How Much Homework Do American Kids Do?
Various factors, from race to the number of years a teacher has been in the classroom, affect a child's homework load.
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In his Atlantic essay, Karl Taro Greenfeld laments his 13-year-old daughter's heavy homework load. As an eighth grader at a New York middle school, Greenfeld’s daughter averaged about three hours of homework per night and adopted mantras like “memorization, not rationalization” to help her get it all done. Tales of the homework-burdened American student have become common, but are these stories the exception or the rule?
A 2007 Metlife study found that 45 percent of students in grades three to 12 spend more than an hour a night doing homework, including the six percent of students who report spending more than three hours a night on their homework. In the 2002-2003 school year, a study out of the University of Michigan found that American students ages six through 17 spent three hours and 38 minutes per week doing homework.
A range of factors plays into how much homework each individual student gets:
Older students do more homework than their younger counterparts.
This one is fairly obvious: The National Education Association recommends tha
Poor Students Need Homework
Of all the well-intentioned but unhelpful things people have ever said about education, perhaps the least helpful was from the father of progressive education himself. “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community,” wrote John Dewey. “Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” How Much is Too Much?: An
