homework is cruel

Ethics and Morality

Homework: an unnecessary evil, surprising findings from new research challenge the conventional wisdom (again).

Posted November 24, 2012

A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study -- and a reminder of the importance of doing just that: reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.

Let’s start by reviewing what we know from earlier investigations.[1] First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive. There does seem to be a correlation between homework and standardized test scores, but (a) it isn’t strong, meaning that homework doesn’t explain much of the variance in scores, (b) one prominent researcher, Timothy Keith, who did find a solid correlation, returned to the topic a decade later to enter more variables into the equation simultaneously, only to discover that the improved study showed that homework had no effect after all[2], and (c) at best we’re only talking about a correlation -- things that go together -- without having proved that doing more homework causes test scores to go up. (Take ten seconds to see if you can come up with other variables that might be driving both of these things.)

Third, when homework is related to test scores, the connection tends to be strongest -- or, actually, least tenuous -- with math. If homework turns out to be unnecessary for students to succeed in that subject, it’s probably unnecessary everywhere.

Along comes a new study, then, that focuses on the neighborhood where you’d be most likely to find a positive effect if one was there to be found: math and science homework in high school. Like most recent studies, this one by Adam Maltese and his colleagues[3] doesn’t provide rich descriptive analyses of what students and teachers are doing. Rather, it offers an aerial view, the kind preferred by economists, relying on two large datasets (from the National Education Longitudinal Study [NELS] and the Education Longitudinal Study [ELS]). Thousands of students are asked one question -- How much time do you spend on homework? -- and statistical tests are then performed to discover if there’s a relationship between that number and how they fared in their classes and on standardized tests.

It’s easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside. When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the NELS study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the ELS study said 60 minutes. There’s no good reason for such a striking discrepancy, nor do the authors offer any explanation. They just move right along -- even though those estimates raise troubling questions about the whole project, and about all homework studies that are based on self-report. Which number is more accurate? Or are both of them way off? There’s no way of knowing. And because all the conclusions are tied to that number, all the conclusions may be completely invalid.[4]

But let’s pretend that we really do know how much homework students do. Did doing it make any difference? The Maltese et al. study looked at the effect on test scores and on grades. They emphasized the latter, but let’s get the former out of the way first.

Was there a correlation between the amount of homework that high school students reported doing and their scores on standardized math and science tests? Yes, and it was statistically significant but “very modest”: Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test. Is that really worth the frustration, exhaustion, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, and potential diminution of interest in learning? And how meaningful a measure were those tests in the first place, since, as the authors concede, they’re timed measures of mostly mechanical skills? (Thus, a headline that reads “Study finds homework boosts achievement” can be translated as “A relentless regimen of after-school drill-and-skill can raise scores a wee bit on tests of rote learning.”)

But it was grades, not tests, that Maltese and his colleagues really cared about. They were proud of having looked at transcript data in order to figure out “the exact grade a student received in each class [that he or she] completed” so they could compare that to how much homework the student did. Previous research has looked only at students’ overall grade-point averages.

And the result of this fine-tuned investigation? There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”

This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard. Frankly, it surprised me, too. When you measure “achievement” in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result -- not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework. Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades?

And yet it wasn’t. Again. Even in high school. Even in math. The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework. (That’s not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field. We got a hint of that from Timothy Keith’s reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect.[5])

Maltese and his colleagues did their best to reframe these results to minimize the stunning implications.[6] Like others in this field, they seem to have approached the topic already convinced that homework is necessary and potentially beneficial, so the only question we should ask is How -- not whether -- to assign it. But if you read the results rather than just the authors’ spin on them -- which you really need to do with the work of others working in this field as well[7] -- you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.

If experience is any guide, however, many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world” (read: the pointless tasks they’ll be forced to do after they leave school). Those open to evidence, however, have been presented this fall with yet another finding that fails to find any meaningful benefit even when the study is set up to give homework every benefit of the doubt.

1. It’s important to remember that some people object to homework for reasons that aren’t related to the dispute about whether research might show that homework provides academic benefits. They argue that (a) six hours a day of academics are enough, and kids should have the chance after school to explore other interests and develop in other ways -- or be able simply to relax in the same way that most adults like to relax after work; and (b) the decision about what kids do during family time should be made by families, not schools. Let’s put these arguments aside for now, even though they ought to be (but rarely are) included in any discussion of the topic.

2. Valerie A. Cool and Timothy Z. Keith, “Testing a Model of School Learning: Direct and Indirect Effects on Academic Achievement,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 16 (1991): 28-44.

3. Adam V. Maltese, Robert H. Tai, and Xitao Fan, “When Is Homework Worth the Time? Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math,” The High School Journal , October/November 2012: 52-72. Abstract at http://ow.ly/fxhOV .

4. Other research has found little or no correlation between how much homework students report doing and how much homework their parents say they do. When you use the parents’ estimates, the correlation between homework and achievement disappears. See Harris Cooper, Jorgianne Civey Robinson, and Erika A. Patall, “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?: A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003,” Review of Educational Research 76 (2006): 1-62.

5. To put it the other way around, studies finding the biggest effect are those that capture less of what goes on in the real world by virtue of being so brief. View a small, unrepresentative slice of a child’s life and it may appear that homework makes a contribution to achievement; keep watching, and that contribution is eventually revealed to be illusory. See data provided -- but not interpreted this way -- by Cooper, The Battle Over Homework, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2001).

6. Even the title of their article reflects this: They ask “When Is Homework Worth the Time?” rather than “ Is Homework Worth the Time?” This bias might seem a bit surprising in the case of the study’s second author, Robert H. Tai. He had contributed earlier to another study whose results similarly ended up raising questions about the value of homework. Students enrolled in college physics courses were surveyed to determine whether any features of their high school physics courses were now of use to them. At first a very small relationship was found between the amount of homework that students had had in high school and how well they were currently faring. But once the researchers controlled for other variables, such as the type of classes they had taken, that relationship disappeared, just as it had for Keith (see note 2). The researchers then studied a much larger population of students in college science classes – and found the same thing: Homework simply didn’t help. See Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai, “Success in Introductory College Physics: The Role of High School Preparation,” Science Education 85 [2001]: 111-36.

7. See chapter 4 (“’Studies Show…’ -- Or Do They?”) of my book The Homework Myth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006), an adaptation of which appears as “Abusing Research: The Study of Homework and Other Examples,” Phi Delta Kappan , September 2006 [ www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/research.htm ].

8. On the alleged value of practice, see The Homework Myth , pp. 106-18, also available at http://bit.ly/9dXqCj .

Alfie Kohn writes about behavior and education. His books include Feel-Bad Education , The Homework Myth , and What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?

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Why more and more teachers are joining the anti-homework movement

The word homework doesn’t just elicit groans from students. Many veteran educators aren’t fans of it either.

Barbara Tollison, a high school English teacher with nearly four decades in the classroom, stopped assigning homework five years ago. In lieu of writing papers, she asks her 10th graders in San Marcos, California, to read more books before bed.

