homework ban news

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

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 about 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 workloads 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 can cause, 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 take home, 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 past 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 up assignments 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."

More: Some teachers let their students sleep in class. Here's what mental health experts say.

More: Some parents are slipping young kids in for the COVID-19 vaccine, but doctors discourage the move as 'risky'

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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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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An illustration shows an open math workbook and a pencil writing numbers in it, while the previous page disintegrates and floats away.

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The Highlight

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

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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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Poland’s children rejoice as homework is banned. The rest of the world watches on for results

Some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, article bookmarked.

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Ola Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland ’s government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.

“I am happy,” said the fifth grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.

“Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn’t make sense,” she said.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernise Poland's education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.

Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn't count towards a grade.

Not everyone likes the change – and even Ola’s parents are divided.

“If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school,” said her father, Pawel Kozak.

His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. “I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned,” she said. “It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what’s going on at school.”

(Ola's brother Julian, a third grader, says he sees both sides.)

Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.

The rest of the world will be watching Poland’s results closely.

Poland's educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.

For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.

But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers' Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.

The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children “had no time to rest.” The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.

Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children’s mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, "the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework.”

Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be “very individual and contextual.”

“We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child,” Sahlberg said.

In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.

In the US, teachers and parents decide for themselves how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework entirely to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.

A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the US recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.

The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the US, extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning, which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student wellbeing led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.

It's important for children to learn that mastering something "usually requires practice, a lot of practice,” said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, “things will go wrong.”

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Should We Ban Homework?

The cons of homework are starting to outweigh the pros.

Recent research shows that teenagers have doubled the amount of time they spend on homework since the 1990s. This is in spite of other, well-documented research that calls the efficacy of homework into question, albeit in the younger grades. Why are students spending so much time on homework if the impact is zero (for younger kids) or moderate (for older ones)? Should we ban homework? These are the questions teachers, parents, and lawmakers are asking.

Bans proposed and implemented in the U.S. and abroad

The struggle of whether or not to assign homework is not a new one. In 2017, a Florida superintendent banned homework for elementary schools in the entire district, with one very important exception: reading at home. The United States isn’t the only country to question the benefits of homework. Last August, the Philippines proposed a bill to ban homework completely, citing the need for rest, relaxation, and time with family. Another bill there proposed no weekend homework, with teachers running the risk of fines or two years in prison. (Yikes!) While a prison sentence may seem extreme, there are real reasons to reconsider homework.

Refocus on mental health and educate the “whole child”

Prioritizing mental health is at the forefront of the homework ban movement. Leaders say they want to give students time to develop other hobbies, relationships, and balance in their lives.

This month two Utah elementary schools gained national recognition for officially banning homework. The results are significant, with psychologist referrals for anxiety decreasing by 50 percent. Many schools are looking for ways to refocus on wellness, and homework can be a real cause of stress.

[contextly_auto_sidebar]

Research supports a ban for elementary schools

Supporters of a homework ban often cite research from John Hattie, who concluded that elementary school homework has no effect on academic progress. In a podcast he said, “Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero. In high school it’s larger. (…) Which is why we need to get it right. Not why we need to get rid of it. It’s one of those lower hanging fruit that we should be looking in our primary schools to say, ‘Is it really making a difference?'”

In the upper grades, Hattie’s research shows that homework has to be purposeful, not busy work. And the reality is, most teachers don’t receive training on how to assign homework that is meaningful and relevant to students.

Parents push back, too

In October this Washington Post article made waves in parenting and education communities when it introduced the idea that, even if homework is assigned, it doesn’t have to be completed for the student to pass the class. The writer explains how her family doesn’t believe in homework, and doesn’t participate. In response, other parents started “opting out” of homework, citing research that homework in elementary school doesn’t further intelligence or academic success.

Of course, homework has its defenders, especially in the upper grades

“I think some homework is a good idea,” says Darla E. in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. “Ideally, it forces the parents to take some responsibility for their child’s education. It also reinforces what students learn and instills good study habits for later in life.”

Jennifer M. agrees. “If we are trying to make students college-ready, they need the skill of doing homework.”

And the research does support some homework in middle and high school, as long as it is clearly tied to learning and not overwhelming.

We’d love to hear your thoughts—do you think schools should ban homework? Come and share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

Plus, why you should stop assigning reading homework.

$Student in front of a blackboard with math problems$

Dear Parents, “Common Core Math” Isn’t Out To Get You, and Here’s Why

"Carrying the one" isn't all it's cracked up to be. Continue Reading

Why I Think All Schools Should Abolish Homework

Two brothers work on laptop computers at home

H ow long is your child’s workweek? Thirty hours? Forty? Would it surprise you to learn that some elementary school kids have workweeks comparable to adults’ schedules? For most children, mandatory homework assignments push their workweek far beyond the school day and deep into what any other laborers would consider overtime. Even without sports or music or other school-sponsored extracurriculars, the daily homework slog keeps many students on the clock as long as lawyers, teachers, medical residents, truck drivers and other overworked adults. Is it any wonder that,deprived of the labor protections that we provide adults, our kids are suffering an epidemic of disengagement, anxiety and depression ?

With my youngest child just months away from finishing high school, I’m remembering all the needless misery and missed opportunities all three of my kids suffered because of their endless assignments. When my daughters were in middle school, I would urge them into bed before midnight and then find them clandestinely studying under the covers with a flashlight. We cut back on their activities but still found ourselves stuck in a system on overdrive, returning home from hectic days at 6 p.m. only to face hours more of homework. Now, even as a senior with a moderate course load, my son, Zak, has spent many weekends studying, finding little time for the exercise and fresh air essential to his well-being. Week after week, and without any extracurriculars, Zak logs a lot more than the 40 hours adults traditionally work each week — and with no recognition from his “bosses” that it’s too much. I can’t count the number of shared evenings, weekend outings and dinners that our family has missed and will never get back.

How much after-school time should our schools really own?

In the midst of the madness last fall, Zak said to me, “I feel like I’m working towards my death. The constant demands on my time since 5th grade are just going to continue through graduation, into college, and then into my job. It’s like I’m on an endless treadmill with no time for living.”

My spirit crumbled along with his.

Like Zak, many people are now questioning the point of putting so much demand on children and teens that they become thinly stretched and overworked. Studies have long shown that there is no academic benefit to high school homework that consumes more than a modest number of hours each week. In a study of high schoolers conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), researchers concluded that “after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.”

In elementary school, where we often assign overtime even to the youngest children, studies have shown there’s no academic benefit to any amount of homework at all.

Our unquestioned acceptance of homework also flies in the face of all we know about human health, brain function and learning. Brain scientists know that rest and exercise are essential to good health and real learning . Even top adult professionals in specialized fields take care to limit their work to concentrated periods of focus. A landmark study of how humans develop expertise found that elite musicians, scientists and athletes do their most productive work only about four hours per day .

Yet we continue to overwork our children, depriving them of the chance to cultivate health and learn deeply, burdening them with an imbalance of sedentary, academic tasks. American high school students , in fact, do more homework each week than their peers in the average country in the OECD, a 2014 report found.

It’s time for an uprising.

