Less homework gives US students a break

Los Angeles: Vanessa Perez was a homework scofflaw. The Marshall High School senior didn't finish all of it — largely because she worked 24 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop. Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn't have his own room and his mother babysits young children at night.

"They're always there and they're always loud," he said, explaining his challenges with homework. The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided to give students like these a break.

A new policy decrees that homework can count for only 10 per cent of a student's grade. Critics — mostly teachers — worry that the policy will encourage students to slack off assigned work and even reward those who already disregard assignments. And they say it could penalise hard-working students who receive higher marks for effort.

National trend

Some educators also object to a one-size-fits-all mandate that they said could hamstring teaching or homogenise it. They say, too, that students who do their homework perform significantly better than those who don't — a view supported by research.

But Los Angeles Unified is pressing forward, joining a growing list of school districts across the country that are taking on homework — including Fontana, California, and Pleasanton, New Jersey. In many districts, limits are being placed on the amount of homework so students can spend more time with their families or pursue extracurricular activities such as sports or hobbies.

The competition to get into top colleges has left students anxious and exhausted, with little free time, parents complain. In Davis, California, a policy that took effect this year specifies homework maximums, with some exceptions for advanced courses.

And it prohibits assigning homework over weekends and holidays while also addressing the quality of the assignments. That effort, and others, aligns with national trends and widely accepted research. A good thumbnail is ten minutes per day multiplied by the grade of the student, said Duke University professor Harris Cooper.

So a sixth-grader should be able to handle 60 minutes. Cooper said homework patterns have followed 30-year cycles: the Soviets' launch of Sputnik in 1957, for example, also launched a crusade in the US to increase homework.

The trend is now swinging against more-is-better. The Los Angeles approach is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district's mostly low-income, minority population.

The homework change accompanies another policy being tested: More than three dozen campuses are experimenting with boosting a student's grade for improved performance on state standardised tests.