“For the kids who understand the information, additional practice is unnecessary,” she told TODAY Parents . “The kids who need more support are going to go home and not do it right. It's just going to confuse them more. They don’t have the understanding and they need guidance.”

Tollison is part of a growing movement that believes learners can thrive academically without homework. According to Alfie Kohn, author of “ The Homework Myth ,” there’s never a good excuse for making kids work a second shift of academics in elementary and middle school.

“In high school, it’s a little more nuanced,” Kohn told TODAY Parents . “Some research has found a tiny correlation between doing more homework and doing better on standardized tests . But No. 1, standardized tests are a lousy measure of learning. No. 2, the correlation is small. And No. 3, it doesn’t prove a causal relationship. In other words, just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.”

Kohn noted that “newer, better” studies are showing that the downside of homework is just as profound in 16-year-olds as it is in 8-year-olds, in terms of causing causing anxiety, a loss of interest in learning and family conflict.

Parents Is homework robbing your family of joy? You're not alone

“For my book, I interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside,” he shared.

“There just isn’t a good argument in favor of homework,” Kohn said.

Katie Sluiter, an 8th grade teacher in Michigan, couldn’t agree more. She believes that the bulk of instruction and support should happen in the classroom.

“What I realized early on in my career is that the kids who don’t need the practice are the only ones doing their homework,” Sluiter told TODAY Parents .

Sluiter added that homework is stressful and inequitable. Many children, especially those from lower-income families, have little chance of being successful with work being sent home.

“So many things are out of the student’s control, like the ability to have a quiet place to do homework,” Sluiter explained. “In my district, there are many parents that don’t speak any English, so they’re not going to be able to help with their child’s social studies homework. Some kids are responsible for watching their younger siblings after school.”

Parents Too much homework? Study shows elementary kids get 3 times more than they should

Sluiter also doesn’t want to add “an extra pile of stress” to already over-scheduled lives.

“Middle school is hard enough without worrying, ‘Did I get my conjunctions sheet done?’” she said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s just too much. We need to let them be kids."

Kohn, who has written 14 books on parenting and education, previously told TODAY that moms and dads should speak up on behalf of their children.

"If your child's teacher never assigns homework, take a moment to thank them for doing what's in your child's best interest — and for acknowledging that families, not schools, ought to decide what happens during family time," he said. "If your child is getting homework, organize a bunch of parents to meet with the teacher and administrators — not to ask, 'Why so much?' but, given that the research says it's all pain and no gain, to ask, 'Why is there any?'"

Related video:

Rachel Paula Abrahamson is a lifestyle reporter who writes for the parenting, health and shop verticals. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and elsewhere. Rachel lives in the Boston area with her husband and their two daughters. Follow her on Instagram .

Does homework really work?

by: Leslie Crawford | Updated: December 12, 2023

Print article

You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain? Is this just too much homework?

However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.

But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in their 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?

Homework haterz

Whether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”

Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?

Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework , The Homework Myth , and The Case Against Homework the film Race to Nowhere , and the anguished parent essay “ My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me ” make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.

One Canadian couple took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all homework.

So what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?

How much is too much?

To answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting and examining hundreds of studies. Chris Drew Ph.D., founder and editor at The Helpful Professor recently compiled multiple statistics revealing the folly of today’s after-school busy work. Does any of the data he listed below ring true for you?

• 45 percent of parents think homework is too easy for their child, primarily because it is geared to the lowest standard under the Common Core State Standards .

• 74 percent of students say homework is a source of stress , defined as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

• Students in high-performing high schools spend an average of 3.1 hours a night on homework , even though 1 to 2 hours is the optimal duration, according to a peer-reviewed study .

Not included in the list above is the fact many kids have to abandon activities they love — like sports and clubs — because homework deprives them of the needed time to enjoy themselves with other pursuits.

Conversely, The Helpful Professor does list a few pros of homework, noting it teaches discipline and time management, and helps parents know what’s being taught in the class.

The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is listed on the National Education Association’s website and the National Parent Teacher Association’s website , but few schools follow this rule.

Do you think your child is doing excessive homework? Harris Cooper Ph.D., author of a meta-study on homework , recommends talking with the teacher. “Often there is a miscommunication about the goals of homework assignments,” he says. “What appears to be problematic for kids, why they are doing an assignment, can be cleared up with a conversation.” Also, Cooper suggests taking a careful look at how your child is doing the assignments. It may seem like they’re taking two hours, but maybe your child is wandering off frequently to get a snack or getting distracted.

Less is often more

If your child is dutifully doing their work but still burning the midnight oil, it’s worth intervening to make sure your child gets enough sleep. A 2012 study of 535 high school students found that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body development.

For elementary school-age children, Cooper’s research at Duke University shows there is no measurable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, Cooper found there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, Cooper’s research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

Many schools are starting to act on this research. A Florida superintendent abolished homework in her 42,000 student district, replacing it with 20 minutes of nightly reading. She attributed her decision to “ solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students .”

More family time

A 2020 survey by Crayola Experience reports 82 percent of children complain they don’t have enough quality time with their parents. Homework deserves much of the blame. “Kids should have a chance to just be kids and do things they enjoy, particularly after spending six hours a day in school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth . “It’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.”

By far, the best replacement for homework — for both parents and children — is bonding, relaxing time together.

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Student Opinion

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.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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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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August 16, 2021

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in

by Sara M Moniuszko

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide-range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas over workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework .

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy work loads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace, says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression.

And for all the distress homework causes, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night.

"Most students, especially at these high-achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school ," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely, but to be more mindful of the type of work students go home with, suggests Kang, who was a high-school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework, I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the last two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic, making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized... sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking assignments up can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

©2021 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Is My Kid the Asshole?

Is Homework Helpful or Harmful?

Research suggests homework doesn’t make young kids smarter. but it may widen the achievement gap..

Welcome to  Is My Kid the Asshole? , a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can  read more about here . If you like it, please  subscribe  and/or  share  this post with someone else who would too.

Hello! I’m excited to be sharing my inaugural Dear Melinda column . This week it’s free for everyone, but next week my Friday column will only go out to paid subscribers , so don’t forget to subscribe. These columns will address a broad range of parenting questions with science.

Right before the pandemic hit, I dug into the science of homework. I had heard from parents that many elementary-aged kids were getting more than the recommended amount — the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association have long advised that students should get a maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level per night, meaning that first graders should have at most 10 minutes, second graders 20 minutes, and so on — and I wondered: What do we know about how homework affects young kids? Does it help them learn? Does it pose any downsides?

Now that kids are back in school again (and my kids, at least, are once again getting homework), I thought it would be a good time to share what I learned.

First, it’s important to point out that kids didn’t always get homework. In the early 20th century, educators and politicians were adamantly against it. The California state legislature passed a law banning homework for children under the age of 15 in 1901, and in 1930, the American Child Health Association lumped homework in with child labor as the “chief causes of the high death and morbidity rates from tuberculosis and heart disease among adolescents.” Oh my.