Already, small rebellions are starting. High schools in Ridgewood, N.J. , and Fairfax County, Va., among others, have banned homework over school breaks. The entire second grade at Taylor Elementary School in Arlington, Va., abolished homework this academic year. Burton Valley Elementary School in Lafayette, Calif., has eliminated homework in grades K through 4. Henry West Laboratory School , a public K-8 school in Coral Gables, Fla., eliminated mandatory, graded homework for optional assignments. One Lexington, Mass., elementary school is piloting a homework-free year, replacing it with reading for pleasure.

More from TIME

Across the Atlantic, students in Spain launched a national strike against excessive assignments in November. And a second-grade teacher in Texas, made headlines this fall when she quit sending home extra work , instead urging families to “spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside and get your child to bed early.”

It is time that we call loudly for a clear and simple change: a workweek limit for children, counting time on the clock before and after the final bell. Why should schools extend their authority far beyond the boundaries of campus, dictating activities in our homes in the hours that belong to families? An all-out ban on after-school assignments would be optimal. Short of that, we can at least sensibly agree on a cap limiting kids to a 40-hour workweek — and fewer hours for younger children.

Resistance even to this reasonable limit will be rife. Mike Miller, an English teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., found this out firsthand when he spearheaded a homework committee to rethink the usual approach. He had read the education research and found a forgotten policy on the county books limiting homework to two hours a night, total, including all classes. “I thought it would be a slam dunk” to put the two-hour cap firmly in place, Miller said.

But immediately, people started balking. “There was a lot of fear in the community,” Miller said. “It’s like jumping off a high dive with your kids’ future. If we reduce homework to two hours or less, is my kid really going to be okay?” In the end, the committee only agreed to a homework ban over school breaks.

Miller’s response is a great model for us all. He decided to limit assignments in his own class to 20 minutes a night (the most allowed for a student with six classes to hit the two-hour max). His students didn’t suddenly fail. Their test scores remained stable. And they started using their more breathable schedule to do more creative, thoughtful work.

That’s the way we will get to a sane work schedule for kids: by simultaneously pursuing changes big and small. Even as we collaboratively press for policy changes at the district or individual school level, all teachers can act now, as individuals, to ease the strain on overworked kids.

As parents and students, we can also organize to make homework the exception rather than the rule. We can insist that every family, teacher and student be allowed to opt out of assignments without penalty to make room for important activities, and we can seek changes that shift practice exercises and assignments into the actual school day.

We’ll know our work is done only when Zak and every other child can clock out, eat dinner, sleep well and stay healthy — the very things needed to engage and learn deeply. That’s the basic standard the law applies to working adults. Let’s do the same for our kids.

Vicki Abeles is the author of the bestseller Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation, and director and producer of the documentaries “ Race to Nowhere ” and “ Beyond Measure. ”

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Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

Mother helping son with homework at home

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

High angle view of young woman sitting at desk and studying at home during coronavirus lockdown

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Amid Growing Debate About Homework, One School Bans It

Some research questions the value of homework prior to high school.

 -- More than 550 students at a Massachusetts elementary school will have less to carry home in their backpacks this year.

There will be no homework.

Kelly Elementary School in Holyoke has banned homework for the year with the intention of giving students all the instruction and extra help they may need during the school day.

“We want kids to go home tired; we want their brains to be tired,” Jackie Glasheen, principal of the school, whose kindergarten through 8th-grade students are nearly all poor and Hispanic, told ABC News. At home, she said, “we want them to engage with their families, talk about their school days and go to bed.”

Glasheen and the team of teachers who came up with the idea to end homework are among a growing number of U.S. educators and parents questioning the value of having children do schoolwork at home.

A Texas elementary school teacher last month drew wide attention by eliminating homework.

Brandy Young, 2nd-grade teacher at an elementary school in Godley, wrote parents in a letter shared widely on social media, that after "much research over the summer," she would not assign any homework except for uncompleted classwork.

"Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance," she wrote in the letter handed to parents at a meet-the-teacher night Aug. 16.

"Rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success," she wrote. "Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside and get your child to bed early."

Texas Teacher Announces No-Homework Policy for Class

Nj teacher writes encouraging messages on students' desks before their exam.

Kelly Elementary School eliminated homework under circumstances uncommon in most schools.

Beginning this fall, nearly all schools in the Holyoke district, which has among the lowest standardized test scores in Massachusetts, are extending their school days by two hours. Elementary school students now go to school from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., instead of the previous 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Principal Glasheen said her school surveyed its teachers, parents and students before implementing the homework ban.

"The toughest stakeholder group was the teachers," she said. "Some of them felt [students] need that extra practice. They need that extra work."

But Glasheen said the longer school days will give students more instructional time.

“Face time with a teacher … is going to impact their learning more than doing skill-and-practice work at home,” she said.

Not many schools are lengthening their school days by as much as the Holyoke district. But even without the longer days, a number of educators and researchers say homework is more of a hindrance than a help to students.

Author and education researcher Alfie Kohn says homework routinely produces frustration, exhaustion, family conflict, a loss of time for other activities and diminished excitement about learning.

“In classrooms and schools where little or no homework is assigned, results have been extremely positive in terms of students’ academic performance as well as their attitudes about learning,” Kohn told ABC News. “‘No homework’ should become the default, with homework assigned only on those days when there is compelling reason to believe that a given assignment will benefit most students.”

Kohn, whose books include "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing," said research has failed to demonstrate any benefit to assigning homework, at least until students are in high school.

But Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank in Washington, D.C ., said the question of homework's value is not cut-and-dried. Pondiscio, who is also an adviser at Democracy Prep, a New York City charter school network, said homework may have a greater benefit for low-income students than affluent students.

“I still think we’re in a situation in this country where we have a far greater problem of expecting too little -- not too much -- of kids, and homework falls into that,” Pondiscio told ABC News.

The benefits of assigning homework also depend on what you want it to achieve, Pondiscio said. Homework may not lead to a higher grade on a test within six months, he said, but it can encourage behaviors and foster skills that yield long-term benefits such as practice in time-management

“Whenever I hear ‘homework doesn’t work,’ my first response is, ‘Well what do you want homework to do?’” Pondiscio said. “We always want to press the easy button in these discussions, and there isn’t one.”

Kelly Elementary School Principal Glasheen has heard from some critics of her school's homework ban who echo Pondiscio, telling her, "'You're letting kids off the hook,'" she said.

But she's also gotten support. The far-flung responses she's received suggests how widespread is the debate over homework's value.

“I have heard from principals from southern California, Dallas, Brazil," she said.

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Get involved: Should homework be banned?

Published 11 April
comments Comments

Do you think you should have to do homework?

Well primary school children in Poland don't have to do it anymore after the government banned it.

Under the new rules, teachers can't give out compulsory homework - that's homework you have to do - to children aged seven to nine.

Meanwhile any homework given to children aged nine to 14 is optional and won't count towards a grade.

Do you think kids should have to do homework or should schools in the UK ban it like they have in Poland? Take the vote and let us know in the comments.

What do children in Poland think of the changes?

There are mixed opinions among the children in Poland about the change.

Julian who is 9 said: "I like to do my homework because, after that, I know I will have more time to do other things, when I have done it, I will have time for other things that are also important."

