why we should have longer school days and no homework

10 Longer School Days Pros and Cons

In the United States, many children find themselves falling behind on their benchmarks that are needed for basic scholastic achievement. Once a child falls behind their grade level, it can be difficult for them to catch back up. This is especially true for difficult subjects, such as mathematics or reading.

One of the solutions to this issue is to extend the length of the school day. This extension may be as little as 30 minutes, but some districts have implemented up to 2 additional hours of schooling every day.

The primary benefit of a longer school day is that it provides students with more time for learning. Teachers can provide more 1-on-1 time with each student in their classroom, allowing for specific weaknesses to be personally addressed. Trouble areas for each student can have education plans implemented to correct them, even if an IEP isn’t mandated for that student. Even intensive tutoring could be implemented.

As for the disadvantage of a longer school day, quantity doesn’t necessarily equate to quality. The fact that students are falling behind on their scholastic benchmarks is evidence that the current teaching structure, curriculum, and/or environment isn’t working for that student. Instead of making a student endure an ineffective system for a longer period each day, a better solution would be to improve the quality contacts for those individual students.

Here are some additional pros and cons of a longer school day to consider and discuss as well.

What Are the Pros of a Longer School Day?

1. It matches the class schedule to a parent’s work schedule. In many US school districts, the first class begins 1-2 hours after most parents need to be at work. The final class ends 1-2 hours before the work day ends for most parents. By extending the length of the school day, parents can potentially save some money on child care because their schedules will better match. If nothing else, household transportation costs can be reduced by synching up the schedules.

2. It provides additional learning time for other subjects. In an era when school districts face tight budgets and limited resources, the creative subjects tend to be the first ones to go. Subjects like music, art, and physical education tend to be cut because they aren’t tested in a standardized way. By having longer school days, it would be possible to add these subjects back into local curriculums so that students can benefit from a well-rounded education.

3. It could reduce the amount of homework sent home. Many teachers send homework with their students at the end of the day or the week as a way to supplement the learning process. By extending the length of a school day, it would make it possible to reduce or eliminate the amount of homework that is sent to students. That lessens the burden on parents to be teachers at home, which can be difficult in an era when Common Core mathematics has proven to be difficult to understand.

4. Optional courses or recreational activities could be part of the school day. Although a longer school day means less free time, certain components of school could be included as part of the day so that the loss is tempered. Sports practices could be part of the final period of the day. Certain recreational activities, such as swimming, could be included as part of the curriculum. By surveying what students want to learn outside of school, a district can create a comprehensive plan that still encourages passions to be pursued while educational opportunities are extended.

5. It could create longer family weekends. Many employers offer their workers the option to work four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days, creating a three-day weekend for that employee. Schools which extend the length of their contact time could do the same thing. That means the potential of creating longer family weekends, when schedules can be synced up, and that increases parent-child contact time.

What Are the Cons of a Longer School Day?

1. It limits student activities outside of school. If children are spending more time in a classroom, then that means they’re spending less free time outside of it. A longer school day means less time for students to get involved in programs like 4-H, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, or organized sports. Instead of pursuing something they are passionate about, like gymnastics or marital arts, students will be sitting at a table or desk, trying to retain information from textbooks while being told what they need to learn instead of learning what they’re passionate about.

2. It results in fatigue. Children who become tired are less likely to retain information provided to them. Fatigue in children can also create mood instabilities or enhance the symptoms of an attention deficit disorder diagnosis. It is not unusual for students to already experience this issue after lunch, so extending the school day would make it difficult for children to mentally prepare themselves for additional learning.

3. Scores don’t rise with longer school days. From data compiled in 2009 by the Seattle PI, students in the United States are already spending longer days in school compared to other nations. Compared to Singapore, US students are spending more than 200 additional hours in school each year. Even with these additional contact hours in place, student scores in the US have failed to rise to the levels seen in other nations.

4. It forces teachers to work longer hours too. Teachers are already putting in a full day of work. Most teachers arrive an hour before school starts and leave 1-2 hours after school ends. Many teachers grade papers at home and perform other duties outside of the “normal” work day. Extending their contact time with students will extend their day and could make many of them be less effective at what they do.

5. More funding is required to make longer hours happen. More contact hours for teachers means a higher salary needs to be paid. Another solution would be to hire additional teachers, but that would mean an added labor cost as well. That means higher property taxes and levies. It means private schools would raise their tuition rates. Considering the additional time doesn’t seem to improve scores, a focus on quality would be a better solution – especially if the funding requirements are difficult to meet.

The pros and cons of a longer school day will always be a controversial debate. More contact time can mean greater learning opportunities, but it could also create discipline issues for tired children without seeing any gains in scores. By focusing on quality first, then quantity, US children may have a better chance to reach their benchmarks and strive for future success.

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The Promise and Challenges of Extending Learning Time

With millions of students struggling academically and the U.S. Department of Education pushing the deadline for spending some federal pandemic-recovery funding into 2026, there’s both a need and an opportunity for local education leaders to increase learning time.

More time gives students more opportunities to learn and to develop bonds with teachers and peers, allows teachers more flexibility to meet individual students where they are, and can accelerate learning.

School reformers have supported the strategy for years. The landmark 1983 federal reform manifesto A Nation at Risk urged state and local policymakers to replace the then-traditional 6-hour school day and still-common 180-day school year with 7-hour days and school years as long as 220 days. President George H.W. Bush established a National Education Commission on Time and Learning in the 1990s that endorsed more learning time. And President Obama promoted the strategy a decade and a half later.

But increasing the time students spend learning presents significant challenges for educators and education policymakers. Which strategies produce the best results? Which are the most politically palatable? The most cost-effective? This report addresses these and other key questions.

Extended Learning Time Models

There are several ways education policymakers can increase learning time. The additional time can be voluntary or mandatory, occurring after school, during the summer, during school breaks or weekends. In some cases, it can involve changes to academic calendars.

Extended school year

Extended school year programs expand the number of days that students are in school beyond the 180 days typically mandated by states for public schools in the U.S. (Requirements range from 160 school days a year in Colorado to 186 days in Kansas).

There are two primary strategies for adding instructional days—lengthening the school year or adding “intersessions” during vacation breaks.

While the typical 180-day school year continues from August to June, extended-year programs often run for 200 or more days and students start the school year earlier or end the year later than their peers, resulting in a shorter summer break. This is not the same as year-round schooling, which is often used to address overcrowding. Under that model, students typically attend school for 180 days, but schools are open year-round and some students attend during the summer.

Massachusetts launched an Expanded Learning Time Initiative in 2005, establishing a    competitive grant program that resulted in participating schools across the state redesigning their school calendars to increase instructional time by at least 300 hours, a roughly 30 percent increase.

Many charter schools have embraced extended school calendars, in some cases providing up to 50 percent more learning time than traditional public schools. The KIPP charter school network, for example, serving 120,000 students in 275 schools nationwide, uses both longer school days and school years. Although specific schedules vary in KIPP schools, extended time was integrated into the KIPP model, with a typical day now spanning from 7:30 am to 4 pm or even later, and additional instruction offered on Saturdays and during the summer.

More recently, two schools in the Aldine Independent School District near Houston, Texas, extended their school years to 210 days during the 2021-22 school year to help students rebound from school closings during the early days of the pandemic. The experiment’s positive impact on student achievement prompted the district to add two more schools to the initiative in 2022-23.

Richmond Public Schools in Virginia launched a pilot program that extends the 2023-24 calendar to 200 days in two elementary schools to help address learning loss during the pandemic. Students at the schools returned at the end of July, a month ahead of Richmond’s other schools.

In contrast, the intersession model adds blocks of days throughout the school year when students can receive additional academic support, including during winter or spring breaks, or at the beginning or end of the school year. Some school districts mandate the sessions for struggling students; others offer them to every student.

The Dallas Independent School District introduced intersessions as part of a $100 million extended-school-year initiative starting in fall 2021. Forty-one schools added five voluntary intersessions of a week each to their school calendars, during which schools invited up to half of their students who could benefit most to participate in targeted enrichment and remediation. Only five schools chose the calendar that would extend the school year for all students.

The Los Angeles Unified School District took a similar, though less intensive approach in 2022-23, adding four “acceleration days” to provide students targeted academic support. The district added two voluntary days over both winter and spring breaks. Many elementary students received small group or one-on-one support focused on literacy and math, while middle and high school students often received tutoring or college and career advice. About 40,000 students participated in the winter session and 30,000 in the spring session; 80 percent of the participants were considered high-need students. The school district is continuing the acceleration days this school year.

Extended school day

Extending the school day typically entails adding 30 minutes to an hour to the traditional 6-to-7-hour schedule, providing students an extra 150 to 300 minutes of instruction per week, or an extra 14 to 28 days over the course of a 180-day school year, based on a 6.5-hour school day.

The extra time allows school districts to create a supplemental period for targeted support, such as tutoring or small-group study sessions. Atlanta Public Schools , for example, during the 2021-22 school year added 30 minutes to the elementary school day for a dedicated intervention block for small-group tutoring to address learning loss.

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools was the first large urban district to expand the length of its school day for all its schools, moving from a 5.75-hour day—well below the national average—to a 7-hour day for elementary students and a 7.5-hour day for high schools. Opposition to extending the school day without additional teacher compensation was a factor that led to a 2012 Chicago teacher strike.

Out-of-school time

Out-of-school programs, also called expanded learning opportunities, are school-based or community-based opportunities for additional learning and enrichment outside of regular school hours and the standard school curriculum. This includes afterschool and summer-learning programs, as well as tutoring, mentoring, or other enrichment activities.

Because these programs do not require calendar changes and are often optional opportunities, they are more prevalent than extended-day or extended-year initiatives. FutureEd analyzed the way 5,000 school districts educating 74 percent of the nation’s students planned to use their federal pandemic-response funding and found that more than 3,000 of the districts expected to provide after-school, extended-day, or summer programs.

Mobile County School District in Alabama, for example, has dedicated a significant portion of its federal pandemic funding to bolster afterschool and summer programs across its 92 schools. The afterschool program includes homework help and academic support, as well as art, music, STEM, and other enrichment. The four-week summer program includes instruction in math, science, English language arts, and reading, with specialized support for English language learners.

Research generally concludes that increased learning time improves student outcomes if educators use the additional time effectively.

A 2010 review by the American Education Research Association of 15 research studies between 1985 and 2009 found that extended school time can be effective, particularly for students of color and low-socioeconomic or low-achieving students—groups who typically have fewer opportunities for out-of-school learning and are most susceptible to summer learning loss. The researchers note that the quality of instruction, as well as the amount of time added, is a critical factor in seeing achievement gains.

Another review of 27 studies, conducted in 2012 by Child Trends, found mostly favorable relationships between extended-day programs and academic outcomes.

More recently, a 2017 study of a Boston Public Schools’ expanded-learning-time initiative that involved 31 schools adding at least 30 minutes of additional instruction a day between 2015 and 2017 found positive effects on students’ language and mathematics achievement. The results were especially strong in math and for Black and Hispanic students.

Similarly, researchers at the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research in 2018 found significant positive effects on reading achievement under a Florida program requiring an hour of supplemental reading instruction daily through an extended- day program in the state’s 300 elementary schools with the lowest reading results.