Everything changed when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Worries mounted that American children weren’t as smart as their Russian counterparts. At that point, “homework became an instrument of national defense policy,” explained Carnegie Mellon historian Steven Schlossman and education researcher Brian Gill in a 2011 paper . From 1952 to 1962, the proportion of homework that high schoolers reported doing every night tripled. It dipped again in the anti-establishment ’60s, but in 1983, President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education lamented  that “our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world” and called for more homework to help address that concern.

All that is to say: Arguments over homework aren’t new. What’s interesting about this historical back-and-forth, though, is that it has centered almost entirely around homework in high school. At no point did educators and politicians argue that elementary school students should be doing homework. Until very recently.

In 1984, just over 40 percent of American 9-year-olds were doing up to an hour of homework a night. In 2012, that percentage had risen to 57 percent. (These may well be underestimates, too: The numbers are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, which ask students how much homework they had the night before, but teachers often ease up on homework the night before standardized tests.) A 2015 survey of nearly 1,200 parents in Rhode Island revealed that even kindergartners were spending an average of 25 minutes each night on schoolwork.  

Pro-homework experts argue that, in addition to helping young kids master lessons, homework is crucial because it teaches self-discipline, responsibility, resilience and conscientiousness. The anti-homework camp, on the other hand, thinks it’s busy work that does more harm than good: “Young children need time outside to move their bodies, free time to recover from the structure and demands placed on them, and quiet time to be alone with their thoughts,” said Emily W. King, a child psychologist in private practice in Raleigh, N.C., and a former school psychologist. Kids also need sleep, and yet surveys show that the more homework kids have, the less sleep they get.

In my house, there’s a four-hour window between the end of the school day and the beginning of the bedtime shuffle. After squeezing in sports, dinner and showers for my kids, there’s barely any time for downtime or imaginative play. The last thing I want to do is sit my kids back down to do more schoolwork.

Plus, overall, the research suggests that homework in elementary school doesn’t do much good.

In middle school and high school, research does generally find a positive association between homework and achievement (though the effects can be hard to tease out; kids who do more homework might fare better because they might come from higher-income families, attend better schools, or are simply more motivated). But that is not the case in elementary school.

In what is by far the most comprehensive analysis of the research on homework, published in 2006, Harris Cooper, a neuroscientist and social psychologist at Duke, and his colleagues found no relationship between the amount of homework elementary school students did and their overall academic achievement. In 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, average mathematics test scores were actually lower among fourth graders whose teachers assigned more than 30 minutes of math homework a day.

“There is a misconception that the more homework you give, the more rigorous the education,” said Cathy Vatterott, a professor of education at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a former middle school teacher and principal.

And yet some experts keep insisting on its value, arguing that homework helps children learn complex tasks and develop resilience. Cooper, the neuroscientist whose study found no relationship between homework and achievement in elementary school, agrees, arguing that homework builds conscientiousness. 

I certainly want my kids to develop these skills. But when I hunted for research to support this assertion, all I could find was one 2017 study reporting that German fifth graders who spent more effort on their homework also became more conscientious over the next three years compared to students who put less effort into their homework. When I asked Cooper why, if homework makes elementary school kids more conscientious, this skill isn’t reflected in better academic performance, he told me it’s partly because kids aren’t doing enough homework for it to show an effect.

Even if homework does teach kids to be conscientious, other activities achieve the same goal. “Washing the dishes will teach discipline,” says Barbara Stengel, an education professor emerita at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education. “Making your bed in the morning will teach discipline.” My son developed resilience playing soccer (especially since his team usually lost); my daughter has learned self-control helping her dad make pancakes.

And too much homework can deprive kids of activities that we know are enriching. Childhood is the one and only period in which we get to enjoy imaginative play and explore diverse interests, yet adults seem hellbent on taking that freedom away and starting the never-ending grind of “real life” ever earlier. It’s cruel — and counterproductive. Studies have shown, for instance, that young kids learn more academic skills when they attend play-based schools rather than more academically oriented schools.

Many educators and psychologists therefore argue that elementary school homework is, for most students, more of a burden than a boon. This can be especially true for disadvantaged kids, who may not have a quiet place in which to do their homework, or who have to look after their siblings, or who don’t have parents (or tutors) available to help with confusing assignments. In these situations, homework can become a major source of stress, a situation in which “all we’re doing is taking family time away, reinforcing failure and causing confusion,” Stengel said.

Some research even suggests that homework worsens the achievement gap, which is as vast now as it was back in 1954.

In a 2011 study , the economist Marte Ronning analyzed data from more than 4,000 Dutch elementary school students, and found that in classes that assigned homework, the test score gap between the highest and lowest-achieving students was larger than it was in classes that did not assign homework.

In another 2011 study of American students, the sociologist Jonathan Daw analyzed how homework shapes individual achievement over time, concluding that homework widens the achievement gap in math, science and reading in secondary school.

A recent study published in American Sociological Review reveals an even more disturbing phenomenon — that disadvantaged kids, who often have the most trouble completing their homework, are also punished for their homework failings more than their wealthier classmates are. The research was conducted before the pandemic by Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University. She spent two and a half years studying the third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classes at a public elementary school in a suburb in the Northeast. She conducted in-depth interviews with teachers, administrators, parents and students, observed classes and collected data.

In the classes, the standard punishment for forgotten or incomplete homework was for students to stay in for recess and receive a lower grade. But high-income students, she found, were far less likely to be punished for missing homework than low-income students were.

Calarco attributes this discrepancy in part to teacher incentives. It’s not hard for teachers to discern their students’ economic backgrounds; in fact, it’s part of their job to know what students are dealing with at home. And it’s especially obvious which kids have the wealthiest parents: These are the parents who are most likely to volunteer their time in the classroom and raise money for the school as members of the parent-teacher association. Teachers, Calarco found, treat these children differently. The teachers know it, too, but they don’t feel they have a choice.

“They want to enforce the rules,” she explained, “but at the same time, they worry that if they do enforce those homework rules, they will end up creating conflict with especially the highly involved, privileged parents on whom they are most dependent.”

Calarco speculates that teachers may also subconsciously believe that poorer students needed more strict rules, because they assume the children are not getting that structure from their parents.

One fifth grade student Calarco interviewed for her study was a lower-income student whose mother ran a home day care. When he got home from school each day, he was surrounded by the children his mother cared for, many of whom didn’t leave until 6:30. His mother would try to get him to do his homework anyway, but he would often nod off, get distracted or need to help his ailing grandfather, who also lived with them. By the time she could really sit him down to work on it, it would be 8:30 or 9, and often he wouldn’t get it done. His teacher concluded that “school just isn’t a priority in their house,” and rarely granted him exemptions from the homework rules.

“My sense,” Calarco told me, is that the teachers thought the poorer kids “needed stability and consistency and rules” in a way that higher-income students did not. “And they made those judgments even when — and sometimes because — they knew what those students were facing at home,” she added.

This study is small, of course, based on just one school. But with the other evidence, it makes me wonder: Given that one of our country’s key educational goals is to close the achievement gap, do we really want to be doubling down on an educational tool that seems to do the exact opposite?