But 11-year-old Ola is celebrating the changes. She loves music and drawing and hopes it means she has more time for her hobbies.

She said: "I am happy because this homework, I did not like it too much.

"It didn't really make much sense because most people in my class, in the morning would copy (it) from someone who has done the homework or would transcribe (it) from some (internet) pages. So, it didn't make sense."

Ola's mum doesn't agree, she said: "I am not very pleased, because it helps the child really remember their lessons, the homework. And helps (parents) stay on top of what the child has really learnt and of life at school."

Why did Poland ban homework?

The changes were announced by Poland's Education Minister, Barbara Nowacka

The Polish government introduced strict limits on homework from the beginning of April as a way to improve the education system in the country.

The decision was announced by Education Minister, Barbara Nowacka who said: "When I read research regarding the mental health of children, their overload with learning, the reasons of depression, of tensions, stress, or loss of interest in learning, one of the factors, the one that could be removed fastest, was the burden of homework."

Is banning homework a good idea?

Not everyone agrees that banning homework is a good idea.

A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation suggests that homework in primary school can help children learn important skills, help get ready for tests and improve the connection between home and school.

We want to know what you think about homework. Let us know in the comments below.

Schiavo bill aims to alleviate student stress, change homework

A ssemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, D-Chatsworth, held a news conference last week in Sacramento to discuss her new bill, the Healthy Homework Act, and how it would help to alleviate student stress through changes in homework.

Assembly Bill 2099, introduced earlier this year by Schiavo and sponsored by four other Democrats in the Assembly, does not ban homework, Schiavo said, but directs public school districts to create homework policies by the 2027-28 school year that would better benefit student learning without putting them under more stress.

“I’ve spent the last year talking to every single teacher and parent and student that I can talk to, and administrators, to get their thoughts on homework, and I have been hard pressed to find teachers who love homework,” Schiavo said. “And I am definitely hard pressed to find students who love homework.”

The bill is being reviewed by the Assembly Committee on Appropriations.

Should the bill pass, school districts would be directed to hold two public meetings to develop and adopt their homework policies. Districts would also have to post their policy publicly and update it every five years.

The state Department of Education would be required to post guidelines for developing homework policies by Jan. 1, 2026.

Should the bill cause school districts to have to spend money to meet the guidelines of their policy, the state would reimburse those districts for certain costs.

According to the bill, research shows that 45% of students consider homework a primary source of stress, and adding more homework can cause them to not meet developmental needs or cultivate critical life skills. That, the bill states, leads to students dropping activities, not seeing friends or family and choosing to not pursue hobbies that they enjoy.

Schiavo said the idea of the bill came from her daughter, Sophia, a sixth-grade student, who spoke at the news conference. During her campaign in 2022, Sophia asked her mom if she would have the power to ban homework, Schiavo said.

Last week, Sophia explained why she brought that up.

“Homework is exhausting. It’s overwhelming,” Sophia said. “And it’s depressing that my whole day, from when I wake up until when I go to bed, is nearly all taken up with schoolwork. With most of my time scheduled for me, it’s making me not like school at all.”

According to Denise Pope, a senior lecturer in education at Stanford, of 13,000 California high school students who were surveyed, the average amount of homework was two and a half hours.

That, she said, leaves little time for sleep, time with friends and family and other extracurricular activities after also spending seven to eight hours in school each day.

“This isn’t just a frivolous thing, it turns out,” Pope said. “Extensive research will show you that playtime, downtime and family time are considered protective factors and are fundamental to healthy children.”

Schiavo added that more homework could also lead to more time using screens and students learning poor time management skills as most of their time would be spent doing only one thing.

“We’re asking students to do actually three shifts,” Schiavo said. “They go to school all day and then they go to after-school or after-school activities, and then come home and sit at the table in the evening and work all night on their homework.”

Also in Sacramento for the news conference was Casey Cuny , a Valencia High School English teacher and one of five teachers selected as the 2023-24 California Teachers of the Year.

Cuny said he initially taught the way that he was taught, meaning lots of homework. These days, Cuny focuses more on teaching in the classroom and only assigning small amounts of homework to reinforce certain ideas.

“I think there’s enough time in the classroom for the learning to take place in the classroom with the professional,” Cuny said. “There is space for meaningful homework, but it doesn’t need to be 50 problems.”

The post Schiavo bill aims to alleviate student stress, change homework appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal .

Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, D-Chatsworth, held a news conference last week in Sacramento to discuss her new bill, the Healthy Homework Act, and how it would help to alleviate student stress through changes in homework. Assembly Bill 2099, introduced earlier this year by Schiavo and sponsored by four other Democrats in the Assembly, does not ban […]

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Children at their desks in a primary school class in the Philippines.

Ban weekend homework for overworked Filipino pupils, says lawmaker

Sam Verzosa says education is in crisis as children study for hours but underperform in tests

A lawmaker in the Philippines has proposed banning schools from setting homework at weekends, saying students are overworked and need to recharge.

Sam Verzosa, a member of the House of Representatives, said the Philippines was in an “educational crisis”, with students spending long hours studying but underperforming in test scores.

He cited international rankings, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, which in 2018 listed the Philippines as the lowest performing of 79 countries in reading, and second lowest in science and maths.

“The Filipino youth are overworked and yet the Philippines is trailing behind other countries,” said Verzosa, in comments reported by local media .

A bill proposed by Verzosa said “the problem lies in the students having excessive school hours” that are “low in learning productivity”. “Upon going home, they are still piled with homework, despite experts saying that one hour of homework is enough.”

Under the proposals, primary and secondary school teachers should not give any homework or assignments during weekends, while homework during weekdays should be minimal and not require more than four hours a week to be completed.

Students needed time to “rest and recharge”, said Verzosa, adding that the homework also risked worsening the divide between wealthy and poorer students, who might hold part-time jobs and not have access to the internet.

The time children spend at school in the Philippines can vary, with those in provinces spending on average 10 hours a day, and those in cities six hours a day, said Ruby Bernardo, the secretary of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers.

In the national capital region, some schools operate in shifts , starting at 6am, to manage overcrowding and a lack of classroom space.

Bernardo said the school system was struggling with underinvestment and a lack of resources, and that excessive homework was a symptom of this. “In my experience as a teacher, usually the teacher gives homework to the students because we don’t have enough numbers of textbooks and materials in class,” she said. Students might be asked to research a topic online at home because there are not enough books or laptops to do so at school.

“I can give [students] a printout, but it’s out of my pocket expenses because we don’t have a Xerox copy machine at our school,” said Bernardo, adding that teachers use their own money for anything from laptops and projectors to balls for physical education.

Schools are especially overwhelmed after the pandemic, which led to in-person classes being halted for two years , causing students to fall behind, she said, adding that the government response had been insufficient.

Verzosa’s proposal would build on Department of Education guidance issued in 2010, which advised teachers to limit public primary students’ homework to a reasonable quantity on weekdays, and to not set assignments over weekends. Verzosa’s bill would “institutionalise and expand” this, it said, and also incorporate secondary school students.

