Tom Loveless has seen the stories: Newsweek, 1998: "Homework Doesn't Help"; Time, 1999: "The Homework Ate My Family"; People, 2003: "Overbooked: Four Hours of Homework for a Third Grader? Exhausted Kids (and Parents) Fight Back".

But Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, was skeptical of the claim that U.S. kids today are sinking under an unmanageable load of homework. So he set out to find out how much time kids are spending on homework, whether homework time has increased, and how kids and parents perceive the amount of time spent on homework.

The results, released on Oct. 1, 2003, paint a reassuring picture for anyone concerned that U.S. kids are hitting the books too hard, with only about 5 percent devoting two hours or more per day to homework.

Loveless, a former 6th grade teacher, says the media reports pair lopsided reporting about research findings with true accounts of individual kids and families who really are struggling—but that those kids make up only a tiny percentage of all students. "They're outliers," said Loveless recently, at a press conference to release his report.

The Brookings report finds that in 1999, only about one-third of students at ages 13 and 17 had an hour or more of homework per night. In contrast, the percentage of children with less than an hour of daily homework stood at 66 percent for 13-year-olds and 65 percent for 17-year-olds.

Why does this amount of homework loom so large in some media accounts?

For one thing, Loveless argues, the same task will take different kids very different amounts of time. "When I was a sixth grade teacher, I surveyed my parents every year: how much homework, how long did it take. Every year the answers fell in the same range: from 15 minutes to three hours," says Loveless.

Then, there are certainly some teachers who do pile on the homework, and some eager students who sign up for too many Advanced Placement classes.

But Loveless finds other causes for concern in the data: teens, in particular, give homework a low priority when it comes to budgeting time; part-time jobs can seriously undermine academic performance if they take up more than 15 hours per week; and not much is known about how effective homework really is.

The Michigan Study
The Brookings report, "Homework: An Easy Load?" is based on a number of sources, including a study conducted by the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. While the Michigan study is often cited to support the "too much homework" hypothesis, Loveless found a different story in the numbers.

The Michigan researchers compared data on the activities of children ages 3-12 in 1981 and 1997. They found that for all ages, the amount of time devoted to studying increased from one hour and 53 minutes per week to two hours and 16 minutes. That works out to an additional 23 minutes per week, for a homework load of 19 minutes per day, seven days a week, or 27 minutes a day, five days a week.

That's certainly an increase. But the picture is complicated. For one thing, children aged 6 to 8 accounted for most of the change. Homework for this group more than doubled, from 52 minutes a week to two hours and 8 minutes. Most of that increase was caused by a big decline in the percentage of children in the early grades with no homework at all.

Attention to the big jump in early-years homework tended to obscure another fact in the Michigan data: for all other age groups, the percentage of children doing no homework at all increased between 1981 and 1997. For the oldest children in the study, ages 9 to 12, only 62 percent reported doing homework in 1997, compared to 82 percent in 1981.

Similar Findings from Another Source
For a closer look at how much homework students themselves say they are doing, and for information on students older than 12 (the ones for whom homework is generally considered to be most closely connected to achievement), Loveless turned to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. For 20 years, NAEP has been asking a nationally representative sample of students how much homework they had the day before taking the NAEP test.

In 1999, 30 percent of 9 year olds had done no homework the night before the test; 53 percent had spent less than an hour on homework, and 12 percent had spent between one and two hours. Only 5 percent reported over two hours of homework.

Among 17 year olds, 39 percent had done no homework the night before (26 percent reported not having any, another 13 percent reported not having done theirs); 26 percent had spent less than an hour; and 23 percent had spent between 1 and 2 hours. Twelve percent reported more than two hours of homework.

That, says Loveless, doesn't sound like a very heavy load for 17-year-olds. "I think we have to question whether or not they are being adequately prepared for the rigors of college," said Loveless.

Resources: For a different perspective on the homework issue, the American Youth Policy Forum [1]has a synopsis of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning [2], by Dr. Etta Kralovec with John Buell.

A Different Approach
Loveless argues that with research offering consistent evidence that most school children don't have too much homework, it's time to try to answer different questions about homework.

For instance, for older students, what are the costs and benefits of part-time paid work?
"What's unique about the United States is part-time paid work," said Loveless. "This is unheard of in many other countries, where the view is that for teens, school is their work."

Loveless noted that the percentage of working teens is fairly steady across economic groups. While low-income teens may be working to help their families get by, high-income teens are working to make car payments or purchases of clothes, electronics, etc.

Working up to about 15 hours per week has not been found to hurt academic performance, but kids who work more than that do suffer academically. Also, said Loveless, "Work is a primary competitor for kids' time. Not just with homework, but with reading for pleasure, and all kinds of activities that help kids develop intellectually."

Homework Resource on the Internet PTA homework guide [3]Checklists and other resources for parents that encourage good homework habits. The Family Education Network [4], more Web resources from the national Parent-Teacher Association [5] Helping Your Child with Homework [6] -- Advice and resources from the U.S. Department of Education)

Parents OK With Homework Loads
Another source cited in Loveless' study is a survey carried out by the Public Agenda Foundation in 2000. Parents were asked to evaluate their children's homework loads, and by a large margin reported that the amount of work their kids were bringing home was either just about right (64 percent) or not enough (25 percent). Ten percent felt there was too much homework.

Loveless suggested that for those children and parents who are overwhelmed by homework, there might be issues other than quantity at play. "I suspect that in some of these cases, kids are getting home after a long day at school and encountering new knowledge when they sit down to do their homework," said Loveless. "This puts parents in the position of being teachers. As a former sixth grade teacher, let me tell you, you don't want to do that, because they don't like it."

One positive role for homework that is often overlooked, noted Loveless, is as a vehicle of home-school communication. For many parents, he says, "Homework represents the best information they get about what schools are trying to teach their kids."

Talk Back

If you've got comments or questions about this story, we'd like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips [7].