In our current muddled and contentious state of play when it comes to education, it seems that anything can become a battleground for competing ideologies and strongly held opinions, whether or not those opinions can be backed up by solid evidence or data. So I have found it fascinating to follow recent controversies regarding homework—a seemingly benign topic that has lately given rise to passionate if not necessarily well-informed arguments.
A recent article in the New York Times opened with a bit of domestic drama:
After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” [the mother] asked. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge.”6
It so happened that Ms. Cushlanis was a secretary at the suburban school district of Galloway, New Jersey, and she spoke of her qualms about her second grader’s homework burden to the superintendent of schools. The superintendent assured her that the district was already in the midst of reevaluating its homework policies, and was considering new guidelines limiting homework to ten minutes for each school grade; that is, ten minutes a night for first graders, twenty minutes for second graders, and so on. This approach, at the very least, seemed tidy and systematic… but what was it really based on? Why should teachers and administrators feel confident that this was the right amount of homework?
What is the right amount of homework? This seems like a simple enough question. It isn’t. So let’s let it simmer awhile while we pursue our discussion.
The homework battle that was going on in Galloway, New Jersey, seemed to summarize a controversy that was brewing everywhere. For every parent like Ms. Cushlanis, who believed her child was being unduly and unhealthily stressed, there was an equally caring parent who felt that her child’s education was inadequate and lacking in rigor. “Most of our kids can’t spell without spell check or add unless it comes up on the computer,” said one such mom, quoted in the Times article. “If we coddle them when they’re younger, what happens when they get into the real world?”
Some Galloway parents claimed that excessive homework constituted a sort of “second shift” of school, an unreasonable preemption of time that should be used for playing, socializing, finding pollywogs. Against this viewpoint, one adult voiced the somewhat dated but nevertheless sincere conviction that “part of growing up is having a lot of homework every day. You’re supposed to say, ‘I can’t come out and play because I have to stay in and do homework.’ ”
As it was in suburban New Jersey, so it was in school districts around the country and the world. Some people argued for more homework, some for less. Various experimental programs were put in place. Some schools made homework “optional.” Some schools put aggregate limits on homework, which created a nightmarish chore for teachers who had to coordinate how much they assigned. Some school districts essentially played semantic games, now calling after-school assignments “goal work” rather than homework. Other schools banned homework on weekends or before vacation breaks; some took the interesting step of forbidding homework on the evening before major standardized exams, perhaps sending the message that it was okay for kids to be stressed and exhausted except when taking tests that might reflect on the performance of the school itself.
Nor was all this angst and uncertainty about homework restricted to U.S. schools. At a time when test results are compared globally, and cross-border college and even prep school applications are at an all-time high, the anxiety and contention were contagious. In Toronto, an edict banned homework for kindergartners and for older kids on school holidays. The controversy reached as far as the Philippines, where the education department opposed weekend assignments so kids could enjoy their childhoods.
Interestingly, students themselves seemed to disagree as virulently as their parents and teachers about the proper amounts and uses of homework. The New York Times education blog, “The Learning Network,” invited middle-schoolers and teens to weigh in on the subject.7 The preponderance of the posts, not surprisingly, were complaints about having too much still to do when the school day was over. Yet even allowing for some adolescent overstatement and melodrama, a few of the comments were disturbing if not heartbreaking. One ninth-grade girl wrote that “I came home at 4 pm and finished homework by 2 am. We couldn’t go to dinner because I had too much homework. I couldn’t talk to my Mom, Dad, or sister…. So yes. I think I have too much homework. And no. It doesn’t really help…. I just copied everything I saw without any of the actual information being absorbed just to be done with the work. Homework ruined my life.”
Distressingly, a recurring motif in the student comments was the subject of sleep deprivation. One seventh grader reported that she was routinely doing homework “until at least midnight. It’s just too much!… It’s just not healthy to get 6–7 hours of sleep each night.” (Children up to age twelve, according to the National Sleep Foundation, should have ten to eleven hours of sleep per night. Teenagers require around nine and a quarter.) Another middle-schooler complained that “the whole year, our LA [language arts] teacher has taught us how to get by on 6 hours of sleep [and to] drain our brains dry of creative [thinking].” It’s a little difficult to imagine what pedagogical purpose is served by having a generation of kids sleepwalk through their preteen and early teenage years.