A 2020 study by Beth E. Schueler from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education of “vacation academies” or “acceleration academies” implemented in low-performing Massachusetts middle schools found that attendance in the program increased the likelihood of students achieving math proficiency by 10 percentage points on state exams. Achievement in English and end-of-course grades also improved.

And a 2022 research review by Matthew Kraft and Sarah Novicoff found that extending students’ time in class could increase student achievement, if the increased time was used well.  “When used ineffectively, extended learning time will produce little benefits for students and can even be counterproductive if this additional time has detracted from more enriching activities,” the researchers cautioned. The study also found that districts that moved to four-day school weeks—a recent trend particularly for small or rural areas aiming to address staffing and funding challenges—yielded mostly negative results. Additionally, the researchers noted that the evidence for extending the school year rather than the school day appeared to be strongest.

Studies have shown that afterschool enrichment and other academic-oriented programs can help improve test scores, decrease the likelihood of course failure, and increase class attendance and graduation rates. Research indicates that such programs are most effective when they provide between 44 and 210 hours of instruction annually for reading and between 46 and 100 hours for math.

Summer programs, too, have improved academic outcomes, provided they give students sufficient high-quality academic instruction. A 2018 RAND study found that students who received at least 25 hours of math instruction and 34 hours of reading instruction during voluntary, district-run summer programs performed better on subsequent state tests than those who did not attend.

Extending learning time comes with significant challenges that educators and policymakers must navigate carefully.

Quality of extra time . Additional instructional time is likely to yield stronger results when it’s used to provide one-on-one or targeted small-group support, and when it’s closely aligned to a school’s curriculum and delivered by qualified educators.

A 2012 study by Abt Associates of Massachusetts’ Expanded Learning Time Initiative found that some schools saw substantial increases in the number of students scoring proficient, whereas others saw little change or even decreases after providing students in 26 schools with 300 additional hours annually. Importantly, the researchers didn’t measure the quality of instruction that students in the schools received.

Amount of extra time . Extending instructional time involves adding enough but not too much extra time. Small additions to the school day or school year might not make a difference, whereas too much could lead to student and teacher burnout. The 2012 study of the Massachusetts extended-time initiative found that significantly fewer students in the schools that adopted expanded learning times looked forward to and enjoyed their time in school and significantly more teachers reported fatigue.

Effective summer programs, the 2018 RAND study found, tend to run for five to six weeks and provide at least three hours of daily academic instruction. Afterschool programs are most effective when they provide between 44 to 210 hours for reading and 46 to 100 of additional instructional time for math, according to a report by the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Child Development. When in a school calendar time is added can also make a difference in student engagement; students, for example, are often less motivated to stay in school into the summer after their peers in other schools have started summer vacations.

Student eligibility . Key questions for policymakers are whether to make extended time mandatory or voluntary and whether to open the programs to every student or target them to those most in need of academic support. Targeted programs are likely to be less costly since they serve fewer students. And focusing on the neediest students allows schools to narrow the programs’ instructional focus, rather than having to address the needs of students with a wide range of learning levels. School districts also need to ensure that students have the transportation they need to participate in the programs and that they attend.

Staffing . Extending school hours for students also extends the working hours for teachers and staff. Buy-in from teachers and staff, as a result, is a crucial ingredient of expanding learning time successfully. Efforts to extend the day and year are often met with significant pushback from teachers and their unions.

In Richmond, Virginia, Superintendent Jason Kamras proposed an ambitious plan to extend the school year for one-third of the district’s students, which the Richmond teacher union and several school board members rejected. In response, Kamras developed a voluntary pilot program, RPS200. Once interested schools’ applications received initial approval, they had to demonstrate support from a majority of parents and teachers, after which they were fully approved by the school board. Any teacher assigned to a school that ultimately adopted the RPS200 calendar was guaranteed placement at another school if they chose to transfer.

Arguing against a longer school year, Melvin Hostman, a member of the executive board of the Richmond teachers’ union, emphasized that teachers have struggled with low morale since returning to in-person teaching and insisted there were more pressing challenges, including late-arriving school buses, student absenteeism, and even a lack of toilet paper in schools, he told The New Yorker .

In Los Angeles, the United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing district teachers, blocked Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s initial proposal to embed additional instructional days across the school year. In response, Carvalho clarified that teachers who agreed to work the additional days would be paid their usual daily rate and moved the days to the start of winter and spring breaks.

A 2013 report from the National Center on Time and Learning analyzed the costs associated with extended time at five different types of public schools in different parts of the country and found that teachers at the schools were paid an increased rate for additional hours worked under terms negotiated with local teacher unions.

External stakeholders . In addition to teachers and other school employees, a range of external interest groups often opposed mandatory extensions of the school day and school year, including the tourist industry and summer camp associations, whose members benefit from longer summer breaks.

But parents are the most important constituency likely to oppose extended time, particularly since the pandemic. A 2021 national survey by University of Southern California researchers found that only 23 percent of parents supported a longer school year and 19 percent supported longer school days to respond to pandemic learning loss. This reluctance could reflect the negative experiences many families had with school during the pandemic. It could also signal the disconnect between many parents’ positive perception of their children’s academic performance and students’ actual achievement levels.

In Richmond, Virginia, parents voiced opposition to Superintendent Kamras’ initial proposal, emphasizing that students needed a break after the stressors of the pandemic. And in Chicago, where longer days were introduced well before the pandemic, parents voiced concerns about adding additional time when the current system was already dysfunctional.

Communicating the educational and child-care benefits of longer school days and school years is critical to winning the support of parents and overcoming the opposition of the tourist industry and other outside political actors.

Cost . The 2013 National Center on Time and Learning report found that the cost of expanding learning time ranged from $290 per student for an additional 132 hours of instruction annually (equivalent to 20 days) to $1,695 per student for an additional 540 hours (equivalent to 83 days), a figure that seems conservative, given that annual per-pupil spending averages $13,200 nationally and 83 days constitutes nearly half a typical school year. The report found that transportation costs made up roughly 2 to 3 percent of the added costs.

The Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time initiative initially provided $1,300 per pupil to schools who received the grant (the state later added an $800 option for schools to apply for). A review of the program found that more than 70 percent of the $1,300 went toward instructional staff salaries, followed by 10 percent for support staff. Administrators, contractual services, supplies, and fringe benefits made up almost all the remaining 20 percent.

Los Angeles Unified’s acceleration days cost $611 per student per day for the first two days added, which is significantly higher than the state’s per-pupil funding of $132 per day for the entire 180-day school year—a high price tag considering that less than 10 percent of the district’s students actually showed up.

In Richmond, teachers in the two schools with extended school years receive $10,000 bonuses and principals receive $15,000 bonuses. Additionally, teachers moved to 11-month contracts. Richmond school officials have estimated the personnel costs for the extended year at the two schools to be $2.7 million , an almost 25 percent increase in the total budget for the two schools.

Teachers and other staff are often paid at higher-than-normal rates as a condition of working longer hours under local collective bargaining contracts, something that’s typically not the case at charter schools with longer school years.

Many school districts are currently using federal pandemic-response funds to cover the cost of extended learning time. Once the emergency money runs out, they will have to find alternative funds. Other potential federal funding sources include the U.S. Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Center grants, which can be used to fund afterschool and summer learning activities.

Ultimately, meeting students’ academic needs post-pandemic demands schools provide as much high-quality instruction as possible. Expanding the school day, the school year and after-school and summer programs are all effective strategies to reach that goal, research suggests. But all have unique implementation challenges, and policymakers need to select the options that best suit their local political and policy landscapes. As always, they must then implement those options effectively if they hope to maximize the benefits of increasing instructional time.

Research Associate Kristian Thymianos contributed to this explainer.

Published: November 2, 2023

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4-Day School Weeks: New Research Examines the Benefits and Drawbacks

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The move from a five-day school week to a four-day week with extended days has been one of the fastest-increasing—and least-studied—phenomena shaping district operations.

It boomed after the Great Recession, especially in small, far-flung districts looking to try to save cash and attract teachers. Now, the widest-reaching analysis of the practice to date paints a nuanced picture of the effects of the switch.

The four-day week is enormously popular among parents and students, the new research finds. It typically saves districts a small—but not intangible—amount of cash. And on their day out of school, students are typically working, doing errands, or spending time with family, not running wild.

The tradeoff for those benefits, though, shows in learning. Several years after adopting a four-day schedule, the researchers found, those districts saw slower rates of student progress than similarly situated districts that retained a five-day schedule.

In a sense, the findings underscore the mix of factors beyond test scores that district leaders and communities weigh when making decisions and point towards some of the more-general tensions at the heart of K-12 schooling.

Is the point of schooling just to raise achievement? Are there other civic benefits that accrue from these arrangements, like helping to instill in students a sense of responsibility through jobs or other duties? Just how should these competing interests be weighed?

“When I think about ed[ucation] policy debates, I often assume that achievement will be the king of all the outcomes. And it was pretty clear that when we talked to people that they did have this ‘whole-child’ model guiding their thinking,” said Rebecca Kilburn, one of a half-dozen researchers who conducted the study for the RAND Corp., a research and analysis group. “And they really did talk about everything from sleep, to stress, to spending more time with their families.”

A broad picture from four-day districts

The study, released Oct. 7, was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A team of researchers used three main methods to study the complex phenomenon.

More than 1,600 U.S. school districts have adopted the model as of 2019-20. In some states, it represents a significant, widespread restructuring of district operations, including 60 percent of Colorado’s districts and around 40 percent of New Mexico’s and Oregon’s.

The researchers interviewed more than 400 parents, teachers, administrators, and students in three states with large numbers of districts using the four-day model: Idaho, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. They also administered thousands of surveys to secondary students and to the parents of elementary students in 36 districts across those states and in three others—half of them using the four-day schedule and half using a traditional schedule—and collected data on their school schedules.

Finally, they analyzed nearly a decade’s worth of student test scores across four- and five-day districts in six different states, looking for patterns in how students performed.

Among some of the most important findings:

• When timing was added up, districts in the sample using the four-day schedule had longer days by about 50 minutes, but over the course of the year averaged 58 fewer hours of school.
• Students in the four-day weeks spent significantly more time on school sports and on chores than did those in five-day weeks. Four-day secondary students also spent more time on homework, at jobs, at school activities, and on hobbies than their counterparts.
• Most students in the four-day districts—80 percent of high school students and 90 percent of elementary students—spent their “off day” at home.
• The four-day week did not appear to affect student-absenteeism rates or result in more food insecurity for students.
• It did seem to change some sleep patterns, with four-day elementary students reporting that they got more sleep and four-day secondary students saying that they felt much less tired than their counterparts in five-day systems.
• Parents and students, given the choice, overwhelmingly said they favored the four-day model, with 69 percent of the former and 85 percent of the latter preferring it over five-day schedules.

That final finding came as a bit of a surprise, said Kilburn, who is now a research professor at the Centers for Disease Control Prevention Research Center at the University of New Mexico.

“In the policy debates, you often hear people saying, ‘We shouldn’t do it because parents won’t like it.’ Actually, in the district where people chose to switch, people really like it a lot, and it might be really tough to switch back once you do it,” she said.

