California lawmakers voted last month to prohibit most middle schools and high

schools from starting classes before 8:30 a.m. Once signed into law by Gov. Jerry

Brown, schools across the state will have three years to comply.

The sponsors of the legislation, Senate Bill 328, rightly cite studies showing the

importance of sleep to teen health and development, at a time when American children

face a mounting mental health crisis and rising suicide rates.

But while pushing back start times allows teens to wake later, the law still wouldn't

ensure that they get the sleep and rest critical to their mental health. That's why

lawmakers need to consider and regulate the overall amount of time students are

required to do schoolwork, both inside and outside the classroom.

Most of us take for granted that there are legal limits on how much adults should be

allowed to work without special compensation or protection. "Eight hours for work, eight

hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will" was a rallying cry of unions in the early

20th century.

But somehow we don't yet take for granted that our children's schoolwork ought to be

subject to similar limits. The Fair Labor Standards Act established limits on children's

employment, but not on their schoolwork.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, compulsory public education laws were passed

in all 52 states, largely as an effort to protect children from labor exploitation. Freed
from the physical hazards of factory work, children went to school to become literate

American citizens and productive members of the workforce.

A century later, the student workweek remains unregulated, and schools have an

unfettered ability to increase the amount of academic work that students are required to

do. Children and teens are in school an average of 25 more days a year today than in the

1950s, and a University of Michigan study found that children between 6 and 17 spend

about 7 1/2 hours per week more on academics than they did 20 years ago.

This additional work has not led to a significant improvement in overall academic

performance. The nation's Program for International Student Assessment scores have

been falling for years. All the extra work also hasn't correlated with an increase in future

employability. Scores on the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which assesses one of

the qualities employers seek most, have plummeted since the 1990s.

At the same time, the importance of unscheduled time for children has been well

established. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, passed in 1989,

recognizes children's rights "to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational

activities." The United States is the only U.N. member state that hasn't ratified the child

rights treaty.

U.S. states and school districts determine the number of instructional hours that

American children and teens will have in the classroom. At most schools, the day starts

sometime around 8 a.m. and lasts until 3 p.m. This alone makes for a nearly 35-hour

workweek, not counting extracurricular activities and homework.

The National Education Assn. provides recommendations for time spent on homework,

but at least one study indicates that the amount of homework given to elementary

students far exceeds those suggested limits. A 2014 survey of American teachers

found that high schoolers are assigned 17 1/2 hours of homework a week, or 3 1/2

hours per night.

The upshot of all this: For most students in the United States, the workweek often

exceeds 40 hours -- the work limit we set for employed adults.

Children should be afforded the same amount of time to rest and recharge as adults, if

not more. We should not make them choose between the sleep they need for good

health and the work required to get good grades. Both will have a strong impact on their

future prospects.

And, while the burdens and stakes are high for all students, they are even greater for

those from underprivileged families, who often need to care for younger siblings and

work after-school jobs on top of their other responsibilities.

According to one recent study, only 15% of teens are getting the recommended eight to

10 hours of sleep on school nights. Studies suggest this could have a host of harmful

effects, causing teens to age faster and be more susceptible to disease as adults.

Too much schoolwork also cuts down on play time. The U.N. declared recreation a right

for children for good reason. It is an essential contributor to their physical and mental
health, and it helps them develop the social and decision-making skills they need in

order to find fulfillment and success later in life.

Children deserve legal protection from excessive schoolwork. If we believe, as science

tells us, that rest and recreation are critical to children's health, we should ensure they

get it.California lawmakers voted last month to prohibit most middle schools and high

schools from starting classes before 8:30 a.m. Once signed into law by Gov. Jerry

Brown, schools across the state will have three years to comply.

The sponsors of the legislation, Senate Bill 328, rightly cite studies showing the

importance of sleep to teen health and development, at a time when American children

face a mounting mental health crisis and rising suicide rates.

But while pushing back start times allows teens to wake later, the law still wouldn't

ensure that they get the sleep and rest critical to their mental health. That's why

lawmakers need to consider and regulate the overall amount of time students are

required to do schoolwork, both inside and outside the classroom.

Most of us take for granted that there are legal limits on how much adults should be

allowed to work without special compensation or protection. "Eight hours for work, eight

hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will" was a rallying cry of unions in the early

20th century.
But somehow we don't yet take for granted that our children's schoolwork ought to be

subject to similar limits. The Fair Labor Standards Act established limits on children's

employment, but not on their schoolwork.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, compulsory public education laws were passed

in all 52 states, largely as an effort to protect children from labor exploitation. Freed

from the physical hazards of factory work, children went to school to become literate

American citizens and productive members of the workforce.