There’s a better way forward. Some schools and districts are cutting down on the more rote forms of homework — worksheets and the like — in elementary school. In 2019, 16 percent of American fourth graders reported getting no math homework the night before, compared with only 4 percent in 2015. Instead, many schools are focusing homework assignments on reading, and sometimes that’s all they require.

It’s hard to know how homework amounts will shift now that kids are back in school this year. I hope that they will continue to follow a downward trajectory (and a very unscientific poll I conducted on Twitter yesterday suggests that so far this year, they are), but I worry that some schools will be so focused on catching kids up after last year that they might, instead, start to assign more. This could be an unwelcome burden for students who are already struggling with the transition back to school amid strict Covid-19 protocols.

But maybe, after such a trying year, schools will recognize that the emotional health of their students should be priority — and that homework doesn’t provide much of a benefit. My second grader has had upwards of 40 minutes of homework some nights this fall — one afternoon walking home from the school bus, she burst into tears over how much she had — but I was relieved to hear her teacher tell us during their virtual Curriculum Night earlier this week that if homework causes our kids stress or frustration, we should skip it. We will absolutely do this when it feels warranted — and given what I know from the research, I will not second-guess my decision.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my newsletter ! Remember, too, that Founding Members will receive a free signed copy of my book, HOW TO RAISE KIDS WHO AREN’T ASSHOLES.

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Using E-Rate to Address the Homework Gap

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To the Editor:

Anyone concerned about the digital divide and the risk of our most vulnerable students falling further behind amid the pandemic should applaud Jessica Rosenworcel’s efforts as the acting commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission to address the “homework gap.” (“ Acting FCC Chair: The ‘Homework Gap’ Is an ‘Especially Cruel’ Reality During the Pandemic ,” March 10, 2021).

The pandemic has made the homework gap and other inequities clearer to all Americans. Expanding the FCC’s E-rate program that currently makes lower-cost internet service available to schools and libraries to include home connectivity is a common-sense solution that will provide much-needed relief to the many communities that struggle with the challenges of the digital divide.

The Internet Society, a nonprofit which collaborates with communities to make the internet available to all, urges the FCC to provide funding for off-campus connectivity. But the agency should also waive limits from and provide funding for libraries and other anchor institutions that students and community members rely on for connectivity.

For example, the FCC should give special consideration to tribal broadband needs, in particular, by prioritizing a 5 percent set-aside of the expected available E-rate funding. Students on tribal lands desperately need internet access—without it, our most vulnerable students will never achieve school success. Failure to correct this problem will only deepen already entrenched systemic inequities in education and society at large.

Jane Coffin Senior Vice President of Internet Growth The Internet Society Reston, Va.

A version of this article appeared in the April 14, 2021 edition of Education Week as Using E-Rate to Address the Homework Gap

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Siegfried Engelmann: Homework is Cruel in the Primary Grades

Zig has just authored a new paper: Homework is Cruel in the Primary Grades. In his paper, Engelmann outlines the need for sound instructional practices versus the traditional homework regimen. Click here to visit his site at www.zigsite.com to download his latest paper and learn why those who champion homework discriminate against at-risk populations!

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All Homework Should Be Banned

Radio talk show host

My phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree.

As the host of a three-hour mid-morning talk show on CJAD radio in Montreal , I am used to dealing with topics that spark an animated reaction. However, I was not prepared this morning for the deluge of emotion when I suggested that all homework should be banned.

My proposal was simple enough: No more homework, not elementary school and not in high school.

Keep in mind that I am not talking about reading at home or working on a special project. That would be fine. I am talking about assignments that have to be done at home and handed in to a flustered teacher who hands them back days later when the material is long forgotten.

Doesn't homework help students get better marks? One study after another, including the latest one from the Australian Institute of Family Studies , is proof that it does nothing of the kind.

Not only is homework unhelpful, it's harmful.

For 30 minutes, one call after another proved that the idea of a ban struck a chord with parents. One mother of a 7-year-old girl was practically in tears when she told me her daughter, who used to love school, now hates it. Why? Because she is forced to do 90 minutes of homework assignments every day!

No wonder she hates school. She is seven, for heaven's sake. The child gets up at 7:30 in the morning. She's in school all day long. The bus picks her up at 3:45 to take her home. By the time she is dropped off, it's nearly 5:00. That day is long enough. She should not be forced to work for another hour and a half.

Give her time to be a child, to spend quality time with her family, to have fun with her mom without arguing day in and day out. If she knows the work, there is no need to do more of it. If she does not understand, there's no point in having her repeat her mistakes

Shocked at the prospect of doing away with something that is such a staple of virtually every school system across the continent, another parent called me to protest.

She said, "What are you talking about? I mean... we have to have homework. Otherwise, the kids won't have structure and they will just come home and fool around."

Good. That's exactly what they should be doing. They deal with structure from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. That's enough structure for an adult, much less a child.

It's time to 'fess up about homework. It is forced labor. Unpaid forced labor. Homework assignments provide precious little benefit and they cause unnecessary stress for the child and for the parent. Good teachers can get the job done in class. Those who can't just assign more homework.

Some schools are finally pondering the possibility of eliminating weekend or holiday homework assignments. That's too namby-pamby. Not good enough. It's time to stop the addiction to homework cold turkey.

If a student wishes to review some of the work of the day on their own, great. If the kids have to study for a test or exam -- no problem. But those millions of hours of useless make-work homework assignments? They have caused misery enough.

Homework is cruel and unusual punishment. Banning it will improve the life of students, parents and teachers in one fell swoop.

Reading at home or perhaps playing a musical instrument connected with school work, that's fine, but the homework assignments have got to go.

What will these kids do with all their new-found spare time? They will relax; they can have some fun; they can play outside; and spend time with their friends. Letting kids be kids -- what a novel concept.

After hearing what parents were telling me, I want to help them get rid of homework. We will start with Montreal. If -- make that when -- we succeed, perhaps we will set the example for the rest of North America.

If you agree, tell your friends and neighbors. If you don't agree, you better get back to the kitchen table. The homework is waiting.

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Homework, a Cruel Punishment?

Was homework actually created as a punishment? Or is that just a common misconception? For decades, students have been tortured with homework that can take them anywhere between five minutes to two hours to complete. Students are becoming more and more stressed, and spend an average of seven hours a week on homework.  

Roberto Nevilis is considered the first real “inventor” of homework. According to college-homework-help.org , Nevilis is said to have created it as a punishment for students who were underachieving in his class, but those who were succeeding were exempt from completing these tasks. But the truth is, the earliest signs of education dated back to the Sumerian civilization. There are said to be houses of clay tablets with student exercises of reading and writing scratched onto them. 

Everyone knows students get stressed out from the amount of homework they are assigned, but does everyone know the physical struggle students go through? “In 2013, research conducted at Stanford University found that students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, a lack of balance in their lives, and alienation from society.” This study proves that homework has more of an effect on students than teachers realize. Students have an average of more than three hours of homework each night, adding up to an average of seven hours per week. 