The focus group interviews, in the meantime, fleshed out just why district leaders were willing to make the shift. They also provided context for other research showing that districts usually save below 3 percent of their costs , mainly in transportation, operations, and support-staff salaries, when moving to a shorter week.

Focus groups flesh out a complex picture

Some scholars have criticized the approach on the grounds that it saves such seemingly small amounts of money. But superintendents noted in interviews that even when the savings amounted to just a percentage or two, that was enough to hire an additional reading coach or fund some other program—no small feat in a time of fixed budgets and rising costs.

Similarly, in one district, the four-day week aligned well to work shifts in the town’s larger employer. In another district with a high proportion of Native American students, Kilburn recalled, the schedule allowed students and families to participate in tribal feasts or festivals that traditionally span several days.

“One of them said, ‘This is really great because we don’t have half our student body gone on feast days, and we don’t have students having to choose between coming to school and engaging in their traditional practices,’” she noted.

One eyebrow-raising finding could be the increased amount of chores four-day students appeared to engage in. But that category also included things like errands and medical appointments. In rural locations, where doctors’ offices, retail centers, orthodontists, and so forth can be several hours’ drive away, the four-day week gave them the opportunity to handle those duties without missing a day of school, the researchers found.

On the other hand, Kilburn noted, interviewees also said that while the four-day week was a good fit for their communities, they did not necessarily think it was workable in other locations with different circumstances.

What happens to student learning in four-day districts?

The study’s marquee finding will probably be what it says about student learning. To answer that tricky question, the researchers coupled student test-score growth data from a Stanford University project with federal data to adjust for district poverty and other factors. Then they compared similarly situated four- and five-day districts across those time periods.

The researchers found that there was no significant difference between four- and five-day districts when looking at absolute measures of student proficiency. But looking at growth over time shifted that picture.

Around three years after the switch, student growth in the four-day districts began to fall short compared to that in similarly situated five-day districts. The finding grew more pronounced with time and the slowdown in achievement was more dramatic in math than in reading. In all, the declines were on the order of between 0.05 to 0.15 of a standard deviation lower after three years, and around 0.2 of a standard deviation after eight years.

Effect sizes are hard to interpret in K-12 education but at least one research paper describes that as a medium to large effect —one that’s certainly larger than many other K-12 interventions. (The findings also echo those of a separate study on the effects of the policy in Oregon .)

In all, the study’s findings don’t align well with the rhetoric about the four-day week from either proponents or detractors.

The approach doesn’t appear to disadvantage working parents where it’s been tried or lead to worse social outcomes for students. On the other hand, it also doesn’t seem to yield huge cost savings, and with time seemed to slow student learning.

Even so, there are still unanswered questions about the the four-day week, the researchers concluded.

One thing that the study couldn’t pinpoint was just how the four-day week, sometimes characterized as a perk for educators, might affect teacher recruitment and retention. It can take years for such changes to alter the composition of the teacher workforce via who is attracted to teaching, who applies to open jobs, and how the change affects existing teachers’ retirement decisions.

Second, it remains unclear just why the four-day week affects learning.

The decrease in actual learning time could be the culprit, since time in school is connected to learning outcomes, but that hypothesis needs to be tested empirically.

A version of this article appeared in the October 27, 2021 edition of Education Week as 4-Day School Weeks: New Research Examines the Benefits and Drawbacks

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• August 2, 2023

Shorter School Days: Everything You Need to Know

There are many debatable subjects when it comes to education. Yet, one of the most controversial is whether shorter school days benefit kids. Why should school be shorter? How can it influence academic results? What are the downsides in the long run? These are only a few questions that arise when discussing the shortened day at school.

Still, the truth is that we have many more answers than we might think. There is extensive research on a subject done globally. So, do shorter school days affect students’ performance negatively? Today, we’ll summarize the available data to give a complete perspective on how fewer school hours can influence kids, parents, and teachers.

##How Do Shorter School Days Influence Academic Results Globally?

According to the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), kids in the US, on average, spend  180 days  at school per year for around 6.8 hours daily. It is somewhat of a middle ground between most other developed countries.

Source:  NCEE

Estonia, for example, has shorter school days. Estonian students spend 6 school hours daily for around 175 days a year. In contrast, South Korea has the opposite situation where kids have 220 school days for 8 hours every day.

Yet, we can only see the effectiveness of any approach when comparing the academic results and the school hours. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has a program called  PISA  that assesses 15-year-old students’ knowledge and skills globally. You can check the  full research , but we’ve selected some countries in the table below to make it more digestible. It is the latest available study released in 2019. OECD performs this assessment every 3 years, but the organization postponed its 2021 and 2024 research because of the pandemic.

Note: For the sake of clarity, we excluded the results for mainland China as the study only evaluates four regions (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang). And even the paper’s authors say that “these four provinces in eastern China are far from representing China as a whole.”

Data source:  PISA Insights and Interpretations

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Why Should School Days Be Shorter?

To understand why school should be shorter or not, let’s analyze the data we’ve seen. Singapore is one of the most representative examples. Based on the PISA assessment, it is an undeniable leader in academic performance. Does this mean that kids there spend a larger amount of time at school? Not at all. Singapore has shorter school days (5.5 hours/day) than most countries, including the US (6.8 hours/day). Still, the number of days students study is slightly higher than in American schools – 193 days compared to 180 days in the US.

This example shows us that shorter days in terms of daily school hours positively affect the students’ performance. Yet, fewer days spent at school yearly don’t seem to have a similar impact. And this trend extends to other countries as well. Finland, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand prioritize shorter school days. Why does it happen?

Study Time vs. Students’ Performance

A part of the answer to why school should be shorter lies in the students’ attention span. It is much lower than many might think. In fact, phycologists believe that first graders can focus on one task without distraction for no more than  5-7 minutes . Even the ‘ideal’ attention span for kids this age is 15-18 minutes at most.

Another element we have to consider is how effective full-time studying is. Does the number of school hours play a big role in students’ performance? It turns out that time matters only until a certain point. In fact,  scientists discovered  that when children study one subject for more than 10 hours a week, there is no significant difference in kids’ academic results compared to 5-10 hours of study time. So, more isn’t always better.

Besides, we shouldn’t forget the importance of  motivating children  to learn and discover new things. Being overwhelmed by a full day of school might leave students tired and indifferent, affecting their academic results in the long run.

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Pros & Cons of Shortened Days at School

Shorter school days don’t only influence kids. In one way or another, they also impact parents and teachers. That’s why let’s dive deeper into the pros and cons of shorter days at school from every angle.

Benefits of Shorter School Days

There are many reasons why school time should be shorter, including the following advantages:

• More time for extracurricular activities. School subjects are essential. Still, discovering new hobbies has numerous benefits for the kids. Everything from sports and music to  learning coding  allows children to get new skills, meet friends, and enrich their personalities.
• Better concentration. Shorter days give students an opportunity to concentrate better, as human attention span is limited.
• More hours of sleep and reduced stress. When kids have spare time, they can use it to get more rest, which is crucial for  brain development .
• Lower costs. The larger the amount of time students spend at school, the more financing it requires to cover teachers’ salaries and infrastructure maintenance.
• More preparation time for teachers. Longer school days put more pressure on teachers, leaving them less time to plan engaging lessons and restore their energy. That’s why shorter school days allow them to create a more positive environment for kids to study.
• Opportunities for additional academic classes. Many kids either want to learn other subjects or need extra  tutoring for schoolwork . More free time after lessons helps children to pursue this intention.

Downsides of Shorter School Days

On the other hand, there are several drawbacks to shortened days at school, such as:

• Less guided practice. One of the biggest advantages of offline full-time learning is that kids get more instructional time from teachers whenever they need it. This allows them to avoid unnecessary mistakes and learn faster. Yet, shorter school days might result in a smaller amount of time teachers can spend with every kid.
• More pressure on parents. If children have shorter school days, parents have to come up with other activities for their free time. When both of them work, they have to arrange  after-school activities  or childcare. This requires an additional budget, which creates more financial burdens for families.
• Less teacher-student interactions. Creating a productive and trusting environment takes time. That’s why shortened days might not be sufficient to develop and foster respectful relationships between kids and their teachers.
• Less time to build strong friendships. The same issue might happen with school friends. A full day of school can give more opportunities for children to bond with their classmates.

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Would a longer school day help children catch up after the pandemic? Here’s what the evidence says

Lecturer in Psychology in Education, University of York

Professor of Psychology in Education, University of York

Disclosure statement

Lisa Kim received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the "Being a teacher in England during the COVID-19" project and "Teachers reflect: What has it been like being a teacher during COVID-19?" project.

Kathryn Asbury received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the "Being a teacher in England during the COVID-19" project.

University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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COVID-induced school closures in 2020 resulted in the majority of pupils in England – at primary and secondary level – missing around 40 days of school on site. Schools around the globe were similarly affected, though to different extents.

As recent figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development show, in the first 12 months of the pandemic, 1.5 billion students in 188 countries and economies weren’t able to go to school, for varying lengths of time. Figures from the Netherlands and Ireland are similar to those in England. In Denmark, students missed closer to 20 days, whereas the numbers are much higher in Costa Rica (close to 180 days) and Colombia (around 150 days).

While most English schools during this time provided some form of remote education, these closures nonetheless resulted in learning losses . As a result, amid the UK government’s plans for post-COVID school recovery , the Department for Education has reportedly discussed extending the school day , by possibly lifting the existing cap on the number of hours state school teachers can be asked to work.

International evidence seems to suggest that, in some instances, a longer school day may be beneficial. A report by the United Nations-led Accelerated Education Working Group has proposed multiple ways to deal with pandemic-induced learning losses. These range from extending teaching time to implementing formal catch-up programmes with remedial education for struggling pupils. Extending teaching time was proposed as an appropriate strategy when pupils have missed out on up to one year of education.

Moreover, studies such as those conducted in the US and Canada and in Chile support the idea that extending instructional time could help pupils, both in the short and long term. They would benefit both academically (in terms of achieving higher test scores and higher educational attainment) and socio-economically (their future earnings would be higher).

However, a review of studies in Latin America and the Caribbean noted that, despite these benefits, there may be more cost-effective ways to attain similar results. An additional and important consideration would be the psychological cost to teachers.

Overburdened workforce

Of course, a longer school day means more teaching hours. And that raises the question of whether asking teachers to extend their working day is a reasonable request.

According to government guidelines , teachers at state schools in England can be asked to teach up to a maximum of 1,265 hours over 195 days of the year. This number does not include additional hours required for tasks, such as lesson planning, assessing, monitoring, recording, and reporting.

Data from four surveys shows that, pre-pandemic, an average full-time teacher in England worked 50 hours a week in term time and around four hours a week during the holidays. There are certainly outliers, including 10% of full-time teachers who reported working at least 30 hours per week over the summer and half-term holidays and 15 hours over the Christmas holidays. The researchers also found that the number of reported working hours had not decreased over 25 years. In fact, teachers in England have been found to work longer hours than most other countries , with lower secondary school teachers working around eight hours more per week

Our ongoing research into what being a teacher during the pandemic has been like shows teachers feel frustrated. The participants we have interviewed have relayed their distress at how the media and some sections of the public have portrayed their profession as lazy.

And the numbers bear out their frustration at that misguided impression. A survey conducted in June/July 2020 by the UK charity Education Support found that 31% of teachers and 70% of senior school leaders reported working more than 51 hours per week on average .

