is doing more homework than ever before. It found that 57% of parents felt that their child was assigned about the right amount of homework, 23% thought there was too little and 19% thought there was too much. “So asking a kid how much homework they did the night before a national test and claiming that that data tells us anything about the general run of the mill experience of kids and homework over the school year is, I think, really dishonest.”įurther muddying the waters is a AP/AOL poll that suggests that most Americans feel that their children are getting the right amount of homework. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night’s sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test. “Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, ‘How much homework did you do last night’ Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. But it’s not a crisis in that it’s a very small proportion of kids who are spending an enormous amount of time on homework.”Įtta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. There’s enormous variation across communities. “That’s not to say there aren’t any kids with too much homework. “It doesn’t suggest that most kids are doing a tremendous amount,” says Gill. The median appears to be about four hours a week.”Įducation researchers like Gill base their conclusions, in part, on data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. And most high school students in this country don’t do a lot of homework. “In fact, the trends through most of this time period are pretty flat. “If you look at high school kids in the late ’90s, they’re not doing substantially more homework than kids did in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s or the ’40s,” he says. How do educational researchers weigh in on the issue? According to Brian Gill, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, there is no evidence that kids are doing more homework than they did before. Bottom line: students have too much homework and most of it is not productive or necessary.” Homework studies “Most of us, even attorneys, do not do this. “How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?” asks Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, an attorney and a former high school English teacher. “Teachers nowadays assign these almost college-level projects with requirements that make my mouth fall open with disbelief,” says another frustrated parent. “I believe that we’re stressing children out,” she says.īut hold on, it’s not just the kids who are stressed out. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids.”ĭiane Garfield, a fifth grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. “Kids today are overwhelmed!” a parent recently wrote in an email to “My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. Yet researchers say that American students have just the right amount of homework. Many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in the schools.
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