The stress that comes from loads of homework can cause students to become sleep-deprived, which can cause a decrease in their performance in school. “When it came to stress, more than 70 percent of students said they were “often or always stressed over schoolwork,” with 56 percent listing homework as a primary stressor. Less than one percent of the students said homework was not a stressor,” says Sandra Levy from healthline.com.  

Every day students come home after hours of learning, to sit and again force themselves to learn some more. With an average of three hours on homework a night plus seven hours of school, students nowadays are involved with extracurriculars more than ever, which adds even more stress on students, giving them more work than the average student has. According to the United States Census Bureau, 57 percent of students between the ages of six to 17 participate in extracurricular activities. With all of this, students are being deprived of their social lives and instead stuck with the stress/anxiety levels of an adult. As the stress levels rise and the hours of sleep drop, students are receiving less and less sleep every night. Instead of getting a healthy 8-10 hours of sleep, which only 15 percent of teens receive, they are instead getting a maximum of six hours, which only 85 percent of teens currently receive. If teachers were less strict on students with homework, grades would be higher and students’ stress levels would be lower. 

Homework is an unneeded stressor that could be decreased by the amounts given. When the stress levels of kids get the best of them and restrict them from being a teenager and living their life, it has gone too far. The student should feel comfortable with their work and not have to stay up for hours finishing obsessive homework assignments. 

Sophomore Gia Figueroa is a staff writer for the 2019-2020 Colonel. She dances three days a week at a dance studio in Mystic taking four different classes. In her free time, you can usually find her hanging out with friends, painting, or just watching Netflix.

Sophomore Erin Buller is a staff writer for the 2019-2020 Colonel. She focuses mainly on cheerleading but also participates in volleyball in her free time. When she is not on the court or on the sidelines, she is at home watching a football game or the same YouTube channel for the 7th time.

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Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful For Students (2023)

Is homework helpful or harmful? Well, homework has become one of the most debatable topics all around the world. Many people search on the internet for homework. Some people search for positive points and some people search for negative points of homework. 

If I talk about homework then it has many advantages and disadvantages. For students, it can be helpful or harmful.

In a positive way, homework can be valuable that can help students develop important skills and habits, improve their understanding of course material, and achieve better grades. Whether you are in elementary school, middle school, high school, or beyond, homework plays an important role. 

While homework can certainly have benefits, it can also have negative effects if it is not managed appropriately. When students are assigned too much homework, or when the assignments are overly difficult or not aligned with their skill level, they can experience a range of negative consequences. 

Excessive homework can lead to stress and burnout, reducing students’ motivation to learn and potentially leading to decreased academic performance. Also, too much homework can interfere with other important aspects of students’ lives, such as relationships, extracurricular activities, and physical and mental health.

In this blog, we will discuss some reasons of is homework helpful or harmful. So, let’s get started.

Let’s Learn About The History Of Homework

Table of Contents

If we talk about the invention of homework, then there is no exact date or year. According to our research, three names are being highlighted as responsible for the invention of homework in different research sources. Those three names are:

• Roberto Nevilis.
• Horace Mann.
• Pliny the Younger.

Roberto Nevilis

Roberto Nevilis was an Italian teacher. Many researchers state that Roberto invented homework back in 1905. At the same time, I have seen many articles claiming the invention year to be 1095. There is no fixed data available regarding this. 

According to research, homework was supposed to be a punishment for those students who underperformed in the class. The punishment was especially for lazy students. 

Horace Mann

Horace Mann is known as the “father of American education”. He was the first great American advocate of public education. He believed that education in a democratic society must be free for everyone. There should be no discrimination, and no particular section should be privileged. 

Many researchers say that Horace Mann was the one who invented homework for students. But according to our research, he invented the public school education system. 

Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger was the nickname of a lawyer, author, and magistrate of ancient Rome. The real name of this genius is Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus. It is said that he started giving homework to his followers. He asked his followers to practice public speaking at home to sharpen this skill. Through this activity, they will become more fluent in their speeches.

Purpose Of Homework

Homework was initially started to teach students various management skills. It might sound complicated or exaggerated, but it is true. School or college homework teaches students a lot of life lessons. Let’s know about the various purposes of homework.

• It helps you in managing your various activities according to your priorities.
• It helps the students to learn time management . They do homework on different subjects in a particular time period which helps them learn to manage their time. 
• Homework helps students to do prioritizations. They get to decide which work to finish first and which to put at the end.

Now that we know about homework, how it started, and why it started. Let’s talk about the main question of this article, “Is homework helpful or harmful”.

Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful For Students?

Many students are against homework culture. They find it stressful and time-consuming. So there is always a dilemma of “Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful”. Let’s get started with this discussion.

Why Homework Is Helpful?

• Preparation for exams: Regular homework assignments provide students with regular practice and help prepare them for tests and exams.
• Development of study habits: Consistent completion of homework can help students develop good study habits, such as time management, organization, and prioritization.
• Improvement in problem-solving skills: Homework often involves solving problems or answering questions, which can help students improve their problem-solving skills.
• Increased motivation: By seeing the direct connection between their homework and their grades, students can become more motivated to learn.
• Improved grades: Consistent completion of homework can lead to improved grades, as students are better able to understand and apply the material they have learned.
• Feedback and reflection: Homework provides students with the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, which can help them reflect on their progress and identify areas for improvement.
• Self-directed learning: By working independently on homework assignments, students can develop their self-directed learning skills and take more ownership of their education.
• A greater understanding of course material: By working through homework assignments, students can deepen their understanding of the course material.
• Increased independence: By taking responsibility for their own learning and completing homework assignments on their own, students can become more independent learners.
• Reinforcement of class material: Homework helps students review and reinforce the concepts and skills they learned in class.

Why Is Homework Harmful?

There are so many benefits of homework. But homework can also be harmful because of so many reasons. Let’s discuss the reasons why homework is harmful to students:

• Increased stress and burnout: Too much homework can lead to stress and burnout, reducing students’ motivation to learn and potentially leading to decreased academic performance.
• Interference with other activities: Too much homework can interfere with students’ ability to participate in other activities, such as sports, music, or hobbies, which are important for their physical, social, and emotional development.
• Lack of sleep: When students have too much homework, they may stay up late to complete it, which can lead to sleep deprivation and a range of related health problems.
• Decreased creativity: When students spend all of their time on homework, they may have less time for creative pursuits, such as writing, drawing, or playing music, which can be important for their overall well-being and personal growth.
• Decreased family time: When students have too much homework, they may spend less time with their family and friends, which can be important for their social and emotional development.
• Decreased physical activity: Excessive homework can lead to less time for physical activity, which is important for students’ health and well-being.
• Decreased motivation: When students have too much homework to do, they may lose their motivation to learn and become disinterested in their studies.
• Inadequate assessment: When homework is the primary method of assessment, it may not accurately reflect students’ understanding or mastery of the material, as they may not have access to the resources or support they need to complete the assignments.

We have talked about how much stress homework can give to a student. Now let’s know how you can do homework without taking any stress.

How To Do Homework Without Stress

Follow these tips to do your homework without taking any stress.