Since March 2020, many teachers across the globe have had to oscillate between partial school closures, partial reopenings and full reopenings. To adapt, they have had to rapidly learn new skills in order to be able to teach pupils from home.

They have also done a lot more than just teach. They have regularly called, and in some cases visited, pupils and their families to assess and meet their academic and welfare needs. Given the ongoing uncertainty of the situation, it is not surprising that we found that our teacher participants’ mental health and wellbeing had declined over the course of the pandemic.

While there may be benefits to pupils in extending the school day, one must be wary of the costs this would incur to teachers’ mental health and wellbeing. Students would not benefit from being taught by teachers who are stressed and burned out. For any educational recovery plan to be effective , it is important to consider teachers’ needs and perspectives.

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Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

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9 Reasons Why Students Should Have Recess: Enhancing Learning Through Breaks

Students stated their opinions and provided supporting details in Ms. Timmer’s first grade class today. Students were fully engaged as they wrote about why students should have more recess 😆. #CPSBest #Scholarsfirst pic.twitter.com/jRCnWJR9S7 — Marekka Nickens (@TeachNickens) February 15, 2022

9 Reasons Why Students Should Have Recess

Understanding why students should have recess reveals its undeniable importance in the school day. It is not just a break from the classroom; it’s a vital component of a student’s day that fosters physical, social, and emotional development.

1. Physical Health and Activity

In conclusion, physical activity during recess is crucial for maintaining good health and combating sedentary lifestyles. By incorporating physical activity into recess, educators can create a healthier, more productive learning environment for their students.

2. Mental Refreshment

This video is recommended for its compelling presentation by a 6th grader to educators, sharing his personal discovery on how increased physical activity contributed to his academic performance, offering valuable insights for parents and educators alike.

3. Social Skills Development

Some of the valuable communication and social skills kids learn during recess include:

4. Enhancing Creativity

Unstructured playtime during recess can significantly boost students’ creativity and imagination, making it an essential part of the school day. When children engage in unstructured play, they have the freedom to explore their own ideas and process information, which is crucial for fostering creativity.

Recess provides a break from structured learning, allowing students to have independence and engage in activities that help them learn how to get along with each other and feel good about themselves. Additionally, unstructured play during recess helps children mature in ways that are unlikely to happen in the classroom, promoting creativity and social development.

Furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics emphasizes that recess is necessary for the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development of children, and it should never be withheld for punitive or academic reasons.

5. Improving Academic Performance

Studies have found that recess provides cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits that may not be fully appreciated when a decision is made to diminish it. Recess is important because it:

Several studies demonstrate that recess, whether performed indoors or outdoors, contributes to optimal cognitive processing and a break from academic tasks.

For a deeper understanding of recess as a crucial educational tool, viewing this video, “The Most Overlooked Learning Tool in Education: Recess,” is highly recommended.

In conclusion, regular breaks, including recess, play a vital role in improving academic performance and should be prioritized to support students’ overall development and success. Teachers and school administrators should recognize the importance of recess and ensure that students have adequate time for unstructured play and physical activity during the school day.

Delve into “ 7 Research-Based Reasons Why Students Should Not Have Homework: Academic Insights, Opposing Perspectives & Alternatives ” for a comprehensive view of the homework debate, presenting alternative strategies to improve student learning.

6. Emotional Regulation

Furthermore, recess provides children with a break from academic challenges, which can help reduce stress and improve their overall well-being.

In conclusion, regular breaks, including recess, play a vital role in emotional regulation and should be prioritized to support students’ overall well-being and success. Teachers and school administrators should recognize the importance of recess and ensure that students have adequate time for unstructured play and physical activity during the school day. By providing students with regular breaks, schools can help promote emotional regulation, reduce stress, and improve overall academic performance.

7. Inclusivity and Equality: Emphasizing the Importance of Recess for All Students

In the vibrant tapestry of a school, recess functions as a unifying thread, fostering inclusivity and equality among students. Regardless of background, abilities, or interests, recess provides a leveled playing field where everyone can participate and engage. The playground becomes a space where friendships are formed, social skills are honed, and differences are celebrated.

A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) emphasizes that recess is a critical period for social interaction among children from diverse backgrounds. The AAP highlights that recess promotes social and emotional learning (SEL), which is as crucial as academic skills. This aligns with findings from Pellegrini and Bohn (2005), who observed that recess breaks improve social competence among students.

8. Developing Independence

This autonomy in choosing how to engage not only bolsters their confidence but also enhances their ability to make decisions independently, a cornerstone of personal development.

Moreover, the unstructured environment of recess acts as a sandbox for personal exploration, where children can:

Research by Ramstetter, Murray, and Garner (2010) supports the idea that recess plays a vital role in child development, particularly in autonomy and decision-making. Their study suggests that unstructured play during recess encourages children to make independent choices, enhancing their problem-solving and negotiation skills. This is further supported by Bjorklund and Brown’s (1998) work, which links unstructured play to the development of executive functioning.

9. Healthier Classroom Environment

Recess is not just a time for children to play and have fun, but it also plays a significant role in developing their decision-making and independence skills. During recess, children have the freedom to make choices and engage in activities of their preference, which fosters a sense of autonomy and self-reliance. This sense of independence is essential for their overall growth and development.

Additionally, recess provides children with the opportunity to explore their interests and make decisions about how they spend their time, which can contribute to their decision-making skills.

A comprehensive review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the association between school-based physical activities, including recess, and academic performance, found that physical activity can positively impact cognitive skills and attitudes, which are indicative of academic behavior.

Optimal Duration and Timing

The American Academy of Pediatrics underlines the necessity of regular breaks, like recess, for the holistic development of students across cognitive, social, emotional, and physical spheres. To be effective, recess must be long enough to facilitate substantial social interaction and physical activity.

Educational experts recommend specific durations to optimize the benefits of recess. Debbie Rhea suggests four 15-minute recesses daily, a guideline supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics for all age groups. This structured approach is essential for ensuring that students receive adequate breaks for physical and social engagement, contributing to their overall well-being and academic performance.

However, the implementation of recess varies widely across the United States, influenced by factors such as age, grade, facility, and district policies. Many elementary schools schedule recess immediately following lunch, although studies have shown that holding recess before lunch can enhance nutritional intake and reduce food waste.

This finding has led some institutions to adopt a recess-before-lunch policy, which also correlates with improved student behavior both during meals and in post-lunch classroom settings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture endorse recess before lunch as a component of school wellness policies.

Additional Tips for Enhancing Recess

Recess is an essential part of a child’s school day, and educators can take steps to make it more effective. Here are some practical tips for teachers to enhance recess:

Useful Resources

Final thoughts.

Recess also fosters creativity, leadership, and conflict-resolution skills, making it an essential component of a child’s school day. Therefore, it is crucial for educators to prioritize recess and implement strategies to make it a positive and productive part of the school day.

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The vast majority of teacher respondents in a 2021 survey reported feeling stressed, high levels of burnout/fatigue, and substantial anxiety at work due to the pandemic.

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This is why we should stop giving homework

At Human Restoration Project, one of the core systemic changes we suggest is the elimination of homework. Throughout this piece, I will outline several research studies and reports that demonstrate how the negative impact of homework is so evident that any mandated homework, outside of some minor catching up or for incredibly niche cases, simply does more harm than good.

I’ll summarize four main reasons why homework just flat out doesn’t make sense.

• Achievement, whether that be measured through standardized tests or general academic knowledge, isn’t correlated to assigning or completing homework.
• Homework is an inequitable practice that harms certain individuals more than others, to the detriment of those with less resources and to minor, if any, improvement for those with resources.
• It contributes to negative impacts at home with one’s family, peer relationships, and just general school-life balance, which causes far more problems than homework is meant to solve.
• And finally, it highlights and exacerbates our obsession with ultra-competitive college admissions and job opportunities, and other detrimental faults of making everything about getting ahead .

Does Homework Make Us Learn More?

Homework is such a ubiquitous part of school that it’s considered radical to even suggest that lessening it could be good teaching. It’s completely normal for families to spend extra hours each night, even on weekends, completing projects, reports, and worksheets. On average, teenagers spend about an hour a day completing homework, which is up 30-45 minutes from decades past. Kindergartners, who are usually saved from completing a lot of after school work, average about 25 minutes of homework a night (which to note, is 25 minutes too much than is recommended by child development experts).

The “10-minute rule”, endorsed by the National Parent Teacher Association and National Education Association, is incorporated into most school policies: there’s 10 minutes of homework per day per grade level – as in 20 minutes a day in second grade or 2 hours a day in 12th grade. 

It’s so normalized that it was odd, when seemingly out of nowhere the President of Ireland recently suggested that homework should be banned . (And many experts were shocked at this suggestion.)

Numerous studies on homework reflect inconsistent results on what it exactly achieves. Homework is rarely shown to have any impact on achievement, whether that be measured through standardized testing or otherwise. As I’ll talk about later, the amount of marginal gains homework may lead to aren’t worth its negative trade-offs.

Let’s look at a quick summary of various studies:

• ‍ First off, the book National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling by David P. Baker and Gerald K. LeTendre draws on a 4 year investigation of schools in 47 countries. It’s the largest study of its type: looking at how schools operate, their pedagogy, their procedures, and the like. They made a shocking discovery: countries that assigned the least amount of homework: Denmark and the Czech Republic, had much higher test scores than those who assigned the most amount of homework: Iran and Thailand. The same work indicated that there was no correlation between academic achievement and homework with elementary students, and any moderate positive correlation in middle or high school diminished as more and more homework was assigned. ‍
• A study in Contemporary Educational Psychology of 28,051 high school seniors concluded that quality of instruction, motivation, and ability are all correlated to a student’s academic success. However, homework’s effectiveness was marginal or perhaps even counterproductive: leading to more academic problems than it hoped to solve. ‍
• The Teachers College Record published that homework added academic pressure and societal stress to those already experiencing pressures from other forces at home. This caused a further divide in academic performance from those with more privileged backgrounds. We’ll talk about this more later. ‍
• A study in the Journal of Educational Psychology examined 2,342 student attitudes toward homework in foreign language classes. They found that time spent on homework had a significant negative impact on grades and standardized test scores. The researchers concluded that this may be because participants had to spend their time completing worksheets rather than spend time practicing skills on their own time.
• Some studies are more positive. In fact, a meta-analysis of 32 homework studies in the Review of Educational Research found that most studies indicated a positive correlation between achievement and doing homework. However, the researchers noted that generally these studies made it hard to draw causal conclusions due to how they were set up and conducted. There was so much variance that it was difficult to make a claim one way or another, even though the net result seemed positive. This often cited report led by Dr. Harris Cooper at Duke University is the most commonly used by proponents of the practice. But popular education critic Alfie Kohn believes that this study fails to establish, ironically, causation among other factors. ‍
• And that said in a later published study in The High School Journal , researchers concluded that in all homework assigned, there were only modest linkages to improved math and science standardized test scores, with no difference in other subjects between those who were assigned homework and those who were not. None of the homework assigned had any bearing on grades. The only difference was for a few points on those particular subject’s standardized test scores.