Not all the student respondents were clamoring for less homework. Some were asking for better homework—challenging, meaningful assignments rather than the “busywork” that was often handed out. If the initiative shown by these students was heartening, it also pointed out a little-discussed deficiency in our traditional way of training teachers. According to a journal article called “Teacher Assessment of Homework,” by a researcher named Stephen Aloia, the rather surprising fact was that “most teachers do not take courses specifically on homework during teacher training.”8 Lesson plans, yes; techniques for guiding classroom activities, yes; homework, no. It’s as if homework is an afterthought, some strange gray area that is still the responsibility of students but not so much for teachers. According to Harris Cooper, author of The Battle over Homework, when it comes to crafting homework assignments, “most teachers are winging it.” No wonder homework is sometimes seen by students—and parents—as a tedious waste of time.
On the other hand, when homework is demanding and meaningful, some students, at least, appreciate the difference. One high school junior commented in the Times blog that “at my old school, I got a lot more homework. At my new prep school I get less. The difference: I spend much more time on my homework at my current school because it is harder. I feel as if I actually accomplish something with the harder homework.”
This sentiment was echoed by the same seventh grader who complained about being up until midnight every night. “We should be getting harder work, not more work!”
Given the eminent reasonableness of this suggestion, why do so many of our schools continue to focus on the quantity of homework rather than the quality? In part, the reason is simply that quantity, by definition, is easy to measure; quality is a far more subtle concept. Send kids home with four hours of homework, and you have at least a simulacrum of academic rigor.
But the more interesting question is why we have adopted this pile-it-on mentality in the first place. There is a swinging pendulum when it comes to attitudes about homework, and that pendulum has been in more or less constant motion for at least a hundred years. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the main purpose of homework was thought to be “training the mind” for the largely clerical, repetitive kinds of jobs that the trend toward urbanization and office work required; thus the emphasis was on memory drills, pattern recognition, rules of grammar—things that disciplined the mind but did not necessarily expand it. In the Progressive Era of the 1920s there was a reaction against this; rote memorization went out of fashion in favor of creative problem solving and self-expression. During the 1940s, homework was briefly out of vogue altogether, and this was probably a consequence of wartime. Young men were being sent off to die; let them enjoy their childhoods in the meantime.
Then in the 1950s came an event that, in the United States at least, created a crisis of national self-esteem and a panic regarding our educational methods and standards. That event was the launching of Sputnik. The Soviets had put a satellite into space. They had succeeded where the United States failed. They had won a contest in which each nation had invested a great deal of capital, both financial and psychological.
In terms of practical consequences, the “space race” turned out to be little more than a propaganda opportunity for whichever side seemed to be winning at a given moment. In the wake of the Sputnik embarrassment, however, one thing seemed absolutely clear: American kids were falling behind and needed to do more science homework.
In retrospect, this response—and certainly its virulence—was a little screwy; at the same time, it provides a vivid and chastening example of how adults tend to project their anxieties onto their children. Had Soviet kids launched Sputnik? Had American kids made U.S. rockets crash on the launchpad? The space race in those years was largely a contest between the scientists that each side had inherited from Germany and Hungary in the wake of World War II; what did kids have to do with it? Then too, the Soviet Union was dedicating a far larger share of its GDP to rocketry and the military. No matter. As was widely reported and endlessly repeated, Soviet kids, from the age of nine onward, were doing twice as much math and science homework as their American peers.9
Clearly, America’s national prestige if not the very survival of democracy depended on closing the homework gap. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, kids went home with a lot of crisp new biology and physics textbooks, and ground down a lot of Number 2 pencils working endless problems in introductory algebra, geometry, and especially trigonometry, which was useful for working out the trajectory of missiles.
Not surprisingly, the homework pendulum soon swung back. By the mid-1960s, homework was coming “to be seen as a symptom of excessive pressure on students…. Learning theories again questioned the value of homework and raised its possible detrimental consequences for mental health.”10
True to the pattern, however, homework rose again during the next U.S. crisis of confidence—the spasm of worry occasioned by the economic rise of Japan in the early 1980s. As with Sputnik, Japan’s success led to a flurry of sincere if sometimes misdirected national soul-searching. What were they doing right that we were doing wrong? Was it their consensual management style? Their relentless work ethic? Were they just plain smarter? Maybe it had to do with… homework!
Inconveniently, however, studies showed that Japanese students did not do more homework than their American counterparts; in fact they did less. This was puzzling, but it turned out to be only one of many seeming anomalies that kept cropping up in comparative international studies.
Among the nations whose students ranked near the top of international test results, some, like South Korea and Taiwan, did in fact assign a lot of homework. (This would also seem to be the case with China, though reliable statistics regarding that nation are hard to come by.) But other equally high-scoring countries—Denmark and Czechoslovakia (as it was then called), in addition to Japan—assigned very little. Then there were some very homework-heavy nations—Greece, Thailand, Iran—whose students tested poorly. France, whose students tested roughly as well as their U.S. counterparts, reportedly sent its middle-schoolers home with twice as much homework. And meanwhile, well before the turn of the new millennium, the all-time heavyweight champion of homework, the Soviet Union, had gone out of business altogether.