• Do time management: Time management helps you make a schedule for dividing time slots between different work to bring out the best output.
• Put queries: Students take stress mainly because they have so many doubts in their minds. But they don’t ask those doubts out. Keeping those uncleared doubts in their mind causes a lot of stress.
• Make notes: You should make fair notes when your teacher gives a subject lecture in the class. Those notes are very beneficial while you do homework. 
• Get proper sleep: Doing a lot in less time is the motive of students nowadays. Students sleep very less, which leads to more stress. A sound amount of sleep is much needed if you are a student. 

Conclusion ( Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful )

There is a lot of controversy about “Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful For Students”. In our opinion, homework can be extremely helpful for students. Homework helps students learn how to study and prepare for tests and exams. Some people think that students should only study at school and should not have to come home and work on their school work.

If a student comes home and has to work on their schoolwork, they will be able to study in a more relaxed environment with the help of their parents. This will allow the student to study for the test or exam in a more relaxed and comfortable setting. If you need help. If you need help with any subject like math homework help or statistics homework help then contact us today.

FAQs (Is Homework Helpful Or Harmful For Students)

Is homework necessary.

Homework is one of the inevitabilities of school, unless going to school is no longer an inevitability. Whether or not it’s necessary depends on the school and the work. Students in early elementary school do not need homework, because they go home at the end of the day and there is no reason for them to stay. Some teachers may assign something for the parents to do with their child, but this is not necessary for the child to succeed in the class.

What are the benefits of homework research?

When you’re in school, it’s crucial to be prepared for any given assignment. Researching is an effective way to increase the quality of your work, especially for homework and project assignments. If you are having trouble with a particular subject, it’s best to do your research and see what you can find out! You might be surprised by how much information you find. You could even find a website that has clear, step-by-step instructions on how to complete the assignment you’re working on. If you would prefer a more general source of information, you can look online for articles and videos that will give you insight on the information you need.

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Wall Street's summer of worry

Recent stock market wobbles mean investors' summer vacations may be canceled.

2024 was supposed to be easy for Wall Street's speculators. There was an improving economic picture, a clear way to trade it, and the chance to take it easy while still racking up profits. Inflation canceled that, and now it's almost certain that Wall Street's summer is canceled, too.

After 2023's glorious stock-market rally , the Street went into this year expecting nirvana — a combination of healthy corporate earnings, strong household consumption, and a final defeat of high inflation. The combination would put the Federal Reserve on a glide path to cut interest rates — a move that would reduce the cost of debt, push stocks higher, and make consumers feel richer.

But inflation proved stickier than expected, and those interest-rate cuts started to fade from view. First, Wall Street pushed back its prediction for the first cut from March to June, then to September — now investors are starting to wonder whether a cut is coming at all.

"This isn't what we were told we were signing up for, that's for damn sure," Justin Simon, a portfolio manager at Jasper Capital, told me. "We were going to get rate cuts, and everything was going to the moon. That's why people bought stocks. Now that seems relatively unlikely."

As the hope for cuts faded, the performance of major stock indexes has become decidedly "meh." The S&P 500 has slipped 0.2% since the beginning of March, when this new reality started to down on Wall Street, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 0.7%. But worse than all that is the potential for higher rates to stick around long enough to change the shape of our economy and, as a result, what companies have been making money in the stock market.

That means Wall Street's fantasies of decamping to the Hamptons for the summer have shattered. No leaving the interns and junior analysts to just run the same trades that worked last year. No set-it-and-forget-it strategies pushing up portfolios. No unquestioningly buying the dip. Inflation's stubbornness has injected the market with uncertainty, which, in turn, drives volatility. Unfortunately, uncertainty and volatility do not come with a $100 lobster cobb salad from Duryea's. They generally come with pain.

When doves cry

Wall Street's expectations of sailing into a smooth summer weren't entirely its fault. While Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell tried to strike a cautious tone , the Fed's public projections for interest rates signaled that multiple rate cuts were coming in 2024. To the world of finance, that sounded like a little victory lap over inflation and meant the US would likely stick a soft landing — a Goldilocks scenario in which prices stabilize without slowing down the economy so much that it causes a recession.

But as the new year began, things started to go awry. Inflation data showed that prices were still rising at an uncomfortable pace — the core consumer price index, which strips out volatile categories such as food and energy, rose 3.8% year over year in March . The Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the core personal consumption expenditures index, has also remained stubbornly above the central bank's 2% goal. Economists started to doubt that higher prices were being driven just by corporations opportunistically jacking up prices to pad profit margins — but rather something more enduring. Wall Street really started to worry that its precious cuts weren't coming. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon reminded everyone not to get "lulled into a false sense of security" that a soft landing was coming.

We were going to get rate cuts, and everything was going to the moon. That's why people bought stocks. Now that seems relatively unlikely.

Last week, the Fed admitted in a statement that even though the economy was on solid footing, "in recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the Committee's 2% inflation objective." It kept rates at current levels, reiterated its commitment to data dependence, and said it remained "highly attentive to inflation risks." In other words, there's still a chance data is telling us inflation will get worse. Some analysts, including Torsten Slok, the chief economist over at Apollo, see signs that it could turn south.

"Rising energy prices combined with the ongoing rebound in the manufacturing sector increase the likelihood that we could see an increase in goods inflation over the coming months," Slok wrote in a recent email to clients.

A scenario like that could put the Fed in a position where it might not just hold rates at 5% but also consider hiking them . At his press conference on Wednesday, Powell said hiking was "unlikely," but he didn't say it was off the table. He also didn't offer a guess as to where this persistent inflation was coming from and said we'd find out "over time."

In Wall Street's language of probabilities, that means nirvana has become considerably less likely. This isn't to say that the economy is all bad or that there's no hope. GDP for the first quarter came in at 1.6% , lower than economists expected, but the underlying details were more promising. Unemployment is still near historical lows, and wage growth continues. Consumers are still spending that mone y, too — driving strong retail sales. On the business side, UBS's head of equities, David Lefkowitz, said in a recent note to clients that "corporate fundamentals remain largely solid and intact" and that about 75% of the S&P 500 companies that reported first-quarter earnings had beaten estimates. This is good news, of course … unless it turns out to be bad news. The economy has to actually come in for a landing for it to be a soft one. If the US takes back off, we run the risk of inflation picking up again, which would force the Fed to take more drastic measures to rein in prices. April's job report came in at 175,000 jobs created, weaker than the 238,000 expected, but employment stayed below 4% and wage growth cooled. Wall Street loved that — it was growth, but not too much growth. Goldilocks, the weather on April 25th — "not too cold, not too hot, all you need is a light jacket."

Paradoxically, there are signs that things aren't as hunky-dory as they may appear. McDonald's missed quarterly earnings estimates for the first time in two years as, the company said, its customers were "more discriminating with every dollar they spend." Starbucks saw sales decline for the first time since 2020, in what the company's CEO called a "highly challenging environment" surrounding "pressures consumers face." Over at Pepsi , organic sales fell 2%. What all these companies have in common is that they had been able to extract more money from customers with significant price increases over the past couple of years, and now they can't. Money has tightened, and now they can't push price hikes over sales volume. Expect to see this theme repeat itself all over the market. The bad news is that this means the consumer — the engine of the US economy — is getting tired. The good news is that this means these companies won't be a source of inflation.