All in all, the data is relatively inconclusive. Some educational experts suggest that there should be hours of homework in high school, some homework in middle school, and none in elementary school. Some call for the 10-minute rule. Others say that homework doesn’t work at all. It’s still fairly unstudied how achievement is impacted as a result of homework. But as Alfie Kohn says , “The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.” That said, when we couple this data with the other negative impacts of assigning homework: how it impacts those at the margins, leads to anxiety and stress, and takes away from important family time – it really makes us question why this is such a ubiquitous practice. 

Or as Etta Kralovec and John Buell write in The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning,

‘Extensive classroom research of ‘time on task’ and international comparisons of year-round time for study suggest that additional homework might promote U.S. students’ achievement.’  This written statement by some of the top professionals in the field of homework research raises some difficult questions. More homework might promote student achievement? Are all our blood, sweat, and tears at the kitchen table over homework based on something that merely might be true? Our belief in the value of homework is akin to faith. We assume that it fosters a love of learning, better study habits, improved attitudes toward school, and greater self-discipline; we believe that better teachers assign more homework and that one sign of a good school is a good, enforced homework policy.

Our obsession with homework is likely rooted in select studies that imply it leads to higher test scores. The authors continue by deciphering this phenomena:

“[this is] a problem that routinely bedevils all the sciences: the relationship between correlation and causality. If A and B happen simultaneously, we do not know whether A causes B or B causes A, or whether both phenomena occur casually together or are individually determined by another set of variables…Thus far, most studies in this area have amounted to little more than crude correlations that cannot justify the sweeping conclusions some have derived from them.”

Alfie Kohn adds that even the correlation between achievement and homework doesn’t really matter. Saying,

“If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores…But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive… The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough…”

Ramping Up Inequity

Many justify the practice of assigning homework with the well-intentioned belief that we’ll make a more equitable society through high standards. However, it seems to be that these practices actually add to inequity. “Rigorous” private and preparatory schools – whether they be “no excuses” charters in marginalized communities or “college ready” elite suburban institutions, are notorious for extreme levels of homework assignment. Yet, many progressive schools who focus on holistic learning and self-actualization assign no homework and achieve the same levels of college and career success.

Perhaps this is because the largest predictor of college success has nothing to do with rigorous preparation, and everything to do with family income levels. 77% of students from high income families graduated from a highly competitive college, whereas 9% of students from low income families did the same .

It seems like by loading students up with mountains of homework each night in an attempt to get them into these colleges, we actually make their chances of success worse .

When assigning homework, it is common practice to recommend that families provide a quiet, well-lit place for the child to study. After all, it’s often difficult to complete assignments after a long day. Having this space, time, and energy must always be considered in the context of the family’s education, income, available time, and job security. For many people, jobs have become less secure and less well paid over the course of the last two decades.

In a United States context, we work the longest hours of any nation . Individuals in 2006 worked 11 hours longer than their counterparts in 1979. In 2020, 70% of children lived in households where both parents work. We are the only country in the industrial world without guaranteed family leave. And the results are staggering: 90% of women and 95% of men report work-family conflict . According to the Center for American Progress , “the United States today has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world due to a long-standing political impasse.”

As a result, parents have much less time to connect with their children. This is not a call to a return to traditional family roles or to have stay-at-home parents – rather, our occupation-oriented society is structured inadequately which causes problems with how homework is meant to function. 

For those who work in entry level positions, such as customer service and cashiers, there is an average 240% turnover per year due to lack of pay, poor conditions, work-life balance, and mismanagement. Family incomes continue to decline for lower- and middle-class Americans, leaving more families to work increased hours or multiple jobs. In other words, families, especially poor families, have less opportunities to spend time with their children, let alone foster academic “gains” via homework.

Even for students with ample resources who attend “elite schools”, the amount of homework is stressful. In a 2013 study in The Journal of Experiential Education, researchers conducted a survey of 4,317 students in 10 high-performing upper middle class high schools. These students had an average of more than 3 hours of homework a night. In comparison to their peers, they had more academic stress, notable physical health problems, and spent a worrying amount of time focused entirely on school and nothing else. Competitive advantage came at the cost of well-being and just being a kid.

A similar study in Frontiers of Psychology found that students pressured in the competitive college admissions process , who attended schools assigning hours of homework each night and promoting college-level courses and resume building extracurriculars, felt extreme stress. Two-thirds of the surveyed students reported turning to alcohol and drugs to cope.

In fact, a paper published by Dr. Suniya Luthar and her colleagues concluded that upper middle-class youth are actually more likely to be troubled than their middle class peers . There is an extreme problem with academic stress, where young people are engaging in a rat race toward the best possible educational future as determined by Ivy League colleges and scholarships. To add fuel to the fire, schools continue to add more and more homework to have students get ahead – which has a massively negative impact on both ends of the economic spectrum.

A 2012 study by Dr. Jonathan Daw indicated that their results,

“...imply that increases in the amount of homework assigned may increase the socioeconomic achievement gap in math, science, and reading in secondary school.”

In an effort to increase engagement with homework, teachers have been encouraged to create interesting, creative assignments. In fact, most researchers seem to agree that the quality of assignments matters a whole lot . After all, maybe assigning all of this homework won’t matter as long as it’s interesting and relevant to students? Although this has good intentions, rigorous homework with increased complexity places more impetus on parents. As researcher and author Gary Natrillo, an initial proponent of creative homework , stated later:

…not only was homework being assigned as suggested by all the ‘experts,’ but the teacher was obviously taking the homework seriously, making it challenging instead of routine and checking it each day and giving feedback. We were enveloped by the nightmare of near total implementation of the reform recommendations pertaining to homework…More creative homework tasks are a mixed blessing on the receiving end. On the one hand, they, of course, lead to higher engagement and interest for children and their parents. On the other hand, they require one to be well rested, a special condition of mind not often available to working parents…

Time is a luxury to most people. With increased working hours, in conjunction with extreme levels of stress, many people don’t have the necessary mindset to adequately supply children with the attention to detail for complex homework. As Kralovec and Buell state,

To put it plainly, I have discovered that after a day at work, the commute home, dinner preparations, and the prospect of baths, goodnight stories, and my own work ahead, there comes a time beyond which I cannot sustain my enthusiasm for the math brain teaser or the creative story task.

Americans are some of the most stressed people in the world. Mass shootings, health care affordability, discrimination, racism, sexual harassment, climate change, the presidential elections, and literally: staying informed on current events have caused roughly 70% of people to report moderate or extreme stress , with increased rates for people of color, LGBTQIA Americans, and other discriminated groups. 90% of high schoolers and college students report moderate or higher stress, with half reporting depression and a lack of energy and motivation .

In 2015, 1,100 parents were surveyed on the impact of homework on family life. Fights over homework were 200% more likely in families where parents didn’t have a college degree. Generally, these families believed that if their children didn’t understand a homework assignment then they must have been not paying attention at school. This led to young people feeling dumb or upset, and parents feeling like their child was lying or goofing off. The lead researcher noted, 

All of our results indicate that homework as it is now being assigned discriminates against children whose parents don’t have a college degree, against parents who have English as a second language, against, essentially, parents who are poor.

Schooling is so integrated into family life that a group of researchers noted that “...homework tended to recreate the problems of school, such as status degradation.” An online survey of over 2,000 students and families found that 90% of students reported additional stress from homework, and 40% of families saw it as nothing more than busy work. Authors Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish wrote the aptly titled The Case Against Homework which conducted interviews across the mid-2000s with families and children, citing just how many people are burdened with overscheduling homework featuring over-the-top assignments and constant work. One parent remarked,

I sit on Amy's bed until 11 p.m. quizzing her, knowing she's never going to use this later, and it feels like abuse," says Nina of Menlo Park, California, whose eleven-year-old goes to a Blue Ribbon public school and does at least three-and-a-half hours of homework each night. Nina also questions the amount of time spent on "creative" projects. "Amy had to visit the Mission in San Francisco and then make a model of it out of cardboard, penne pasta, and paint. But what was she supposed to be learning from this? All my daughter will remember is how tense we were in the garage making this thing. Then when she handed it in, the teacher dropped it and all the penne pasta flew off." These days, says Nina, "Amy's attitude about school has really soured." Nina's has, too. "Everything is an emergency and you feel like you're always at battle stations."

1/3rd of the families interviewed felt “crushed by the workload.” It didn’t matter if they lived in rural or suburban areas, or if they were rich or poor.

Learning this way is also simply ineffective because well, that’s just not how kids learn! Young people build upon prior knowledge. They use what they know to make what they’re currently doing easier. Adding more and more content to a student’s plate – having to connect the dots and build upon more information – especially with the distractions of home life is unrealistic. Plus, simply put…it’s just not fun! Why would I want to spend all of my free time on homework rather than hanging out with my friends or playing video games?

Even with all that said – if other countries demonstrate educational success on standardized testing with little to no assigned homework and limited school hours (nevermind the fact that this is measured through the questionable method of standardized testing), shouldn’t we take a step back and analyze the system as a whole, rather than figure out better homework policies? If other countries do this with limited to no homework , why can’t everyone else?

Investigating Systemic Problems

Perhaps the solution to academic achievement in America isn’t doubling down on increasing the work students do at home, but solving the underlying systemic inequities: the economic and discriminatory problems that plague our society. Yes, the United States tends to fall behind other countries on math and reading scores. Many countries impose increased workloads on students because they are afraid that they will fall behind economically with the standard of living to the rest of the world. But perhaps the problem with education doesn’t lie in not having enough “rigorous” methods, but with how easy it is for a family to simply live and be content.

Finland, frequently cited as a model education system which grew to prominence during the 2000s through popular scholars like Pasi Sahlberg, enjoys some of the highest standards of living in the world:

• Finland’s life expectancy is 81.8 years, compared to the US’ 78.7 years . Unlike Finland, there’s a notable difference between the richest and poorest Americans . The richest Americans are expected to live, on average, nearly 15 years longer than the poorest. Further, America’s life expectancy is declining, the only industrialized country with this statistic .
• Finland’s health care is rated best in the world and only spends $3,078 per capita, compared to $8,047 in the US.
• Finland has virtually no homelessness , compared to the 500,000 (and growing) homeless population in the United States .
• Finland has the lowest inequality levels in the EU , compared to the United States with one of the highest inequality levels in the world . Research has demonstrated that countries with lower inequality levels are happier and healthier .

These statistics reflect that potentially — instead of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in initiatives to increase national test scores , such as homework strategies, curriculum changes, and nationwide “raising the bar” initiatives — that we should invest in programs that improve our standard of living, such as universal healthcare and housing. The solution to test scores is rooted in solving underlying inequities in our societies — shining a light on our core issues — rather than making teachers solve all of our community’s problems.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no space for improving pedagogy, schooling, or curriculums, but at the end of the day the solution cannot solely be by improving education.

‍ Creating Future Workers

Education often equates learning with work. As a teacher, I had to stop myself from behaving like an economics analyst: telling students to quit “wasting time”, stating that the purpose of the lesson is useful for securing a high salary career, seeing everything as prep for college and career (and college’s purpose as just for more earnings in a career), and making blanket assumptions that those who aren’t motivated will ultimately never contribute to society, taking on “low levels” of work that “aren’t as important” as other positions.