Philippines
Asia Pacific
Global education

As States Resist Federal Gender Rules, Schools Are Caught in the Middle

Conservative state governments are forbidding school districts from doing what the Department of Education says they must, under new Title IX regulations on students’ gender identity.

By Amy Harmon

New civil rights regulations released last month by the Biden administration presented school districts across the nation with a clear choice: Either adopt policies that allow transgender students to use the bathrooms, wear the uniforms and be called by the pronouns that correspond with their gender identity, or risk losing federal funding.

But several Republican-led states have responded with an equally clear message for their schools: Steer clear of such policies.

The clashing state and federal directives have put school officials in a difficult spot, education officials said. School boards may face federal investigations, litigation from parents, threats of a state takeover or lost funding.

“No matter which way a school district goes, they’re going to possibly draw a lawsuit from someone in disagreement, whether that’s a federal regulator or a private person who doesn’t agree with how the district handled it,” said Sonja Trainor, managing director for school law at the National School Boards Association. “A lot of schools are going to be in no man’s land.”

The dispute centers on Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. The new regulations from the Biden administration interpret “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes and gender identity. The regulations did not address whether transgender students should be able to play on school sports teams corresponding to their gender identity. A second rule on that question is expected later.

“These regulations make it crystal clear that everyone can access schools that are safe, welcoming and that respect their rights,” Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters when the new regulations were announced in April.

But in four separate lawsuits, filed in federal courts in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Kentucky, attorneys general in more than a dozen states are trying to block the regulations from going to effect in August as planned.

And lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization, have filed a challenge on behalf of the Rapides Parish School Board in Louisiana.

“We would not want to put ourselves in a position where the federal government would take funding away because we follow the original purpose of Title IX,” Jeff Powell, the district superintendent, said in a statement. “We want students in our district to have privacy and safety when they access sex-specific facilities.”

Most school districts across the country receive federal funds for special education programs, and schools serving high concentrations of low-income families get federal support. But they get much more funding from state governments and, in some cases, local property taxes. Most school boards are directly answerable to their states.

“Schools are trying to ensure that kids are safe and that they have access to educational services,” said Francisco M. Negron Jr., founder of K12 Counsel, a school law advocacy and policy firm. “When there’s inconsistency in the law, it’s unsettling and it’s distracting.”

Several Republican-led states have passed laws that forbid transgender students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. Gov. Brad Little of Idaho signed a bill last month that bars teachers from referring to a student by a name or pronoun that does not align with the student’s birth sex without parental consent.

Education officials in at least five states — Oklahoma, Florida , Louisiana , Montana and South Carolina — have urged school boards to maintain policies that “recognize the distinction between sex and gender identity,” as Elsie Arntzen, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction, put it in her letter to school leaders in the state.

For now, the new federal regulations supersede any state law or directive from a state official on the issue. But one or more federal judges, legal experts said, could issue an order blocking the regulations from taking effect locally or nationally while the lawsuits make their way through the courts. And the issue may ultimately reach the Supreme Court, which has so far declined to weigh in on how Title IX should be interpreted with regard to gender identity.

The new regulations are premised in part on the Biden administration’s interpretation of Bostock v. Clayton County, the landmark 2020 Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that discrimination based on transgender status necessarily entails treating individuals differently because of their sex.

But in the lawsuits, Republican-led states argue that the Department of Education exceeded its authority by issuing regulations that expand the definition of what constitutes sex discrimination. They point out that the Bostock decision was about workplace discrimination, and that Title IX includes specific exceptions for separating the sexes in certain educational situations, like sports teams. That shows, they argue, that Title IX was intended to recognize biological differences between males and females, not to address gender identity.

And some Republican governors are not waiting for the courts to act.

“I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a letter to President Biden this week.

And Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas signed an executive order on Thursday stating that schools in her state would continue to enforce restrictions on which bathrooms and pronouns transgender students are allowed to use.

“My message to Joe Biden and the federal government,” Ms. Sanders said at a news conference, “is we will not comply.”

Amy Harmon covers how shifting conceptions of gender affect everyday life in the United States. More about Amy Harmon

School refusal and the Australian families gripped by blame, shame, and the fear of a lost education

A woman sitting in the driver's seat of a car at night looks over her shoulder at a young girl in the back wearing bunny ears.

A growing crisis of school refusal is gripping Australia, leaving families in a hidden struggle.

When it first started happening, Alice would drag her daughter Frieda into kindergarten screaming.

The school staff would restrain the five-year-old as they locked the door.

"If tough love worked, my child would be at school. The things we put her through … I'm ashamed of it," Alice says.

She knows what other parents judge her for — being a mother who can't get her child to school.

"It's a really lonely and confusing and shameful world because you assume that you are the problem," the Sydney mum says.

"You see other families, their kids just happily going to school … and you feel like you're just in this complete other world."

Frieda, now eight, is one of the thousands of children in Australia experiencing 'school refusal', also known as 'school can't' — children who have difficulty attending school due to emotional distress.

A young girl sitting in the back of a car at night, with rainbow bunny ears on looks to the side with a neutral expression.

Some days Frieda lasts to the 3pm bell, others she might only make it to the school gate or not leave home at all.

"I get a bit upset when I usually don't make it to school. 'Cause I really want to, but somehow I don't know how to get there," Frieda says.

For parents, it's a living nightmare that can result in broken careers, fear of kids missing out and threats of fines and prosecution.

For the education system, it raises fundamental questions about whether schools can actually include every child.

A woman is seen through the windshield of a car at night. She has her hands on the wheel. A child is in the back seat.

Distress and disengagement

An increasing number of Australian children are struggling to get to school.

In 2023, the attendance rate for students in Years 1 to 10 was 88 per cent, down from 92 per cent almost a decade earlier.

Last year, 38 per cent of all students in Years 1 to 10 were absent for more than 20 days a year – which is considered chronically absent.

A young child's school bag hangs on a hook in a classroom.

Dr Lisa McKay-Brown, an education researcher at the University of Melbourne, says because there is no national data tracking the reason for absences, it's unclear what is driving disengagement.

"How many of this is medical, how many of this is school refusal, how many of this is kids on holidays? That's where the problem lies because it's really hard to resource and plan and intervene when you don't know how big the problem is," Dr McKay-Brown says.

Many parents and experts argue the more accurate term is 'school can't' — it's not that the child won't go to school, they can't.

Experts say the emotional distress can be caused by problems at home or school but is often associated with neurodiversity and mental health disorders.

"We know that there are certain groups that are more at risk than others … they may be autistic, they may have learning difficulties, ADHD. They may have anxiety or some other mood disorder," Dr McKay-Brown says.

'Ethan was left behind'

Hands hold a school portrait photo of a young Ethan. Other old school photos of him sit on a table.

When Ethan looks at a photo of himself in grade 3, he knows behind the smile was someone without much hope.

"I felt like I wouldn't actually get a job when I get older. I would be homeless, sleeping on the side of the road," the 12-year-old says.

A young boy sits on a bed, looking at the camera with a serious expression. Next to him are stuffed toys.

By grade 3 in his Geelong primary school, Ethan couldn't read or write.

He'd been falling behind for years, and becoming more disengaged.

"I couldn't even spell my name," Ethan says.

