“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.

Homework for high schoolers