A common argument exists that the pressure of homework mirrors the real world – that we should assign homework because that’s “just the way things are.” If we want kids to succeed in the “real world”, they need to have this pressure.

But this mentality is unhealthy and unjust. The purpose of education should be to develop purpose. People live happier and healthier lives as a result of pursuing and developing a core purpose. Some people’s purpose is related to their line of work, but there is not necessarily a connection. However, the primary goal for education stated by districts, states, and the national government is to make “productive members of society” – those who are “prepared for the future” through “college and career readiness.” When we double down on economic principles, rather than look to developmental psychology and holistic care, to raise young people, it’s no wonder we’re seeing such horrific statistics related to childhood .

Further, the consistent pressure to solely learn for future economic gain raises generations of young people to believe that wealth is a measurement of success, and that specific lines of work create happiness. Teachers and parents are told to make their children “work hard” for future success and develop “grit.” Although grit is an important indicator of overcoming obstacles , it is not developed by enforcing grit through authoritarian classrooms or meaningless, long tasks like homework. In fact, an argument could be made that many Americans accept their dramatically poor work-life balance and lack of access to needs such as affordable health care by being brought up in a society that rewards tasks of “working through it” to “eventually achieve happiness.”

Many families have shifted from having children participate in common household chores and activities to have them exclusively focus on their school work. Americans have more difficulty than ever raising children, with increasing demands of time and rising childcare costs . When teachers provide more and more homework, they take away from the parents’ ability to structure their household according to their needs. In fact, children with chores show completely positive universal growth across the board , from time management skills to responsibility to managing a healthy work-life balance. 

Of course, this is not to say that it is all the teacher’s fault. Educators face immense pressure to carry out governmental/school policies that place test scores at the forefront. Plus, most families had homework themselves – so continuing the practice only makes sense. Many of these policies require homework, and an educator’s employment is centered on enacting these changes. Barbara Stengel , an education professor, noted that the reason why so much homework isn’t necessarily interesting or applicable to a student’s lived experience is because “some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching.” The constant pressure on teachers to raise test scores while simultaneously being overworked and underpaid is making many leave the profession. Etta Kralovec and John Buell add:

As more academic demands are placed on teachers, homework can help lengthen the school day and thus ensure ‘coverage’ — that is, the completion of the full curriculum that each teacher is supposed to cover during the school year…This in itself places pressure on teachers to create meaningful homework and often to assign large amounts of it so that the students’ parents will think the teacher is rigorous and the school has high academic standards. Extensive homework is frequently linked in our minds to high standards.

Therefore, there’s a connection to be made between the school- or work-life balance of children and the people who are tasked with teaching them. 8% of the teacher workforce leaves every year , with one of the primary reasons being poor work-life balance . Perhaps teachers see an increased desire to “work” students in their class and at home due to the pressures they face in their own occupation?

The more we equate work with learning, and the more we accept that a school’s primary purpose is to prepare workers, the less we actually succeed at promoting academics. Instead, we bolster the neoliberal tendencies of the United States (and others like it) to work hard, yet comparably to other countries’ lifestyle gains, achieve little.

This is why so many families demand that their children have ample amounts of homework. In fact, the majority of parents believe their students have just the right amount. They’re afraid that their kids are going to fall behind, doomed to a life within an increasingly hostile and inequitable society. They want the best for their children, and taking the risk of not assigning homework means that someone else may take that top slot. The same could be said for many parts of the “tracks toward college and career readiness” that professor William Deresiewicz refers to as “zombication” – lurching through each stage of the rat race in competitive admissions: a lot of assignments, difficult courses, sports, clubs, forced volunteerism, internships, and other things to pack our schedules.

The United States must examine the underlying inequities of peoples’ lives, rather than focus on increasing schools’ workloads and lessening children’s free time for mythical academic gains that lead to little change. Teacher preparation programs and popular authors need to stop promoting “interesting and fun ways to teach ‘x’!” and propose systemic changes that radically change the way education is done, including systemic changes to society at large. Only then will the United States actually see improved livelihoods and a better education system for all.

And what could be done instead? Much of the research and writing on homework tends to conclude that we should find a “happy middle ground” to continue the practice of homework, just in case it does indeed work. However, based on the decades of studies we have on this issue…I’m not really sure. It seems the best practice, by far, is to eliminate homework altogether outside of incredibly niche and rare scenarios. If a student asks for more things to do at home because they want to explore something that interests them, great! But that doesn’t need to be mandated homework.

Human Restoration Project believes that the four recommendations of the late educator and scholar Ken Robinson allows young people to learn for themselves and make the most of their lives:

• Let children spend time with their families. The single strongest predictor of academic success and fewer behavioral problems for a child, 3-12 years old, is eating as a family. Make planned time during the day to catch up with children, talking to them about what they’re learning, and encouraging them to achieve.
• Give children time to play outside or create something, preferably not always with a screen. Let them dive into their passions and plan a trip to a library, park, or museum. Explore free online resources to discover new skills and interests.
• Give children opportunities to read by themselves or with their family. One of the best ways to learn about the world is developing a lifelong love of reading. Children who prioritize reading are more motivated to learn and see drastically improved academic outcomes.
• Let children sleep! Elementary students should sleep at least 10 hours each night and adolescents, 9 hours. Being awake and ready to tackle each day keeps us energized and healthy.

If you’re interested in learning more, see The Case Against Homework by Nancy Kalish and Sara Bennett, The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn, The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Muelle, or one of the many citations linked in the show notes.

You can also watch a modified video version of this piece on our YouTube channel:

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I was just going to say that that is the ideal place to do it, because I think just biologically and whatever, when you're younger, you are more naturally a change agent, and have a better sense of vision, and have a longer time to be invested in the future, so that's actually the perfect place to be doing what you just said, Falami, is in schools, because that's where you've got this nexus of brilliance, and vision, and investment in 100 years from now or whatever. Not that we all can't be part of it, but you've got a nice concentration of people who are especially suited to creating that vision, and that change, and partnership with us elders.

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• June 6 Check out our final articles of the 23-24 school year! Have a great summer! See you in September!

Shorter School Days Increase Success

Kayla Weise , Student Writer | January 31, 2022

Although many people think longer school days would increase academic success, students would benefit more from spending less time in school. Many argue that a longer school day would be beneficial because school hours could match parents’ work schedules. It would provide for additional instructional time so students could also learn nonacademic skills during the school day as well as participate in more arts and physical education classes. They may also argue that a longer school day gets students used to an eight-hour work schedule.

Despite these claims, research shows no direct correlation between student success and longer school days. In a worldwide comprehension assessment in 2016, Norway was one country that scored higher than the US. However, their school hours are from 8:15 a.m to 1:10 p.m. This shows that more time in school does not improve student success. Although longer school days give students more time to learn, there are more important aspects of life outside a classroom that children need to experience to be successful. Shortening the school day would allow for more time to focus on other important activities such as playing a sport, doing homework, extracurricular activities, family responsibilities, and work for some high school students. Students may also feel the pressure of strict time management which may prevent them from investing themselves in these activities. Stephanie Weise, a kindergarten teacher, said “by the end of the day, it is hard to keep the kindergarteners’ attention. They would be more engaged if the day was shorter.”

By starting school one hour later, students would get more sleep which would improve their academics. They would also lose no time for extracurricular activities and homework. After-school activities or child-care programs could be established to provide care for students who may not be able to go home directly after school. The benefits of shorter school days are abundant. Students should not be spending most of their time in a classroom but instead out doing activities, working, and learning valuable life skills that cannot be taught in school.

https://www.gcu.edu/blog/gcu-experience/pros-and-cons-longer-school-days

https://students4sc.org/2020/07/14/shorter-school-days-should-be-established-for-u-s-students/

https://web.s.ebscohost.com/pov/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=22b9539f-00da-4375-bf5b-04c5fe1c56b5%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9cG92LWxpdmU%3d#AN=122636753&db=pwh

Kayla Weise, Grade 12. Interests/hobbies include Key Club, NHS, FCA, playing piano, spending time with family and friends, painting, and traveling. She...

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Vivianne C. • May 20, 2024 at 1:51 pm

I like how you explained how starting school an hour after students would get more sleep meaning they would be more ready for academic activities. P.S. I am in 5th grade do you think I write nicely or horribly?

UWUGIRL • May 16, 2024 at 1:19 pm

This passage really helped me! UWU!

Bot 001 • Jan 26, 2024 at 3:53 pm

Simon Jensen • Jan 24, 2024 at 12:45 pm

my school hours are stupid I leave at 3:45 pm And start at 8:00 am too long >:(

mason • Mar 21, 2024 at 12:17 pm

mason • Mar 21, 2024 at 12:18 pm

urmom • Jan 22, 2024 at 10:07 am

your artical is the best

urdad • Jan 11, 2024 at 3:58 pm

Arthur • Oct 3, 2023 at 11:11 am

very very nice information kayla weise like the work buddy ol’pal

kl • May 5, 2023 at 6:47 am

Awilda Perez • Apr 8, 2023 at 6:18 pm

Very nice information Kayla.

jknih • Mar 21, 2023 at 3:25 pm

oooooo nice

rylan • Feb 15, 2023 at 2:24 pm

great inspiration

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Shorter School Days Should Be Established For U.S. Students

Introduction.

A six-and-a-half-hour school day is business as usual for most U.S. students, running from early morning to mid-afternoon. With such a long day at hand, there is undoubtedly plenty of time for learning and focusing on subjects in a structured curriculum. However, while this may sound beneficial, there are cons to the current length of school days here in the U.S. Students may find themselves with less time to manage a busy schedule, where they may have to juggle homework, family responsibilities, playing a sport, and many other important parts of their lives. Although longer school days leave more time for students to learn, students have less time to focus on other important parts of their lives, and there is no direct correlation between longer school hours and overall student success. Shorter school days give students more free time and are utilized by the highest-ranking education systems.

Longer School Days

The longer students are in school, the more time can be invested in learning and studying, which may seem beneficial considering that we are a competitive nation, and currently, U.S. test scores fall behind the test scores of other countries such as Finland and China. To solve this problem, many would assume that students would have to be in school for a longer time. If students have more school time to invest in learning, they might perform better on tests, and the overall U.S. student test scores may rise above other nations.

Knowledge in different work fields constantly advances with the times , as research findings continuously become updated. It is important to keep students well-informed on a consistent basis so that they will be aware of the expanding knowledge in different fields. A longer school day may appear to be the answer for this.

The structured hours where students arrive to and leave school align with the average work schedule of their parents. Because parents won’t have to stress as much about drop-off and pick-up times, this releases potential burdens in child-care.

Cons Of Longer School Days

Although supposedly leaving more time to invest in learning, longer school days take a lot of time out of a student’s day. This leaves less time for them to focus on other important aspects of their lives, such as playing a sport, doing homework, participated in enriching extracurricular activities, or tending to family responsibilities. With less time available to focus on these aspects, students may feel stressed under the pressures of strict time management and could fall behind in these activities, preventing them from becoming invested in other important parts of their lives outside their education.

Furthermore, studies have shown that longer school days do not directly improve overall student achievement. Therefore, when approaching the issue of U.S. test scores falling behind other nations, it wouldn’t seem beneficial to lengthen school days as this would not provide any positive effect on student test scores, and could even cause them to fall even further behind.