A century later, the student workweek remains unregulated, and schools have an

unfettered ability to increase the amount of academic work that students are required to

do. Children and teens are in school an average of 25 more days a year today than in the

1950s, and a University of Michigan study found that children between 6 and 17 spend

about 7 1/2 hours per week more on academics than they did 20 years ago.

This additional work has not led to a significant improvement in overall academic

performance. The nation's Program for International Student Assessment scores have

been falling for years. All the extra work also hasn't correlated with an increase in future

employability. Scores on the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which assesses one of

the qualities employers seek most, have plummeted since the 1990s.

At the same time, the importance of unscheduled time for children has been well

established. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, passed in 1989,

recognizes children's rights "to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational
activities." The United States is the only U.N. member state that hasn't ratified the child

rights treaty.

U.S. states and school districts determine the number of instructional hours that

American children and teens will have in the classroom. At most schools, the day starts

sometime around 8 a.m. and lasts until 3 p.m. This alone makes for a nearly 35-hour

workweek, not counting extracurricular activities and homework.

The National Education Assn. provides recommendations for time spent on homework,

but at least one study indicates that the amount of homework given to elementary

students far exceeds those suggested limits. A 2014 survey of American teachers

found that high schoolers are assigned 17 1/2 hours of homework a week, or 3 1/2

hours per night.

The upshot of all this: For most students in the United States, the workweek often

exceeds 40 hours -- the work limit we set for employed adults.

Children should be afforded the same amount of time to rest and recharge as adults, if

not more. We should not make them choose between the sleep they need for good

health and the work required to get good grades. Both will have a strong impact on their

future prospects.

And, while the burdens and stakes are high for all students, they are even greater for

those from underprivileged families, who often need to care for younger siblings and

work after-school jobs on top of their other responsibilities.

According to one recent study, only 15% of teens are getting the recommended eight to

10 hours of sleep on school nights. Studies suggest this could have a host of harmful

effects, causing teens to age faster and be more susceptible to disease as adults.

Too much schoolwork also cuts down on play time. The U.N. declared recreation a right

for children for good reason. It is an essential contributor to their physical and mental

health, and it helps them develop the social and decision-making skills they need in

order to find fulfillment and success later in life.

Children deserve legal protection from excessive schoolwork. If we believe, as science

tells us, that rest and recreation are critical to children's health, we should ensure they

get it.California lawmakers voted last month to prohibit most middle schools and high

schools from starting classes before 8:30 a.m. Once signed into law by Gov. Jerry

Brown, schools across the state will have three years to comply.

The sponsors of the legislation, Senate Bill 328, rightly cite studies showing the

importance of sleep to teen health and development, at a time when American children

face a mounting mental health crisis and rising suicide rates.

But while pushing back start times allows teens to wake later, the law still wouldn't

ensure that they get the sleep and rest critical to their mental health. That's why

lawmakers need to consider and regulate the overall amount of time students are

required to do schoolwork, both inside and outside the classroom.

Most of us take for granted that there are legal limits on how much adults should be

allowed to work without special compensation or protection. "Eight hours for work, eight
hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will" was a rallying cry of unions in the early

20th century.

But somehow we don't yet take for granted that our children's schoolwork ought to be

subject to similar limits. The Fair Labor Standards Act established limits on children's

employment, but not on their schoolwork.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, compulsory public education laws were passed

in all 52 states, largely as an effort to protect children from labor exploitation. Freed

from the physical hazards of factory work, children went to school to become literate

American citizens and productive members of the workforce.

A century later, the student workweek remains unregulated, and schools have an

unfettered ability to increase the amount of academic work that students are required to

do. Children and teens are in school an average of 25 more days a year today than in the

1950s, and a University of Michigan study found that children between 6 and 17 spend

about 7 1/2 hours per week more on academics than they did 20 years ago.

This additional work has not led to a significant improvement in overall academic

performance. The nation's Program for International Student Assessment scores have

been falling for years. All the extra work also hasn't correlated with an increase in future

employability. Scores on the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which assesses one of

the qualities employers seek most, have plummeted since the 1990s.