When Ethan's mum Sam saw how he was treated in class one day, it left her heartbroken.

"Instead of sitting there and writing a sentence like the other children were doing, they just said 'Oh, just draw a picture'. It pushed him further away," she says.

Pandemic lockdowns only made matters worse.

Ethan found online learning hard and later, found the return to school challenging. As he struggled to keep up, he began having physical outbursts and experiencing bullying. Eventually he started threatening self-harm if he was forced to attend school.

"It wasn't safe for me. I got bullied every day. Made me feel ... like I was locked up in a cage,” Ethan says.

A boy rests his head on his mum as he puts his arms around her. The ocean is behind them.

Sam, who had recently separated with four kids, was struggling to balance working to pay off her mortgage with Ethan's low attendance rate.

"Being a parent is really hard. Especially when they're having to finish school early, or you're getting phone calls saying, 'You need to come pick your child up, they've broken a window, or they've tried to self-harm'."

"You kind of can't commit to anything. Your life just goes on hold."

When Ethan's public school said they were out of options to help him, Sam added her son's name to a 100-person long waitlist for an independent school that helps youth who are disengaged from mainstream schooling.

The months slipped by as they waited for a spot.

"No child left behind is definitely not a reality, because Ethan was left behind," Sam says.

The shadow of the law

Because school attendance is required by law, for parents of kids struggling to go, the threat of legal action always looms.

When Kurt's 16-year-old daughter Hayley couldn't get out of bed to go to school, the daily texts started coming.

"Your daughter was marked absent … this absence has been recorded as unexplained or unjustified," one text from her Sydney school read.

Hayley says school staff eventually told her that her absences could result in a $11,000 fine, placing further pressure on the family.

A teenage girl sits on a couch, looking at the camera, with a serious, reflective expression.

“I had my parents coming in, like yelling at me … I got the light turned on, the blinds opened, the bed sheets pulled off, stuff like that,” Hayley says.

During a fight with Hayley, it dawned on Kurt, who is a mental health nurse, that his daughter had depression. He'd also noticed cuts on her arms.

"The school stuff was hard, but the stuff where you cry yourself to sleep sometimes is having a child doing that themselves … and working in the industry knowing what the outcomes can be," Kurt says tearily.

A man sits indoors on a couch, looking at the camera, with a neutral expression.

Meanwhile, the texts continued, leaving Kurt fearing what might come next.

In a general statement provided to Four Corners, the NSW Department of Education said, "where attendance improvement support has been unsuccessful … and the parents have not meaningfully engaged, the matter may be referred for consideration of legal action".

Homeschooling Hayley would have stopped the texts, but for the working single-dad of two, it wasn't an option. Eventually, school staff assured him he would not be fined.

"We started talking to the deputy principal and she was excellent, so she put a plan in place with Hayley," Kurt says.

The number of homeschooled children has doubled during the past five years, from 21,456 pupils in 2019 to more than 43,797 in 2023.

Alice has seen parents post on Facebook about giving up their careers to homeschool their kids. It's an option she's thought about a lot for Frieda who has been diagnosed with autism.

"The prospect of homeschooling Frieda hangs over me every day … but I can't afford to," Alice says.

When Frieda doesn't make it into school, Alice isn't able to get through a normal work day. To make up for lost time she works into the night or over weekends.

A woman wearing glasses sits looking at a computer in a darkened room. Her hand is resting on her chin.

Frieda's attendance has improved after moving to a school where staff have been more accommodating to her needs.

Despite the improvement, Alice received a formal warning letter last month regarding Frieda's attendance. A second will trigger contact from a homeschool liaison officer.

"The principal did explain it's just how the system works, and it doesn't need to be a scary thing as they may have more resources … but if I didn't have the heads up, I would have been terrified," Alice says.

"When you get something like that … it's got a shaming tone. Like you're failing at this, you're failing because your child isn't going to school all the time."

Frieda lies on pillows on her bed, looking up with a neutral expression.

Alice feels like that sentiment runs across the department's pamphlets on school refusal, particularly the NSW Education slogan "Every School Day Counts".

"How insulting. Of course we want our kids to be going every day."

"They were putting [it] back onto the parents, it's our fault … instead of 'school attendance is tanking, so is numeracy and literacy' and the department isn't prepared to go, 'Maybe it's a problem with the system'."

'You have to go through so much trauma’

After a six month wait, Ethan got a place at MacKillop Education in Geelong, a non-government school that helps students disengaged from mainstream schooling to get back on track.

Teachers and the principal personally greeted the shy newcomer at the school gates every day.

A boy sits at a table with a pen and paper in front of him.

With just 80 students and class sizes capped at eight, Ethan got the attention he needed to work on things like regulating his emotions when he felt challenged by the schoolwork.

"He would bite or pull his hair and he would say, 'I'm so dumb'. That's the thing that upset him most, that he thought he was stupid," says Sharyn Sadler, Ethan's support teacher.

"There was a fear of failure. And that's actually common amongst many of our children because they've experienced so much failure."

To support students' emotional regulation, classrooms are fitted with chill-out sensory spaces and teachers keep a predictable routine. Uniforms are also scrapped for students who find them itchy.

"I think there does need to be greater flexibility in the system in how we're providing education for young people to be able to access it. And that comes through knowledge, human resourcing, money," MacKillop co-principal Skye Staude says.

For most MacKillop students, the school is a transition period to get them back into a mainstream setting.

After two years at the school, Ethan's attendance went up to full-time. He can now read fluently and spell.

This year he transitioned into a mainstream government school with additional supports.

Sam knows not every child gets the opportunity Ethan does.

"Alternative schools like this, they're not as easily accessible for kids who need them. You have to go through so much trauma, so much anger. The child has to go through so much themselves to even be put in the position to access a school like this," Sam says.

"Ethan's been given that chance, and he's really grown with it."

A boy smiles sitting in the driver's seat of an arcade racing game at a neon-lit arcade. His mum smiles in the seat next to him.

Ethan will be a teenager next year, and he likes the person he's finally becoming.

"I feel like I got hope in myself. I'm proud of myself," Ethan says.

Sam knows that school refusal is difficult to comprehend for those that haven't lived it themselves, but knows from experience how debilitating it can be.

"You feel like there's no light at the end of the tunnel as a parent, so you're not thinking about your hopes, what you want out of your life," Sam says.

A boy and his mum sit on a park bench looking ahead. To their right the sun is setting behind a row of trees.

For some kids, the path ahead isn't as straightforward.

Hayley's attendance improved to 85 per cent last year when she signed up to a pilot program run by NSW Education for students with chronic attendance issues that employs interest-based learning.

But this year she's had setbacks — first with her mental health, then the program made some changes to its approach.

A teenage girl walks in her backyard at night holding a book. She is looking down at her dog, a golden retriever.

"Sometimes I'll be going great for a few weeks or months or even a whole year, but then stuff will not be going as great again, and then my attendance will go down again."

To stay engaged, the program has allowed Hayley to make adjustments like wearing headphones to block out distractions. She's also started attending a local school for art class four days a week.

She's noticed the change in herself.

A teenage girl sits outside at night, looking at the camera with a slight smile. A light illuminates the house behind her.