Shorter School Days

Shorter school days should be utilized in the U.S. education system as it comes with many benefits. Students have more time outside of school to focus on other important aspects of their lives. Therefore, they won’t feel as stressed with time management, and won’t fall behind on such enriching activities.

Furthermore, countries with the highest-ranking education systems operate on shorter school days than those of the U.S. Finland, for example, educates their students in a way that they can receive time alone to reflect on what they have learned, and to focus on other activities that are intellectually stimulating. This also leaves students with a reduced workload, creating less stress and more room in their minds to effectively comprehend learned material. This is one of the factors that allows Finland’s education system to be among the highest in the world, and student test scores are significantly higher than those of the U.S. If shorter school days are established for U.S. students, we can follow Finland’s lead and create a better education for students.

Although shorter school days might conflict with the average work schedules of parents, after-school activities or child-care programs could be established to provide care for students who may not be able to go home with their parents directly after school. Such programs could include fun and enriching activities for students, such as reading or playing games with their peers. This will keep children entertained and will release the stress of child-care, as parents will not have to worry as much about drop-off and pick-up times for their students.

In conclusion, U.S. schools should operate on shorter school days. This will leave more time for students to focus on other activities and comprehend learned material. Although longer school days may seem effective, there is no correlation between longer school hours and student success, and less time is set aside for students to work on other aspects of their lives. Shorter school days are utilized by some of the highest-ranking education systems, and should be considered for the U.S.

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Education Secretary Considers a Longer School Day: The Pros and Cons

• November 12, 2021

Where has this idea come from?

Pros in favour of a longer school day.

• Cons against a longer school day

Where do we go from here?

On 1 st November, Robert Halfon, chairman of the education select committee, asked the education secretary if he would be willing to look at the prospect of lengthening the school day in the UK. The MP said that there was evidence to suggest that a longer day would improve pupil attainment , especially in disadvantaged areas. 

While Mr Zahawi stated that he was keen for all schools to offer the average 6.5-hour school day, this was criticised by Paul Whiteman, general secretary of NAHT . He was quick to point out that a longer school day could have a detrimental effect on mental health , family time and extra-curricular activities. ⚽

Former education secretary, Gavin Williamson, had previously brought up an extension of the school day back in June as a possible solution to classroom hours lost to Covid-19 . At that time, Kate Green, shadow education secretary, warned that children would fail to learn ‘if they are tired and if it has been a long day.’

This opposition was mirrored by teaching staff back in March 2021. A YouGov survey showed that around nine in ten teaching staff didn’t agree with the suggested catch-measures. ❎

Last month, Rishi Sunak pledged to spend an extra £2 billion on COVID recovery in education. Although this would be a total of £5 billion since 2019, it still falls well short of the £15 billion asked for by Sir Kevan Collins, the government’s former catch-up tsar. Despite the obvious difference in funding, the question remains: would a longer school day be the best way to use government money? 🤔

What are the main reasons to extend the school day?

• More teaching: Covid-19 has resulted in a lot of disruption in teaching. This is one of the strongest arguments in favour of a longer school day. There is the possibility of making up for lost time, especially those who are at a disadvantage due to the digital divide .
• Good for working parents: This would lead to less wraparound care for working parents, especially single parents , who finish their jobs after their children finish school.
• Would allow for longer breaks: According to the Nuffield Foundation , in 2019, around half of all secondary schools had less than 45 minutes to eat lunch, and a quarter had less than 35. Most morning breaks last 20 minutes and an afternoon break is almost non-existent. This is compared to only 30% of children having a lunch break of less than 55 minutes in 1995 .  

Cons against a longer school day 

What are the main reasons not to extend the school day?

• Pupils would have no time for other activities: If the school day were lengthened, there would be little down time for extracurricular activities and family time, especially if pupils were expected to do homework after school. These activities build social skills and relationships which are as important as a formal education in childhood.
• Health and wellbeing would suffer: Over recent years mental health services in schools have been called upon as a result of pupils being under more and more pressure to achieve. This situation has been further compounded by the disruption of the global pandemic and would undoubtedly only increase with a longer school day.
• Pupil and teacher exhaustion: In 2020, author and educator, Dr Jared Cooney explained that there is a limit to how much learning people can do. After this time, it is not retained. This is known as cognitive fatigue. Dr Cooney thinks that pupils learn for approximately three hours a day before their learning starts to diminish.

That’s the big question! There seems to be a need for students to catch up with their studies but the debate over how this is to be achieved rumbles on. And with Nadhim Zahawi pushing schools which are currently operating below the 6.5-hour week to extend their day without any extra funding, the idea is unlikely to get the support of teachers and local authorities.

A recent review by the Department for Education also found that an extension to the school day would require ‘significant delivery operations’ such as new legislation, teaching capacity and measures to make sure that quality of teaching didn’t suffer. Therefore, if an extension to the school day actually happens, it certainly won’t happen overnight.

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10 Noteworthy Benefits of a Shorter School Day

Our individualized learning setup at the Tenney School allows us to offer  more instruction in a shorter amount of time. Since students receive dedicated 1:1 teaching for all core subjects, they don’t need to bother spending time on topics that aren’t on their instructional level. Our general school hours run from 9 am – 2 pm, with extra hours available after school for tutoring or lessons. A shorter school day comes with many benefits to students and parents alike. Specific benefits might differ depending on a family’s needs, but these top 10 benefits are appreciated by many of our Tenney families:

Extra Time for Other Interests

Sometimes, a student’s outside interests might expand into their future career. With enough time to explore these outside interests, students can probe the subject matter that appeals to them, gaining a stronger foothold on what they’d like to do after graduation.

Extra Time for More Lessons

Maybe a student requires extra remediation in a subject. Or maybe a student is trying to catch up from an unexpected period of absence from learning. The built-in extra time at the end of the school day takes away the pressure of trying to squeeze it all in.

Less Time Wasted With Classroom Management

In traditional schools with heavy teacher-to-student ratios, a great deal of time is wasted throughout the school day as teachers try to get students on task. A shorter school day means that students are less likely to “zone out” with overwhelm, as they won’t feel as though time is dragging on.

More Sleep at Both Ends of the Day

Students appreciate being able to “sleep in,” and parents appreciate not having to rush them out the door. A well-rested student is ready to learn, with improved executive functioning, cognitive functioning, and emotional regulation.

Improved Family Dynamics and Reduced Stress

Waking up early can cause daily arguments in some households. A later start time means that family relationships can improve, with an improved mood for the entire family.

Alignment With Circadian Rhythms

Melatonin  releases later in the day  during the teenage years. This means that it takes a while for teens to get sleepy at night. Yet they still need at least 8 hours of sleep, at the least (some teens require closer to 10 hours). A later start time in the school day allows teens to work with their natural body clocks, rather than against them.

Time to Travel to Other Locations

Some students split their time between multiple households. Some teens travel often for competitive sports or other outside activities. An early afternoon end to the day means that students don’t have to feel harried around dinnertime.

Less Time Spent Looking at the Clock

Nothing quite drags down on a student’s incentive to learn than making the school day too long. A shorter school day means that students aren’t counting down the minutes until the end of class.

More Time to Appreciate Learning

When students aren’t dreading a long day, they have more time to appreciate the subject material. Students can focus more deeply on their work in shorter, targeted amounts of time.

Enough Time for Homework

When a too-long school day combines with a lot of extracurriculars, some students might be still working on their homework into the night. A short school day allows students to pursue extra activities, while still granting them enough time to complete their homework.

Learn More About

Our students at the Tenney School are well-rested and energized, ready to tackle a day of learning. Both students and parents find our programs to be refreshing and supportive.  Contact us  for more information about our individualized approach.

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• The Highlight

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

by Jacob Sweet

As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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Is Homework Bad for Kids in Elementary School?

As a teacher with a master’s in Education and over a decade of experience in the public education system, I’ve seen firsthand how the traditional model of assigning homework plays out in the lives of young students and their families.

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While the intent behind homework has often been to reinforce what was learned in class, the reality is that for elementary-aged children, homework can do more harm than good. This post will answer your question, “is homework bad for kids?” and discuss the negative impacts it can have on young children.

**Keep reading because I’ll share how you can OPT OUT of homework AND give you a simple copy and paste e-mail to let your child’s teacher know your plans respectfully .

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Historical Perspective on Homework

Homework wasn’t always an integral part of elementary education. In fact, it was originally seen as a way to promote discipline and work ethic in older students. 

Over time, this practice trickled down into elementary schools, where the rationale was that starting early would give younger children a head start. However, the expectations for homework have not evolved to reflect our growing understanding of child development .

Today, elementary school students as young as five or six are coming home with worksheets and assignments, and the assumption is that this will help them achieve better academic performance. 

But research studies show that for elementary school children, this assumption of homework being good for kids is simply not supported by evidence. The benefits of homework at this grade level are minimal, and the academic benefits are often negligible.

Say NO to Homework and Hello to Connection

So, you're looking to reduce homework stress while still helping your kids grow and learn?

I totally get it.The good news is, learning doesn't always have to look like schoolwork. In fact, some of the most valuable lessons come from play, creativity, and spending time together as a family. I’m an educator and a parent, and I know firsthand that the key is finding balance and making small, intentional changes that support your child’s growth while keeping things fun and easy for everyone.

Grab this Family Connections Activities Guide and my simple e-mail template to send a respectful note to your child's teacher letting them know you'll be opting out of homework this year.

Why do Teachers Assign Homework

Teachers often assign homework with the best intentions, aiming to reinforce concepts taught in class, build good study habits, and promote independent learning. 

Many educators believe that homework helps students practice skills, retain information, and prepare for future lessons.

It’s also seen as a way to teach responsibility and time management, as students must manage their workload outside the classroom. 

Additionally, homework can serve as a tool for teachers to gauge a student’s understanding of the material, helping them identify areas where further instruction might be needed.

However, homework assignments are often influenced by school policies or long-standing traditions, and teachers may feel obligated to assign them even when they recognize that the benefits might vary for different age groups, especially for younger students.

What the Research Says about Homework in Elementary School

According to research by education expert Harris Cooper, who conducted a comprehensive review of educational research , the benefits of homework for elementary students are virtually non-existent. 

Cooper’s findings suggest that while homework may have some positive impact for older students, particularly in high school, we do know there is no clear academic advantage for children in elementary school.

In fact, the average homework assignment at this age level does not significantly improve test scores or student achievement. What’s more concerning is the emotional and psychological toll excessive homework can take.

For young children who are still developing basic cognitive and social skills, being saddled with assignments after school can actually backfire. Instead of fostering a love of learning, it often creates frustration, resentment, and anxiety. 

I’ve watched bright, curious children become overwhelmed by the pressure of completing homework, losing the spark that makes them naturally want to learn.

Physical and Mental Health Consequences of Homework in Elementary School

Homework also cuts into time that could be spent on activities that are far more beneficial to a child’s overall well-being , such as physical activity or social time with family. 

When kids come home from school, they need time to unwind, play, and engage in after-school activities. Instead, they often end up sitting for long periods, working through assignments that may not even be meaningful to them. 

This sedentary time is especially problematic when you consider that many children already spend so much of their day sitting at desks.

