In January the LaSalle Parish school district in rural Louisiana announced a major change: for its roughly 2,500 students from kindergarten through 12th grade, assigned homework will no longer be required or graded. Parents can request optional practice problems, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but completing work at home will be voluntary.
The move grew out of persistent complaints from families and students. Garrett said negative feelings about school often came from the frustrations of homework and the burden on parents trying to help. He also pointed to concerns shared by many educators: some assignments—especially repetitive math worksheets—take excessive time, offer limited value, and haven’t adjusted to the reality of generative artificial intelligence.
Reaction on social media was largely positive, and neighbors asked how to adopt a similar policy. LaSalle’s decision is unusual in its breadth, but it aligns with a broader trend: American teachers are assigning less homework than in past decades.
Federal survey data show a steady decline in math homework for fourth- and eighth-graders. Between 1996 and 2015, only about 4 to 6 percent of fourth-graders reported having no math homework the previous night; by 2024 that share exceeded a quarter. Eighth-graders show a similar decline.
Why the shift? Research on homework yields mixed results and is difficult to interpret because students vary widely in how long they take to finish the same assignment. Some studies find benefits: a 2021 longitudinal study of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased time on math homework showed improvements that lasted up to a year. Other research shows little impact: a 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a Duke researcher found no significant effect of more homework in elementary grades on standardized test scores; it found only small gains in class grades and linked increased homework to worse attitudes toward school among younger children.
Many educators say the best lever is what happens during the school day. Garrett argued that eliminating mandatory homework makes the district’s expectations more equitable and lets teachers focus on instruction they can supervise. Math complicates the debate because it typically requires practice. As one education researcher noted, the argument for homework often rests on the need for procedural practice, which teachers sometimes prefer to send home rather than use limited classroom time for repetition.
The rise of chatbots and other AI tools has added another wrinkle. A Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of teens have used chatbots to help with schoolwork and about one in 10 said they used virtual assistants to do all or most of it. An EdWeek Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of teachers said homework assignments had decreased over the prior two years; nearly a third of those teachers cited students’ use of AI as a reason homework’s value has diminished.
Parents and advocates are split. Ariel Taylor Smith of the National Parents Union said some teachers reduce homework because of equity worries—families differ in their ability to support learning at home—but she also believes that students who are far behind need extra practice that doesn’t rely on parental help. Smith described creating additional reading and math practice for her own fourth-grader to ensure steady skill development.
Other families say homework does more harm than good. Jim Malliard of Franklin, Pa., said homework became a nightly battle after his children experienced school-based trauma and bullying. Assignments that were supposed to take 15 minutes sometimes stretched to an hour, compounding stress; he ultimately enrolled his children in a virtual charter school.
Researchers have proposed rules of thumb for homework duration—commonly 10 minutes per grade level per night—but those guidelines are hard to apply uniformly because students’ needs vary. A 2014 Stanford survey of more than 4,300 students at high-performing California high schools found that academic benefits plateau after about two hours of homework nightly; more than that was associated with increased stress and poorer sleep.
Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins’s School of Education cautions that much of the research measures time spent rather than the quality or purpose of assignments. She recommends designing homework with a clear, limited aim: brief, targeted practice that builds mastery rather than long, repetitive worksheets. “The question isn’t whether there should be more homework, but whether homework should be better,” she says.
Some districts are acting on that idea. In Colorado, Harrison School District 2 assigns less homework but focuses on purposeful tasks—a short reading, a few math problems, and a brief writing sample—instead of lengthy drills. In LaSalle Parish, Garrett has told math teachers they may slow the pace of instruction and give students time during the school day to practice skills, even if that means covering fewer topics in a year. He hopes that deeper in-class practice will be more beneficial than racing through the curriculum.
LaSalle’s policy is a bold experiment, but it reflects broader questions districts, teachers and families are asking about equity, quality, student well-being and the role of homework in an era of widespread AI tools. This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering innovation and inequality in education.