Schools ditch homework in favor of reading, family time

When the school year begins Thursday at Marion County Public Schools in central Florida, the district’s 20,263 elementary school students will come to class sure of one thing: No matter what the school day brings, most nights they won’t have homework.

Instead, Superintendent Heidi Maier urges families to read with their kids every night for at least 20 minutes — any book, newspaper or magazine of their choice. The Bible works, as does Popular Mechanics, Harry Potter or Walter the Farting Dog.

Schools nationwide are revisit- ing policies on homework, especially for children. What was once a bedrock principle is under the microscope as research shows few benefits and as families complain about evenings spent stressing over problem sets.

Maier said her teachers can make exceptions for special projects such as book reports or science fairs, but otherwise, she discourages the practice of sending home worksheets and other materials intended to give kids more practice. Homework has long been “a catalyst for arguments at night with family members,” Maier said.

Recent research has mostly been focused on homework assigned to older students — and it shows mixed results.

A study in 2013, led by Indiana University researcher Adam Maltese, found a positive relationship between homework for high school sophomores and performance on standardized tests. But it found little correlation between more homework and better math and science grades. The researchers concluded that perhaps homework “is not being used as well as it could be.”

Maltese and his colleagues pointed out that if high school teachers most nights assign just one hour of homework, or roughly 150 nights during the school year, that amounts to about 180 class periods of 50 minutes apiece. Essentially, they noted, an hour of homework each night adds another class period to the school day. But it brings only a “very modest” boost in achievement.

Research on the benefits of homework for younger students is less definitive. Actually, Maier said, it’s basically non-existent.

In Vancouver, Wash., schools plan to eliminate homework for students through third grade.

In the Katy Independent School District in suburban Houston, schools will observe six “family nights” this year, during which teachers will be discouraged from assigning homework.

Some have pushed back. In the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District near Princeton, N.J., parents — many of them immigrants from China, India and Korea — complained in 2015 of teachers “dumbing down” their children’s education. “What is happening here reflects a na- tional anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” parent Mike Jia said.

Many schools have long subscribed to the “10-minute rule,” which suggests that schools assign no more than 10 minutes of homework per grade level — firstgraders bring home 10 minutes of work, while ninth-graders have 90 minutes.

That may work in middle school and high school, said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford University. But she said researchers who developed the idea didn’t test it out at the elementary school level.

The National PTA, which endorses the 10-minute rule, advises, “Homework that cannot be done without help is not good homework.”