In terms of mental health , homework can become a significant source of stress—not just for children, but for families as a whole. In many households, the nightly homework routine turns into a battleground, with parents and children feeling frustrated, exhausted, and disconnected. 

Physical symptoms of stress like stomach problems and sleep deprivation are not uncommon, and these can have lasting effects on a child’s well-being.

I’ve had parents tell me how much they dread homework time because it creates tension in their home, and as a teacher, that is heartbreaking to hear. 

Ultimately, young children need space to explore their world in ways that are developmentally appropriate. When homework eats into that time, it deprives them of opportunities to grow in areas that are just as important—if not more so—than academic achievement.

It’s time to rethink the purpose of homework for elementary students and consider what is truly best for their development.

Can Homework Cause Anxiety

Homework can often become a significant source of anxiety for children , especially when they feel overwhelmed by the pressure to complete assignments after an already long school day. 

Many young children struggle with balancing the demands of homework with their need for relaxation and play, leading to feelings of frustration and stress.

The fear of making mistakes, not meeting expectations, or not finishing on time can cause children to internalize a sense of failure or inadequacy, even at an early age.

This anxiety not only affects their academic performance but can also seep into their overall well-being, disrupting sleep, affecting their mood, and diminishing their natural enthusiasm for learning. 

Over time, the constant pressure of homework can turn what should be a joyful pursuit of knowledge into a source of dread, creating a negative association with school and learning.

Why Family Time Matters More Than Homework

One of the most critical lessons I’ve learned as both an educator and a parent is that family time often holds far more value for a child’s growth than any worksheet ever could. 

Elementary-aged children thrive on connection, play, and unstructured moments with the people they love most. Yet, for many families, the pressures of homework steal this precious time away, contributing to a lack of balance between school and family life.

When we prioritize homework over time together as a family, we miss out on some of the most powerful learning opportunities that childhood has to offer.

The Value of Family Time

Family time is where some of the most profound learning happens—learning that goes beyond academics and touches the heart of what it means to be human. It’s during these moments that children feel secure, loved, and understood. 

Whether it’s talking around the dinner table, playing a game together, or simply sharing a story before bed, these interactions build emotional resilience and strengthen family bonds.

Research supports this as well. Studies have shown that children who spend more time engaging with their familie s are more emotionally stable, perform better socially, and develop stronger cognitive abilities. 

Family time fosters the development of life skills that can’t be measured by a standardized test—skills like empathy, communication, problem-solving, and patience. These are the very qualities that help children grow into well-rounded, confident individuals.

When the evening is filled with homework, these opportunities for connection often disappear. Instead of discussing the day or laughing together, the focus shifts to checking off assignments. 

This often leads to a sense of disconnection and even resentment, particularly when children struggle with the work or feel pressure to meet academic expectations.

The Role of Play in Learning

Play is an essential part of learning , especially for young children. Through play, kids naturally explore their world, experiment with ideas, and develop critical thinking skills.

 In fact, many of the problem-solving skills that we hope to teach through homework can be acquired far more effectively through imaginative play, building projects, and outdoor exploration.

Play also promotes creativity and resilience—two traits that are fundamental to lifelong learning. When children are free to play, they learn to take risks, deal with failure, and try new approaches. 

These are lessons that are difficult to teach through structured assignments but come naturally through the unstructured, joyful moments of play.

In contrast, traditional homework often stifles creativity. Repetitive tasks like worksheets or rote memorization do little to encourage innovative thinking or curiosity. In fact, they can dampen a child’s enthusiasm for learning altogether. 

The real learning happens when kids are given the space to pursue their own interests, ask questions, and engage with the world around them.

Creating Meaningful Experiences

So, what should families do instead of focusing on homework? The answer is simple: create meaningful experiences together. These don’t have to be grand or elaborate. 

Sometimes the most impactful moments come from the simplest activities —cooking dinner together, going for a walk, or working on a puzzle as a family.

These shared experiences are the foundation of a child’s development. They teach life skills in a way that’s engaging and meaningful.

For example, cooking together can teach math through measuring ingredients, science through understanding how things cook, and even history and culture through trying new recipes. Going for a walk outside can spark conversations about nature, exercise, and mindfulness. 

These moments foster curiosity and help children develop a love of learning that extends beyond the classroom.

By prioritizing family time, we are giving our children something far more valuable than any homework assignment could offer. 

We are showing them that they are more than just students; they are individuals whose interests, emotions, and well-being matter. In these moments, we nurture their whole selves, not just their academic skills.

Alternatives to Homework for Elementary Children

If we want to move away from the traditional homework model, it’s important to have alternatives that nurture our children’s growth in ways that feel enriching and meaningful. 

The good news is that there are countless ways to encourage learning outside of homework , many of which tap into children’s natural curiosity and love for discovery.

These alternatives not only reinforce the skills children need but also give them the freedom to explore, create, and enjoy childhood.

Encouraging Independent Play and Exploration

One of the most powerful alternatives to homework is independent play . When children are given the space and time to play freely, they engage in a form of learning that is deeply personal and developmentally appropriate. 

Play allows them to test boundaries, experiment with ideas, and develop problem-solving skills—all without the constraints of structured assignments.

Independent play builds confidence and fosters a growth mindset , as children learn to navigate challenges on their own terms. 

Whether they’re building a fort out of couch cushions, creating a masterpiece with chalk on the driveway, or pretending to be explorers in their backyard, they’re learning how to think critically, solve problems, and stay resilient when things don’t go as planned.

Allowing children time for this kind of play gives them a chance to recharge from the structured demands of school and tap into their own creativity and imagination.

It also encourages them to become self-directed learners, which is an essential skill for their future academic and personal success.

Fostering a Love of Learning Outside the Classroom

Another alternative to homework is fostering a love of learning through everyday experiences.

We often think of learning as something that happens only in the classroom or through formal assignments, but in reality, children are constantly learning from the world around them.

Parents can support this by encouraging their children to explore their interests and ask questions. 

For example, if your child is fascinated by dinosaurs, take them to the library to find books on the subject or watch a documentary together.

If they’re curious about how things work, spend time tinkering with household objects or building simple machines together.

These activities teach valuable lessons and build knowledge in ways that are fun and engaging for children.

The goal is to create an environment where learning feels like a natural part of life rather than something that happens only when there’s a worksheet in front of them.

By pursuing their passions and engaging in hands-on learning experiences, children develop a deeper love for knowledge and a stronger sense of curiosity that will serve them well throughout their lives.

Prioritizing Social and Emotional Learning

Elementary-aged children are at a critical stage in their social and emotional development, and this is an area that deserves just as much attention as academic skills. 

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is about helping children develop self-awareness, manage their emotions, build empathy, and establish healthy relationships.

These are essential life skills that cannot be taught through traditional homework. Instead of worksheets, families can focus on activities that promote social and emotional learning.

This might include family discussions where children are encouraged to express their feelings and listen to others, cooperative games that emphasize teamwork and communication, or community service projects that build empathy and a sense of responsibility to others. 

These activities help children learn to navigate the social world with confidence and compassion.

They also teach children how to manage stress, resolve conflicts, and make thoughtful decisions—skills that are crucial for both their personal happiness and their future success.

What Parents Can Do to Advocate for Less Homework

As parents, we hold incredible power to influence the educational experiences of our children. If you believe that traditional homework doesn’t serve your child’s best interests , you’re not alone—and you don’t have to accept it as a given.

By advocating for a more balanced, thoughtful approach to learning, you can help shape a school environment that prioritizes well-being, curiosity, and real-world learning.

Here’s how you can start advocating for less homework and creating a home environment that supports learning without the pressure of assignments.

Can Parents Opt-Out of Homework

The idea that parents can opt out of homework is gaining traction as more families recognize that traditional assignments may not always serve their child’s best interests, especially in elementary school.

Some schools and teachers are open to this option, allowing parents to decide whether or not their child completes homework based on what works best for their family. Parents who opt out often do so to prioritize their child’s well-being, choosing to focus on unstructured play, family time, or personalized learning activities instead.

By opting out, parents take an active role in shaping their child’s education , advocating for a more balanced approach that nurtures both academic and personal growth.

However, it’s important for parents to communicate openly with teachers and schools about their decision, ensuring that everyone is aligned on supporting the child’s overall learning journey.

Communicating with Teachers and Schools

One of the most effective steps parents can take is to start a conversation with their child’s teacher. 

As a former teacher myself, I can tell you that most educators are open to feedback and genuinely want what’s best for their students. Often, teachers assign homework out of habit or due to school policies, not necessarily because they believe it’s the best method for every child.

Frame it as a partnership. 

Express your concerns in a respectful, constructive manner, and focus on your child’s well-being.

For example, you might say, “I’ve noticed that after a long day at school, my child seems exhausted and overwhelmed by homework. I’m wondering if there are ways we can work together to adjust the homework load or explore alternatives that are more beneficial for their development.”

Grab my Opt Out of Homework template here!

Be prepared to offer suggestions. 

Perhaps your child could engage in more hands-on learning at home , or the teacher could suggest activities that align with classroom content but don’t involve traditional homework.

You might also advocate for more reading time or projects that encourage creativity and independent thinking, rather than worksheets and busywork.

If your child’s school has a formal homework policy, it might be helpful to gather other like-minded parents and approach the administration collectively. 

Thankfully, many schools are rethinking their homework policies in light of recent years of research, and showing that there’s parent support for a change can help drive that discussion.

Creating a Home Environment That Supports Learning Without Homework

Even if homework is a part of your child’s school routine, you can create a home environment that balances those demands with opportunities for unstructured learning. One of the best ways to do this is by cultivating a home that encourages exploration, curiosity, and creativity .

Start by making learning a natural part of everyday life. Fill your home with books, art supplies , puzzles, building materials, and other resources that spark interest. 

Minimize toys that do the work for the child (toys should do no more than 10% of the work!), and create a space for play that is minimal and simple. Encourage your children to ask questions, explore their passions, and dive into projects that excite them.

The goal is to make learning feel less like a task and more like a natural extension of their curiosity.

Another key is to prioritize downtime. Make sure your children have time each day to unwind, play freely, and engage in activities that bring them joy. This could mean family game nights, outdoor play, or even just quiet time to read or daydream (remember, boredom is GOOD for kids!). 

When children have time to relax and recharge, they are better equipped to face the challenges of school and life with a positive attitude.

It’s also important to model a love of learning yourself. Let your children see you engaging in activities that involve discovery and growth—whether that’s reading a book, working on a hobby, or trying something new. 

When children see that learning doesn’t end when school is over, they are more likely to adopt that mindset themselves.

Finding a Balance That Works for Your Family

Ultimately, every family is different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to homework (or anything for that matter!).

The key is finding a balance that works for your family’s unique needs and values. If you feel that your child’s homework load is affecting their well-being or family life, it’s okay to set boundaries.

You might choose to limit the hours of homework your child spends each evening, allowing them to stop after a certain point and focus on other activities.

Advocating for less homework doesn’t mean you’re against education—it means you’re for a more holistic approach to learning that respects your child’s developmental needs.

As parents, we have the right to prioritize what we believe is best for our children, even when it means challenging the status quo. 

By taking small steps, whether that’s having a conversation with a teacher or shifting the focus at home, you can help create a more balanced, enriching experience for your child—one that goes beyond the traditional homework model and nurtures their full potential.

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