At the same time, the importance of unscheduled time for children has been well

established. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, passed in 1989,
recognizes children's rights "to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational

activities." The United States is the only U.N. member state that hasn't ratified the child

rights treaty.

U.S. states and school districts determine the number of instructional hours that

American children and teens will have in the classroom. At most schools, the day starts

sometime around 8 a.m. and lasts until 3 p.m. This alone makes for a nearly 35-hour

workweek, not counting extracurricular activities and homework.

The National Education Assn. provides recommendations for time spent on homework,

but at least one study indicates that the amount of homework given to elementary

students far exceeds those suggested limits. A 2014 survey of American teachers

found that high schoolers are assigned 17 1/2 hours of homework a week, or 3 1/2

hours per night.

The upshot of all this: For most students in the United States, the workweek often

exceeds 40 hours -- the work limit we set for employed adults.

Children should be afforded the same amount of time to rest and recharge as adults, if

not more. We should not make them choose between the sleep they need for good

health and the work required to get good grades. Both will have a strong impact on their

future prospects.
And, while the burdens and stakes are high for all students, they are even greater for

those from underprivileged families, who often need to care for younger siblings and

work after-school jobs on top of their other responsibilities.

According to one recent study, only 15% of teens are getting the recommended eight to

10 hours of sleep on school nights. Studies suggest this could have a host of harmful

effects, causing teens to age faster and be more susceptible to disease as adults.

Too much schoolwork also cuts down on play time. The U.N. declared recreation a right

for children for good reason. It is an essential contributor to their physical and mental

health, and it helps them develop the social and decision-making skills they need in

order to find fulfillment and success later in life.

Children deserve legal protection from excessive schoolwork. If we believe, as science

tells us, that rest and recreation are critical to children's health, we should ensure they

get it.

Bad article
Spencer, Kyle. "Homework Bans Don't Work for all Homes, Parents Say." New York Times, 26 Apr.
2017, pp. A.21. SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.

Last spring, when Public School 11, a prekindergarten through fifth-grade school in

Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, banned mandatory traditional homework

assignments for children up to fourth grade, you might have expected universal acclaim.

Rather than filling out worksheets, students were encouraged to read nightly, and a

website offered tips for parents looking for engaging after-school activities.
Instead, war broke out among the parents. Those who wanted to keep homework

accused the anti-worksheet group of trying to force through a policy supported by a

select few. Some privately called the plan "economically and racially insensitive,"

favoring families with time and money to provide their own enrichment. There was a

series of contentious PTA meetings and jockeying to get on the school's leadership

team, a board that some schools have had trouble getting parents to join. At least three

families left the school.

Robin Broshi, a former education technology consultant, a parent of a third grader and

one of the architects of the plan, said the changes gave students time to discover the

things they were "really passionate about." Homework time with her son used to be a

"huge battle," she added, but he now spends hours after school with innovative software

programs that enthrall him.

But Ashley Sierra, an executive assistant and a single mother with three children at the

school, said the policy had created an unwelcome burden on her and other less affluent

families that could not afford extra workbooks, or software programs to supplement the

new policy. "I hate it," Ms. Sierra said.

Researchers who study academic history said they were not surprised that debate over

young children and homework had resurfaced now. Education and parenting trends are

cyclical, and the nation is coming off a stress-inducing, federally mandated

accountability push that has put standardized testing at the center of the national

education debate. Further, many parents say that homework has become particularly
stressful since the arrival of Common Core, a set of rigorous and often confusing

learning goals adopted by many states.

Tom Hatch, a professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College and

co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching,

said homework wars were really a proxy fight about what constitutes learning. He added

that they were intrinsically linked to the debates over standardized testing that have

fueled the national "opt-out" movement.

"It's a small part of a larger conversation about how kids should spend their time,"

Professor Hatch said.

Similar battles have been playing out around New York City: After P.S. 118 in Park Slope,

Brooklyn, eliminated mandatory homework this school year, some parents insisted that

the school provide worksheets for their children anyway. At P.S. 116 in Manhattan's Kips

Bay neighborhood, some parents threatened to leave after the principal, Jane Hsu,

replaced "traditional homework" with voluntary recreational activities and family

engagement -- a program she calls "PDF," or "playtime, downtime and family time."

And P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has had schoolwide conversations on homework, so

far deciding to preserve it, but focusing on keeping it "feasible," "meaningful" and

"reasonable," said Rebecca Fagin, the school's principal.