"I'm actually doing things. Talking to people instead of staying in my room, trying to get to school."

"I want to be able to get through year 11 and 12 and get into uni to study psychology. So I've been doing as much as I can to get there."

One size doesn't fit all

The issue of school refusal, which exists largely in the shadows, was pushed into the spotlight last year by a Senate inquiry.

Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne, who helped instigate the inquiry, says Australia's one-size-fits-all education system is outdated.

Coloured pencils and highlighters in small buckets in a school classroom.

"This is the model of education that we had over 100 years ago. The world is very different now. Young people are very different now," she says.

"The good news is that we know that there are things that work: early intervention, smaller class sizes, flexible campuses, interest-led learning."

The federal government has agreed or supported in-principle two of the inquiry's 14 recommendations.

They include commissioning the Australian Education Research Organisation to analyse the drivers of school refusal and possible interventions, and disseminate school refusal training for teachers.

A girl holds a container and a spoon above a bowl on a kitchen counter. Her mum looks on.

Alice feels like the government has stopped short of investing in schools properly. She's worried asking more of existing teachers will strain the system.

"The teachers are under so much pressure. So, they're going to do more training, more to their workload when they're already stretched?"

Frieda's attendance is now at 54 per cent, she also successfully sat her year 3 NAPLAN test.

But Alice knows there's no guarantee things will keep improving.

"I don't know what our lives are going to look like next week, next month, next year," says Alice.

The fear of the unknown scares her – if Frieda will get through the school day, if she'll get another warning letter.

"As a parent, that's pretty awful because all you want is for your kid to be happy."

A mother holds her young daughter, giving her a kiss on the cheek. They are standing indoors. The child is smiling.

Watch Four Corners: The kids who can't, tonight from 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview .

Subscribe to the Four Corners newsletter and follow Four Corners on Facebook .

Do you know more about this story? Contact Four Corners here .

Story: Mridula Amin and Sascha Ettinger-Epstein

Photography: Mridula Amin

Digital Production: Mridula Amin and Nick Wiggins

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Meet the 12-hour school day that will cure Gen Z’s crippling social awkwardness, complete with public speaking lessons and a smartphone ban

Gen Z workers came of age during the pandemic—and bosses say it shows. Employers frequently accuse their youngest recruits of lacking basic soft skills and having no idea how to interact with their coworkers . Now, schools are stepping in to help plug the gap.

Take All Saints Catholic College in London. Its headteacher is trialing a 12-hour school day between breakfast time and dinner, as well as bringing in public speaking lessons and a smartphone ban—all in a bid to prepare pupils for adult life.

Headteacher Andrew O’Neill told The Telegraph he launched the pilot program after realizing Gen Z pupils—the youngest of whom are 11 years old—had become “homebirds” that were “not as good at holding a conversation or eye contact” post-pandemic.

“We realized we need to break this and change something,” O’Neill said, adding that he has never seen this level of “apathy” in the 20 years he’s worked with teenagers.

Due to lockdown and the rise of smartphones, teens today have grown accustomed to getting home and scrolling instead of interacting with others—and it’s increasingly isolating them, O’Neill believes.

He added: “They don’t want to turn up, they want to go home, they want to be by themselves, they want to be on their device, isolating themselves from others, and it’s a complete tragedy of our youth.”

As well as being addicted to their phones, the school told Fortune that other issues it identified before launching the program include being distracted, disenfranchised and alienated.

The solution? Extend school hours.

All Saints banned its 900 pupils, aged between 11 and 16, from carrying phones in 2016. However, the 120 pupils taking part in the extended school day can enjoy a broader phone detox while on the premises from 7am to 6:30pm on Mondays to Thursdays.

Instead of scrolling TikTok or BeReal, those extra hours will be filled with activities such as cooking lessons, public speaking lessons, basketball training, and extra time to finish homework—before enjoying an evening meal with classmates where they sit down and talk without a screen in sight.

O’Neill told Fortune that the school will be measuring the program’s success using attendance levels, behavior logs, and homework completion alongside anecdotal evidence from parents, students, and teachers.

Gen Z workers lack ‘basic skills’

All Saints Catholic College isn’t the first school to step in and provide extra support for socially awkward Gen Zers.

Michigan State University is getting its graduates ready for the job market with lessons on how to handle a networking conversation—including how to look for signs that the other party is starting to get bored and that it’s time to move on—reports the Wall Street Journal .

The university is also asking companies to give explicit guidance on a hire’s first day, including what to wear and where to get lunch.

Miami University even organized a dinner with senior leaders in order to teach proper mealtime etiquette, such as how to engage in conversation on neutral topics.

Employers are also giving new graduates extra training to get them up to speed. Take the world’s Big Four consulting firms, for example: Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and EY are all offering incoming junior hires soft skills training , including lessons on how to speak up in meetings.

“It’s wholly understandable that students who missed out on face-to-face activities during COVID may now be stronger in certain fields, such as working independently, and less confident in others, such as presentations to groups,” Ian Elliott, the chief people officer at PwC UK, said in sympathy with young workers.

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Trump says he wouldn't sign a federal abortion ban. Could he limit abortion access in other ways if reelected?

By Kaia Hubbard , Shawna Mizelle , Melissa Quinn

May 10, 2024 / 8:18 AM EDT / CBS News

Washington — When Donald Trump announced his position on abortion last month — pledging to leave the issue to the states — groups that oppose the procedure and had pushed him to back a federal ban were disappointed.

"At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people," Trump said.

Indeed, his pledge follows what voters have generally reinforced at the ballot box since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — that they oppose efforts to restrict access to abortion. His backers within anti-abortion groups have nonetheless urged him to publicly support a nationwide ban, at a minimum, on abortion beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy.

But the former president might not need to risk alienating voters in the general election to appease abortion rights opponents in his base. Should Trump return to the Oval Office, some experts say his administration can significantly restrict abortion without ever imposing a federal ban.

The plan for abortion under a new administration

A "presidential transition handbook" titled Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation includes directives aimed at multiple government agencies that could be enforced by a conservative president.

The abortion section was written by Roger Severino, who led the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights under Trump.

Trump senior campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita pushed back against the prospect of such restrictions in a second Trump term, saying in a statement that "unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official."

But without the ability — or political will — to pass new abortion limits through Congress, Trump may face pressure to take other action. And the outside plan outlines how an administration could rely on existing laws, interpreting them to dramatically alter access to abortion — focusing on a centuries-old law and abortion pills.

Ending medication abortion

Medication abortions account for more than half of all abortions in the U.S. each year, making it a key avenue of access for women seeking an abortion and a target for opponents.

Project 2025 calls abortion pills "the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world" and argues the Food and Drug Administration should reverse its approval of the drug at the center of the regimen.

Mifepristone, the first in a two-drug regimen used to terminate early-stage pregnancies, was approved by the FDA in 2000. That approval and subsequent moves to make the drug more accessible have been the source of intense pushback in recent years. The Supreme Court is considering a case this term concerning the rules around the drug's use.

