Homework

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Tom Loveless: There have been a number of press accounts saying that kids are overwhelmed with homework. We wanted to analyze the evidence on this question. We [looked at] all of the surveys done on homework in the past 20 years that have national representative samples and have met high scientific standards ... at the elementary and the high-school level.

What did you find?
Two things: The homework burden is not very onerous, and it hasn’t changed very much over the last two decades. UCLA conducts a survey of four-year degree-granting institutions in which they ask [college freshmen]: “In your final year of high school, how much homework did you have?” They’ve asked every year since 1987. Last year, the amount of homework kids had when they were seniors in high school hit a record low—66 percent said they had five hours or less of homework per week. The troubling thing is that this sample [does not include] high-school dropouts, kids who go directly from high school into the work force, kids who go directly into the military and kids who go to community colleges. So these are our top students, and they are saying they did not have very much homework when they were seniors in high school.







What about younger kids?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress started asking homework questions in 1980. With 9-year-old students, they began asking about homework in 1984. They ask kids, “How much homework did you have yesterday?” It’s a very specific question. At age 9, 83 percent of kids said they had an hour or less of homework. The homework horror stories usually feature third or fourth graders with three or four hours of homework per night. How typical is that kind of child? In the NAEP survey, at age 9, the percentage of kids who had more than two hours of homework per night—so a lighter load than is being portrayed in these stories, although t...