"I certainly hope that inflation has peaked," Silas Myers, a cofounder and the CEO of the investment firm Mar Vista Investments, told me. "But we are seeing significant cracks in consumer spending at the lower end. People are trading down products."

All this contradictory information raises a lot of questions for Wall Street. Do we actually need more interest-rate hikes, or can the Fed just wait for things to settle? If we need to keep pushing to lower inflation, just how ugly will things get? What if the inflation pickup is a head fake and, actually, the economy is weakening? Is not cutting interest rates now a mistake? You can see why this tug-of-war will keep Wall Street on its toes and off Georgica Beach.

What works, what doesn't

When rate cuts seemed guaranteed, and Wall Street's betting class was lining up which oceanfront parties to hit this year, it seemed like the market would be easy picking this year. If rates fell, there would surely be more money sloshing around in the stock market, pushing up indexes and likely crowning the same winners as the year before. But as doubt about the economy crept into Wall Street's mind, so, too, did concern about these trades.

Higher rates for longer means business models that used to work might not work anymore. Investors have to be a little more discerning. Bets that companies will develop tech and then figure out how to monetize it after the fact are already being punished compared with bets on disciplined, profit-focused operations. Take the "Magnificent Seven," a group of tech stocks that dominated the market in 2023. The fortunes of these companies — Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet — have diverged as the market got religion about the realities of the artificial-intelligence revolution. After Meta announced bumper earnings last month, investors sent its stock crashing 10% because the House of Zuck said it would spend $35 billion to $40 billion building an AI product this year. Exactly how that investment would be monetized it couldn't say. In a world where money is more expensive, those are the types of questions the market wants answered posthaste. Microsoft and Alphabet, which have already started monetizing their investments, fared much better.

"People are really worried about a hawkish pivot because I think they own all the wrong stuff," Simon said. When a trade is en vogue on Wall Street, you can expect everyone to crowd in, and if the trade reverses, you can expect a stampede to the exit. That ultimately creates market moves so dramatic they can push down indexes and, frankly, wreck a trader's day if they're not paying attention. So it's time to pay attention.

The simplicity that Wall Street hoped for is one of the few options that's no longer on the table.

This new regime doesn't apply just to Wall Street's stock investors. The longer that higher rates in the US stick around, the more our monetary policy diverges from the rest of the world's. In the EU and the UK, inflation is receding, and rate policy looks like it's coming down. In Japan, interest rates are barely above zero. That divergence means major volatility as hot money sloshes around the world looking for the safest haven. As if to emphasize that fact, on the day of Powell's speech, the value of the Japanese yen blasted up against the dollar by 1% in one second — a massive move by currency-trading standards and a vicious reversal given that over the past year, the yen has fallen 11% against the dollar. There is a certain set on Wall Street that does not get to "rosé all day" on Hamptons summer water when currencies trade that way.

The Fed has always said there are "long and variable lags" between when it moves interest rates and when the economy feels those moves. Now the Fed is starting to admit that those lags may be longer and more variable than it thought. The simplicity that Wall Street hoped for is one of the few options that's no longer on the table. Simple — like a cold glass of lemonade on the front porch or a $210 pitcher of Gimme Shelter at Sunset Beach — is what summer is made of. That's why this year, it's canceled.

Linette Lopez  is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

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Kristi Noem’s dog-killing embodies the cruel phoneyness of today’s Republicans

The South Dakota governor’s proud dog murder tells a lot about how posturing Trumpists like she and Greg Gianforte think

A fter South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, proudly admitted in a forthcoming memoir to marching her young puppy Cricket to a gravel pit to kill her with a shotgun, she rationalized the despicable act by arguing that Cricket had been aggressive.

She also said that she used the same gravel pit to shoot a “disgusting, musky, rancid” unnamed goat – but botched the job, leaving the goat to suffer unnecessarily while she rushed to her truck to get a second shell. (It’s unclear why Noem, supposedly a shrewd outdoorswoman, didn’t think to carry more shells on her.)

Noem has defended her story by proclaiming that Americans want “leaders who are authentic”. It’s a bad excuse. It’s also untrue, because Noem, like so many other political firebrands who are infiltrating and redefining the Republican party, is anything but authentic.

Her political brand is simply a veneer – a fake, stylized brand of dangerous Trump Republicanism whose moral roots are about as deep as a bad facelift. This brand not only fails what used to be the Republican party; it is also destroying and dividing the US, and it’s more evident than ever here in the American west.

In Montana, the Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, has a registered cattle brand, yet he owns no cattle. He takes agricultural tax exemptions on his luxury estate in Bozeman even though he doesn’t do much serious ranching or farming.

In 2021, Gianforte illegally shot and killed a collared Yellowstone wolf that had its leg caught in a steel-jawed trap. He wanted to stuff the wolf and display it in his office – presumably without its radio collar, which would have dampened the effect he was going for.

Then, after realizing he didn’t have the proper training certification to shoot a live animal stuck in a trap for what could have been days, Gianforte tried to lie to investigators about shooting it. If this sounds familiar, it is; in 2017 Gianforte also misled police officers after body-slamming a Guardian reporter.

Yet Gianforte wants his constituents to believe he is, somehow, a fair-chase hunter – a rugged, tough-guy Montanan, even though he spent most of his life in front of a computer screen in the Philadelphia suburbs. In Montana, we have a more accurate word for people like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem: posers .

Real hunters, real gun enthusiasts, real bird dog owners – “ real Americans ”, to use a phrase so often invoked by the Republican party – know that politicians like Gianforte and Noem are phoneys. They’re trying to create fake versions of themselves to publicly demonstrate their capacity for cruelty and extremism without being bothered by any responsibility or morality.

I’ve sold millions of guns in my career as a former firearms executive, but I am no longer a Republican. That’s because I stood up for what I believed in when I saw things take a turn for the worse. I left what I considered a dream job because of a lack of responsibility and morality in the gun industry.

I’m still, however, very much a hunter. Since I was a kid, I’ve owned and rigorously trained bird dogs like the one Noem killed. I have three today. One of them is Aldo, a German wire-haired pointer just like Cricket.

These dogs are exceptional companions whose strong prey drive means they need daily exercise and training; I’ve spent hundreds of days hiking and shooting and hunting with my dogs. All bird dog owners know this, and Noem has no excuse. If neither Kristi Noem nor Greg Gianforte have the patience, responsibility or moral compass when it comes to basic decency to animals, they lack the fundamental decency needed to govern a state.

Real hunters are sickened about what Gianforte and Noem did because we understand our social compact. We know that real fair-chase hunting relies on a tightly woven fabric of self-enforced ethics, respect for our wildlife and the stewardship of the animals who have, for millennia, stood by our side – pets like the one Noem executed in a gravel pit with a shotgun because she was “untrainable”.

