Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. Read: My daughter’s homework is killing me They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work-and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.īut not without pushback. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s.

But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. America has long had a fickle relationship with homework.

Is there any homework