A few days into the new semester this January, the LaSalle Parish school district in rural Louisiana announced a bold change: no more homework. For the district’s 2,500 students, from kindergarten through grade 12, schoolwork will no longer be required at home. Parents can request practice problems, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but that work won’t be mandatory or graded.
Homework had long been a major source of complaints from parents and students. “When there was a negative feeling about school, it usually stemmed from what kids are bringing home, the frustrations they feel completing that, and that parents and guardians feel trying to help them complete it,” Garrett said. He also cited concerns shared by many educators: much homework—especially in math—is repetitive, consumes too much time and hasn’t adapted to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
The response to the district’s announcement was largely positive. The post was one of the district’s most popular Facebook messages of the year, with many parents from neighboring areas asking how to adopt a similar approach. LaSalle’s move is unusual in its scope, but it tracks with a broader trend: teachers are assigning less homework than they used to.
Federal survey data show the amount of math homework assigned to fourth- and eighth-graders has been steadily declining over the past decade. Between 1996 and 2015, only about 4 to 6 percent of fourth-graders reported having no math homework the previous night; by 2024, that figure had risen to more than a quarter. There’s a similar decline among eighth-graders.
Why the shift? The research on homework is mixed and studying it is difficult. Different students take widely different amounts of time to complete the same assignment, so isolating time spent on homework from other factors is tricky. 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 improved in math even a year later. Other research finds little effect: a 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a Duke researcher found that more homework in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores, though small positive gains appeared in class grades. That study also linked more homework to worse attitudes about school in younger children.
Many educators emphasize what they can control: learning during the school day. Garrett said removing homework made homework policy equitable across his district and allowed schools to focus on instruction they can directly supervise.
Math complicates the issue because it’s a subject that typically requires practice. “The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don’t want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home,” said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher.
The rise of generative AI adds another wrinkle. A Pew Research Center survey found more than half of teens 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 survey reported that 40 percent of teachers said homework assignments had decreased over the past two years; among those teachers, 29 percent cited students’ use of AI as a reason homework had become less valuable.
Parents and advocates are divided. Ariel Taylor Smith of the National Parents Union said some teachers avoid homework because of equity concerns: not all families can support learning at home equally. But she also believes students who are far behind need additional practice and that some homework without parental help can be important. Smith said she and her mother now create extra practice for her fourth-grader—reading exercises and math flash cards—because “kids need more practice.”
Other families find homework counterproductive. Jim Malliard, whose children in Franklin, Pa., experienced school-based trauma and bullying, said homework became a nightly battle that worsened stress. Although teachers told the family homework should take 15 minutes, it would often stretch to an hour. Malliard eventually enrolled his children in a virtual charter school.
Researchers and experts have tried to identify appropriate homework amounts. A common guideline is 10 minutes per night per grade level, but that’s hard to enforce because student needs vary. A 2014 Stanford survey of more than 4,300 students in high-performing California high schools concluded that the benefits of homework plateau after about two hours a night; more than that was linked to stress and poor sleep.
Joyce Epstein, who studies homework at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education, notes that much research focuses on time rather than the quality or purpose of assignments. She suggests designing homework with a clear, limited purpose—shorter practice that targets mastery rather than long worksheets. “The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework,” Epstein said.
Some districts are following that advice. Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, said her district assigns less homework but focuses on purposeful tasks: a reading assignment, a few math problems and a short writing sample rather than long “drill and kill” sheets. In LaSalle Parish, Garrett has told math teachers they can slow the pace of instruction and give students time during the school day to practice skills, even if that means covering less content over the year. “We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed,” he said. “We’ll see. This might be something that helps us in the long run.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Contact writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].