If Noem applies this kind of reasoning to her job, and we must assume she does, no wonder South Dakota’s economy has plunged to among the worst in the nation since she took office.

If Gianforte believes “fair-chase” hunting is shooting a collared animal stuck in a trap, no wonder that under his tenure, starting teacher salary in our state has fallen to 51st in the nation (that’s right, a territory beat us!). No wonder his approval rating is at a miserable 37%. No wonder he couldn’t be bothered to explain why the property taxes on his privately owned home went down last year, while virtually everyone else around him got a tax hike.

For years, responsible, reasonable people in the west have seethed at the unabashed theft of our societal goodwill by posers like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem.

There is no good that comes from the devastating story of Cricket’s demise, or the wolf that wandered out of Yellowstone only to get caught in a trap until Greg Gianforte showed up with a gun.

But at least now the rest of the nation can see the dangers of electing these phonies.

Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive, is a Democratic candidate running to become Montana’s next governor

• Republicans
• South Dakota
• Greg Gianforte
• Donald Trump

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Contestant’ on Hulu, a Documentary About an Incredibly Cruel Japanese Reality TV Phenomenon

The documentary The Contestant (now streaming on Hulu) chronicles the ordeal of a reality-TV star who was essentially tortured live, on camera, 24/7, for 15 months. His name is Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi, a nickname he reclaimed after it was given to him by the childhood bullies who teased him for the elongated shape of his face. And the show was Denpa Shonen: A Life in Prizes , a Japanese TV series that makes Jackass look like a Ken Burns documentary. Director Clair Titley where-are-they-nows Nasubi roughly 25 years after he was deceived by a villainous TV producer and humiliated in front of millions of viewers, and digs into some of the nitty-gritty of this fascinating story. 

The Gist: It’s 1998, two years before Survivor and Big Brother put the phrase “reality TV” into the popular lexicon. Producer Toshio Tsuchiya comes up with a downright diabolical segment for his hit series Denpa Shonen : strip a contestant naked and lock them in a room with little more than postcards and a pillow to sit on, and force them to enter mail-in magazine contests to survive. The goal was to win a million yen (about $7,500) in prizes – and hope some of those prizes included food, because the contestant was given next to nothing to eat in order to survive. The lone participant in the show, dubbed A Life in Prizes , was Nasubi, an odd fellow from rural Fukushima who aspired to be a comedian. Looking back at his youth, Nasubi says he was always socially awkward, and tried to compensate for that by being funny; we meet his mother, Kazuko, who remembers telling him as he left for Tokyo to be an entertainer, “just don’t get naked.”

Lured by Denpa Shonen ’s reputation for gifting the participants of its various “endurance tests” with overnight stardom, Nasubi entered a drawing for A Life in Prizes , and soon found himself bare-assed in a tiny apartment, filling out postcards and getting alarmingly skinny. “Rather than naive, he was gullible,” Nasubi’s manager explains to us. Tsuchiya – who amazingly participates in this documentary for reasons I might get into later if it’s not too much of a spoiler – says they obviously didn’t want their budding reality star to die, so they gave him just enough crackers to keep him alive until he wins a bag of rice and realizes he has a stove but no pot to cook it in. He tries eating it raw, and gags. Then he innovates and finds a way to warm it in a package and make a sort of rice pudding. When that runs out, he’s lucky enough to win a case of dog food, which he crunches and swallows, not so convincingly insisting to the camera that it’s delicious. 

Speaking of that camera – this is where the story gets especially disturbing. Tsuchiya flat-out lied to Nasubi that portions of the footage would be edited into segments and aired after he reached his goal. Instead, he left the camera rolling, broadcasting 24/7 on the internet (cue a TV news clip explaining this newfangled thing known as a “webcam”), which helped juice Denpa Shonen ’s Sunday-night ratings to 17 million viewers, who laughed and laughed and laughed at Nasubi’s antics. Tsuchiya admits that he was obsessed with coming up with new ways to test his torture subject’s endurance, so he awakened Nasubi in the middle of the night to move him to different locations and keeps moving the goalposts on his achievements, stuff like that. 

The producer also collected and sold copies of Nasubi’s diaries without his knowing. What was in those diaries? Oh, just the innermost thoughts of a man who was experiencing such isolation and despair that he began contemplating suicide. That was the other side of the weirdo who did silly dances when he finally received prizes in the mail and mugged for the camera and whose hair grew out wild and whose genitalia was covered by an eggplant graphic (that was moved around via joystick by a man in a bunker stocked with 50 Denpa Shonen staffers). Doesn’t all this make for such great, hilarious TV?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: At least The Truman Show was fiction.

Performance Worth Watching: Nasubi fearlessly relives his torture, contrasted by Tsuchiya’s bald admission that some of the things he put his subject through were cruel. However, it takes researching the story outside the film to determine if an apology was offered – or accepted – between these two men.

Memorable Dialogue: “I was tricked, taken in.” – one of the first statements Nasubi made upon finally, at long last, being released from Hell

Sex and Skin: We see Nasubi’s bare hindquarters consistently, and learn the possible origin of the eggplant emoji’s current use as a cheeky surrogate for dude junk.

Our Take: Nasubi has been through enough, so I feel it prudent to resist psychoanalyzing the guy from a distance. However, it’s interesting to note that he could have ended the ordeal at any time – his room wasn’t locked; he had a phone to call producers and tell them enough is enough – but also convincingly expresses how the psychological prison Tsuchiya put him in may have been stronger than any cage. It all points to the all-too-human desire to be loved and accepted by others, which sometimes becomes the desire for widespread fame without consideration for its pitfalls and compromises. Nasubi got his fame, and The Contestant resists saying it was for the better or for the worse. Would he do it all over again is a question Titley doesn’t ask. 

Although Nasubi and the film make it clear that he endured significant cruelty, the director also doesn’t pursue questions of the legality and ethics of Tsuchiya’s actions, and any potential for forgiveness or redemption, which strike me as glaring and obvious omissions. Titley seems to be pursuing something bigger and more complex, and she touches on it in a third act that explores Nasubi’s post- Denpa Shonen life in a loose, vaguely dissatisfying manner (essentially, Nasubi tries to use his fame to raise money and lift the spirits of his fellow Fukushima residents in the wake of the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami). It mostly has to do with Tsuchiya’s against-the-odds participation in The Contestant – it seems safe to assume that most producers in his situation would seek to separate themselves from past moral failures – and how he feels he owes something to Nasubi now. 

But Titley doesn’t seem to be quite a skilled enough interviewer to draw much compelling subtext out of current interviews with Nasubi and Tsuchiya. The film leaves behind some ripples in the pond of pop-cultural consumption, showing us that Denpa Shonen crossed lines of reality-TV (and internet content) ethics before they could even be drawn; as exploitative and gross as current entertainment can be, there was a time, ironically more innocent, when it was far worse. 

Our Call: For viewers unfamiliar with Nasubi’s story – likely most of us outside Japan – it’s too fascinating to ignore, even in a sometimes-shaky doc like The Contestant . So STREAM IT, and prepare yourself to be engrossed and a little bit disappointed by this particular telling.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.