Although the high court appears poised to reject a challenge to the drug's availability on procedural grounds, a new administration could take other action to curtail access to the medication. For instance, a new FDA chief could decide to review the agency's past actions, including the initial approval and more recent moves that have made mifepristone more widely available, like the ability to get it through the mail. Project 2025 outlines the move as an "interim step," while advocating for full reversal of the drug's approval.

Trump said in an interview with Time Magazine that he has "pretty strong views" on the abortion pill that he plans to make public in the near future, along with his views on the implementation of a 19th century anti-obscenity law that could mark an even more substantial move to restrict abortion.

Using the Comstock Act to ban the abortion pill — and more

An 1873 law related to the shipping of materials deemed as "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile" has become a primary focus of anti-abortion groups as a method to significantly restrict access to abortion — even without a new law.

Because the Comstock Act remains on the books, those who oppose abortion see it as a method to almost immediately begin restricting access under a conservative administration.

Project 2025 argues that since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, there is no federal prohibition on enforcing the statute, saying the "next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills."

To do so, a Trump administration could appoint an attorney general who believes that the Comstock Act is not in disuse and should be enforced as it's written, says Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University's Beasley School of Law. And she expects that an administration's Justice Department seeking to apply the Comstock Act could ban everything that is used in furtherance of an abortion — not just the mailing of abortion pills.

"I think that a new administration could try to take action to put people in jail for mailing anything, but, you know, pills included, that assist in an abortion because the act is really broad," Rebouché said, adding that it could amount to a "defacto" abortion ban nationwide if it's applied in a broad sense.

Accordingly, the Comstock Act could offer a path forward for presidents to severely restrict access to abortion with some political cover or "plausible deniability," said Mary Ziegler, a historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, because rather than signing a new abortion ban, they would be able to say they're "just enforcing the law."

But enforcing the Comstock Act, and chipping away at abortion access isn't the movement's end game, Ziegler says.

"The Comstock Act is more of a short term strategy," she said. "Personhood is the long term goal."

The long fight for personhood

The topic of personhood — when human life begins — has been a widely debated philosophical question for centuries. But there's also been a separate legal argument over whether fetuses should be granted the same rights as any person under the law, often referred to as fetal personhood.

Under Roe, the Supreme Court didn't weigh in on when life begins, instead opting to tie abortion access to the viability standard, that is, when a fetus could survive outside of the womb. And the justices didn't address this question directly in overturning Roe either, although Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, mentioned it.

"Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth," Alito wrote, saying the liberals' dissenting opinion would impose a theory about when personhood rights begin that he argued the Constitution and legal tradition don't support. But he didn't appear to rule out an alternative theory for when personhood rights should begin.

"Unborn child" in federal law

The issue seemed to bubble up into recent arguments before the high court in a case pitting Idaho's near-total abortion ban against a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), that requires Medicare-participating hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment in medical emergencies.

During arguments last month, Alito honed in on EMTALA's use of the phrase "unborn child" in its definition of "emergency medical condition," which is one that places the health of the mother or her "unborn child" in serious jeopardy. Alito said "in that situation, the hospital must stabilize the threat to the unborn child. And it seems that the plain meaning is that the hospital must try to eliminate any immediate threat to the child, but performing an abortion is antithetical to that duty."

Meghan Boone, a professor at Wake Forest School of Law who is an expert on reproductive rights, says Alito seemed to be arguing that "EMTALA itself reflected an equal duty to the pregnant person and to a fetus, such that it could not be read to ever allow for abortion because in allowing for abortion, you are necessarily undermining the health of the fetus."

Under that interpretation, "the fetus has the trump card," she said, and "the only correct action is to accept whatever health consequences may come from letting that pregnancy continue as long as the fetus has a chance of survival."

Boone doesn't think the Supreme Court wants to rule on whether fetuses are people. But she suggested these arguments indicate the high court may be receptive to a Republican presidential administration's decision to treat fetuses as fully formed people under the law.

If fetuses are deemed to be people with legal rights, then abortion could be considered murder.

In this way, fetal personhood could be an avenue to prohibit abortion nationwide without having to impose a standard abortion ban. And a recent court ruling in Alabama hinted at the stakes.

In vitro fertilization under fire

Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling that suggested that embryos should have the same rights as children. In a decision stemming from a wrongful death lawsuit, the court determined that the frozen embryos stored for fertility treatments could be considered children under an Alabama law enacted in 1872, granting them protections that children are afforded.

Although the state legislature moved quickly to protect access to IVF amid intense backlash, the ruling has drawn attention to personhood laws elsewhere. According to a report from Pregnancy Justice, a pro-abortion rights group, at least 11 states have broad personhood language on the books, while at least five more states define personhood as including fetuses within their criminal code.

Rebouché said the Alabama ruling signals "there's a will to use both existing law and potentially to enact new law that confers legal rights on the unborn." But exactly what that would look like remains to be seen.

In late February, shortly after the Alabama ruling, Sen. Tammy Duckworth unsuccessfully tried to get legislation protecting access to IVF through the Senate. And it wasn't the first time. The Illinois Democrat had tried to get support for the bill in the months following Roe's reversal and had taken steps even before, recognizing that the movement would likely target IVF.

"I've been talking about this now for well over 10 years, but it really came out of my personal IVF experience talking to my doctor," Duckworth told CBS News.

The Illinois Democrat said she first learned about the personhood push in part when she was going through IVF herself, when her doctor warned her as they were set to discard nonviable eggs that under the new personhood pushes under consideration throughout the country, the act could be potentially considered manslaughter or murder.

Democratic Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts used IVF to conceive her two children and she said she expects access to the treatment to be a "huge factor" in the presidential race.

"I mean, this is going to be a huge issue as women go to the polls and not just women, people who want to start families, people who go to IVF clinics as their last hope to starting a family," she told CBS News. "This is going to be on your mind as they go to the ballot box."

At the state level, Ziegler said she expects personhood pushes to continue. And she made clear that the "end game" is a Supreme Court decision to recognize personhood nationwide. But she noted that that's not expected to happen right away.

Trump has not said whether he believes embryos are children but said he strongly supports IVF "for couples who are trying to have a precious baby." And though Trump says he opposes a nationwide abortion ban, Duckworth said the former president's actions tell a different story.

"We can't stop Trump from lying," Duckworth said. "But when you look at his actions, it's clear that he's proud of these extreme abortion bans, he's proud of this personhood movement and so he's gonna say what he thinks he needs to say to try to get elected, but frankly, we all know Trump lies."

Duckworth's sentiment echoes Democrats across the country. President Biden has made abortion central to his reelection bid. Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are representing themselves as defenders of abortion rights, which they say Trump and Republicans want to take away.

But Trump's campaign says he's been "consistent and clear," that he will not sign a federal abortion ban and will leave decisions on abortion up to the states.

Wiles and LaCivita agreed, saying, "despite our being crystal clear, some 'allies' haven't gotten the hint, and the media, in their anti-Trump zeal, has been all-to-willing to continue using anonymous sourcing and speculation about a second Trump administration in an effort to prevent a second Trump administration."

Still, Ziegler said Trump has had a tendency to "outsource a lot of important questions to the anti-abortion movement."

"He'll bring in people to this administration and let them make the calls," she predicted.

At the end of his video statement, Trump told abortion opponents what it would take to "restore our culture."