What is one to make of all this contradictory and chaotic data? Speaking as an engineer and recovering hedge fund analyst, I would argue that the only conclusion that can be logically drawn is this: The amount of homework assigned—if considered without reference to a raft of many other complicating factors, such as cultural differences, reporting variations, and, not least, widely varying dynamics within families—is a really lousy indicator of future performance, either individual or national.
Why then have parents, teachers, and policymakers continued to obsess about the amount of homework assigned at various grade levels? I believe there are two reasons. The first is simply that homework is an easy thing to argue about. Ten minutes? An hour? Reduced to a matter of duration, as opposed to quality or nuance, it’s easy to stake out a position. More deeply, however, people argue about how much homework there should be because homework itself seems to be a given—so deeply ingrained as part of our standard but archaic educational model that inquiries into the subject never really get down to bedrock.
So then, let’s circle back to our original question: How much homework is the right amount?
The answer is: No one knows. It all depends.
If that answer seems unsatisfying and deflating, it actually points the way to a very useful insight: The reason we can’t come up with a meaningful answer is that we’re asking the wrong question. We should be asking something far more basic. Not how much homework, but why homework in the first place?
Why are certain pedagogical tasks consigned to the classroom and the rigidly structured time increments of the school day, while others are pushed back into the looser hours of personal and family time?
Why do we assume that teachers’ skills are best deployed in broadcasting information to an entire class, then sending kids home to work out problems on their own, often without the chance to ask questions or receive help? Given the pressures of fulfilling set curricula and meeting various governmental guidelines, it is often impossible to review or discuss homework assignments; how valuable is homework that doesn’t get reviewed?
These are the kinds of questions we should be asking—questions that examine some of our longest-held educational habits and assumptions, and are therefore quite threatening to the educational establishment.
Let’s start with a line of inquiry so deceptively simple that it seems to be a tautology, but in fact reveals some of the contradictions and misconceptions regarding homework: Why was homework designed to be done at home?
Different people will give you different answers. Some believe it was to teach students responsibility, accountability, and time management. Others would say that it encouraged students to learn independently. I am actually a fan of these two assertions.
Another line of reasoning is that homework was meant to involve parents in the process of their children’s education. The ideal scenario—straight out of 1950s television, though the idea is actually older—was built around the idea of an intact nuclear family sitting around together in the evening. Susie and Johnny would have their schoolbooks open on the dining room table or the living room floor, while Dad, recently home from a nine-to-five job, smoked his pipe, read the paper, and was free to expound wisdom on almost any subject, and Mom, who’d been home most of the day, vacuuming and baking cookies, could chime in deferentially on questions that were not Dad’s strong points. Whether this idyll ever really existed is open to discussion; in any event, certainly no one who cares about education should overlook the benefit of involving families in the schooling of their kids. But there are far better ways—as we’ll see—to welcome parents into the learning process, especially given that the two-parent, one-earner household has by now become the exception rather than the rule.
For many if not most families, time together has become an increasingly rare and precious commodity. Moms work. Adults of both genders put in longer hours, endure longer commutes, travel on business. Kids confront an ever wider array of distractions and so-called social media whose net effect, ironically enough, is to make people less social, more head-down on their keyboards or keypads. Aside from that, as teaching modalities have evolved and more advanced subject matter has found its way into K-12 curricula, fewer parents are really equipped to help kids with their homework.
So then, is doing homework really the best use of time that families might otherwise spend just being together? Studies suggest otherwise. One large survey conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems was not time spent on homework, but rather the frequency and duration of family meals.11 If we think about it, this really shouldn’t be surprising. When families actually sit down and talk—when parents and children exchange ideas and truly show an interest in each other—kids absorb values, motivation, self-esteem; in short, they grow in exactly those attributes and attitudes that will make them enthusiastic and attentive learners. This is more important than mere homework.
There is another unintended and undesirable side effect of homework as it is usually assigned and generally understood. Traditional homework is a driver of inequality, and in this regard it runs directly counter both to the stated aims of public education and to our sense of fairness. Insofar as parents can help with homework, moms and dads who are themselves well educated obviously have a huge advantage. Even when the homework help is indirect, households with books and families with a tradition of educational success have an unfair edge. Wealthier kids are less likely to be burdened with after-school jobs or chores that single parents—or exhausted parents—can’t perform. In short, homework contributes to an unlevel playing field in which, educationally speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Given all these drawbacks, why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary?
The answer, I think, lies not in the perceived virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day. Why is there a shortage of learning during the hours specifically designed for it? Because the broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture—the technique that is at the very heart of our standard classroom model—turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.