"You must follow your heart on this issue. But remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact, to save our country," he said. "Always go by your heart. But we must win. We have to win."

Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital based in Washington, D.C.

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Israel fumes as Biden signals a harder line against a Rafah ground assault

Israel reacted with a mix of concern and fury Thursday to President Joe Biden's warning that he would cut off weapons to the U.S. ally's military if it moves forward with a full-scale assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.

The threat, which marked a shift in Washington's public approach to the war, came after the Biden administration halted a shipment of bombs last week amid concerns over Israel's plans to invade Rafah even as cease-fire talks continue with Hamas. The U.S. has long supplied weapons to Israel, and Biden's warning follows months of growing tensions between the two countries and as the president faces domestic pressure to take a harder line on the war.

Israeli officials appeared in little doubt that the fallout could have far-reaching consequences.

The country’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said the U.S. pause was “a very disappointing decision, even frustrating.” He suggested in an interview with Israeli Channel 12 TV news that the move stemmed from pressure Biden felt from both Congress and U.S. college campus protests.

“Israel will continue to fight Hamas until its destruction,” Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz said on X in an apparent response to Biden's threat. “There is no just war like this one.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refrained from directly commenting on Biden's remarks, but on Thursday afternoon, he reposted a video on X from a speech he delivered earlier this week saying: "If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone."

Members of his far-right government were quick to express their outrage over the threat.

Right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir issued a short but scathing response in a post on X. “Hamas ❤️ Biden,” he said. His office did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from NBC News.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the ultranationalist Religious Zionist Party, accused Biden of an “arms embargo,” writing in a thread posted to X that Israel would “achieve complete victory in this war despite President Biden’s push back.”

“We simply have no choice as this war is an existential one and anything other than complete victory will put the existence of the Jewish state in danger,” Smotrich said.

The country's president, Isaac Herzog, sought to temper the backlash in comments appearing to admonish the right-wing ministers.

Thanking Biden for being a "great friend of the State of Israel," he said: "Even when there are disagreements and moments of disappointment between friends and allies, there is a way to clarify the disputes and it is beholden upon all of us to avoid baseless, irresponsible and insulting statements and tweets that harm the national security and the interests of the State of Israel.”

On Thursday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, reiterated his military's gratitude for the arms supplied by the U.S., and said they had enough weapons to carry out an incursion into Rafah. "The IDF has armaments for the missions it plans, and we also have what we need for the missions in Rafah," Hagari said.

Israeli military experts also expressed concern over Biden's announcement, however.

Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, said he had "difficulty in understanding" Biden's approach.

"He is committed to the security of Israel by supplying Iron Dome and Arrow interceptors ... but not sophisticated 2,000-pound bombs that will enable to IDF to attack Hamas," Michael, who is also a member of the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, told NBC News. "What does it mean?"

"Israel is allowed to defend itself only from its ground by intercepting rockets and missiles, but it is not allowed to defend itself by attacking the source and generators of terrorism in Gaza or other places?" Michael said Wednesday morning.

In a phone interview Tuesday before Biden's comments, Michael said the U.S. decision to halt a shipment of weapons was already a "troubling signal" that reflected the "depth of the tension between Israel and the U.S."

An Israeli official told NBC News there were deep frustrations within the Israeli government over the Biden administration's decision to withhold the shipment, which included 2,000-pound bombs the U.S. was concerned would be used to deadly effect in a dense urban area.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden said in his interview on CNN Wednesday when asked about the blocked shipment.

His administration has faced mounting scrutiny for continuing to send weapons to Israel despite the growing death toll in the enclave, and there has been little transparency in the volume of munitions the U.S. has sent to Israel since the start of the war seven months ago.

But Israel already has a significant arsenal, so the paused arms transfer would be unlikely to stop any expanded military offensive in Rafah, said Atlantic Council fellow and military intelligence expert Alex Plitsas. The decision was largely “symbolic,” he suggested in a phone interview Wednesday.

“It’s not really going to impact ground operations in Gaza,” he said, adding he believed the Biden administration ultimately wanted to “voice the displeasure” it felt over Israel’s plans. But he noted that if the trend were to continue, future halted shipments could have a more tangible impact on Israel's operations in Gaza.

This would not be the first time the U.S. has withheld military aid from Israel.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan imposed a six-year ban on cluster weapons sales to Israel following a Congressional probe that found Israel had used them in populated areas in its 1982 offensive in Lebanon.

Wednesday's developments came as the Biden administration missed a deadline to submit a highly anticipated report to Congress on whether Israel is using U.S. weapons in accordance with international law.

It was not immediately clear when the report would be submitted to Congress or what impact it might have on Israel's offensive in Gaza, in which more than 34,900 people have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others were taken hostage into Gaza, according to Israeli officials. More than 130 hostages remain held in the enclave, with at least a quarter of them believed to be dead.

Chantal Da Silva is a breaking news editor for NBC News Digital based in London.

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States with abortion bans saw greater drops in medical school graduates applying for residencies

FILE - Medical diagrams are posted in a hallway of one of the wings of a hospital in Mississippi on Feb. 29, 2024. An analysis released Thursday, May 9, 2024, by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that fewer U.S. medical school graduates are applying to residency programs, but the drop is more striking in states that ban abortion compared with other states. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

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Fewer U.S. medical school graduates are applying to residency programs , but the drop is more striking in states that ban abortion compared with other states.

Figures released Thursday by the Association of American Medical Colleges showed continuing declines after the group first spotted the difference in an analysis last year.

“It looks even more pronounced. So now, I’m looking at a trend,” said Dr. Atul Grover, a co-author of the latest report.

The number of applicants to these post-graduate training programs dropped slightly across the board from spring of 2023 to spring of 2024, with larger decreases seen in states with abortion bans. Those states saw a drop of 4.2% from the previous application cycle, compared with 0.6 % in states where abortion is legal.

Similarly, states with abortion bans saw a 6.7% drop in OB-GYN applicants year over year, while states without abortion restrictions saw a 0.4% increase in OB-GYN applicants. The group only looked at graduates from U.S. medical schools, not those from osteopathic or international medical schools.

More study is needed to understand why medical students aren’t applying to certain residency programs. “But it certainly looks like this change in reproductive health laws and regulations is having an effect on where new physicians are choosing to train,” Grover said.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly participates in a ceremony honoring fallen law enforcement officers Friday, May 3, 2024 outside the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. The Democratic governor has vetoed a bill approved by the Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature for ensuring that child support payments cover fetuses. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for abortion bans in states.

Dr. AnnaMarie Connolly, chief of education and academic affairs for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement that patients may ultimately suffer.

Medical students choosing where to apply to residency programs “are making a commitment to the community to work and to live there for years while they train,” she said, adding that they will care for thousands of patients during that time and may wind up practicing there.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Should We Get Rid of Homework?
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6 of 15 |. Ola Kozak, 11, right, and her younger brother Julian Kozak, 9, sit at the table where they used to do their homework at the family home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday April 5, 2024. Ola is happy that Poland's government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April.
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Should We Ban Homework?

Bans proposed and implemented in the U.S. and abroad

Refocus on mental health and educate the “whole child”

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