There is no official tally on the number of the city public elementary schools that are

altering their approach to homework. The Department of Education does not mandate
amounts of homework, and most plans are cobbled together as part of a shared vision

among a school's principal, parents and teachers.

Conversations about the value of elementary school homework have spread nationally.

Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in northeastern Texas, calls herself "the No

Homework Teacher" and has a website that proclaims, "Let's make education GREAT

again." In August, a letter she sent to parents announcing her decision to eliminate

homework was shared more than 70,000 times on Facebook and received national

media attention. In states from Florida to California, elementary schools are

experimenting with no homework, or what some call "reform homework" policies, often

with considerable resistance from parents -- and sometimes teachers.

Alfie Kohn, the author of 14 education-related books, including "The Homework Myth," is

a leader in the anti-homework camp. In a recent interview, Mr. Kohn described

homework as "educational malpractice" and "an extremely effective way to extinguish

children's curiosity." He noted that nations like Denmark and Japan, which routinely

outperform the United States on international math and science assessments, often

gave their students far less homework.

"They're not trying to turn kids into calculators on legs," he said.

On the other side of the argument is Harris M. Cooper, a professor of neuroscience and

psychology at Duke University and the author of "The Battle Over Homework." He says

he believes elementary school students should get small doses of engaging homework.
But Dr. Cooper's own research is often cited against him. A 2006 meta-analysis he

conducted of more than 60 studies of homework's efficacy showed that doing

homework did not necessarily increase an elementary school student's test scores or

grades. Dr. Cooper updated the analysis in 2012, with similar results.

But Dr. Cooper said these studies did not take into consideration homework's obvious,

but less trackable, benefits: teaching organization, time management and discipline.

Small amounts of enriching and age-appropriate homework in the early grades, he says,

serves as a good way for parents to observe their children's progress and to teach

young people that learning doesn't happen only inside a classroom. He calls parents

who seek to abolish after-school work "homework deniers."

Homework for young children has been a recurrent parenting issue since the beginning

of the 20th century, according to Paula S. Fass, a professor emerita of history at the

University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "The End of American Childhood."

Worries about its excesses have ebbed and flowed; students got heavy loads in the

1950s, when Americans were particularly worried about their ability to compete with the

Russians after the launch of Sputnik. Homework spiked again in the 1980s with the

release of the now-famous "A Nation at Risk" report, which indicated that American

students were falling behind their peers in other parts of the world.

Today, though, worry about excessive homework is competing with anxieties about

student achievement and global competition. The situation is compounded by an urge

among parents "to have as much control over their children as possible," Dr. Fass said.
"What you are looking at is the tension between that progressive view that children need

to be protected from being adults, and still these parents want their kids to succeed,"

she said.

The National Education Association and the National PTA have weighed in, suggesting

that students get 10 minutes of homework per grade, starting in first grade -- what

educators sometimes refer to as the "10-minute rule." Dr. Cooper also endorses this

policy.

The focus for many anti-homework parents is what they see as the quality of work

assigned. They object to worksheets, but embrace projects that they believe encourage

higher-level thinking. At P.S. 11 in Manhattan, even parents who support the

no-homework policy said they often used online resources like Khan Academy, a

nonprofit organization that provides free educational videos. The school's website also

includes handwriting exercises, scientific articles, and math and reading lessons.

Sophie Mintz, whose son is in second grade at the school, said that the no-homework

policy had afforded him more time to build elaborate Lego structures.

But parents with fewer means say the new policies don't take into account their needs

and time constraints, and leave them on their own when it comes to building the skills

their children need to prepare for the annual state tests.

Ms. Sierra, the P.S. 11 parent who opposed the change, said that although the school

included test prep materials on its voluntary homework site, she had a hard time getting

her children to do the work.

"Now I can't say, 'Your teacher wants you to do this,"' she said. "It's just me."'

Guadalupe Enriquez, another mother at P.S. 11, who works as a housekeeper, said she

looked to the school to provide and monitor work at home. "Having a little bit of

homework is good," she said.

At P.S. 118, the school in Park Slope, a homework policy that started last fall replaced

required worksheets with voluntary at-home projects. Tensions have arisen there

because the projects often turn out to be videos of after-school activities like gardening

or science experiments, in which parents take a guiding role. Some children do

presentations about family trips. Elizabeth Garraway, the principal, said that some

families had expressed concerns that they didn't have the time and resources for

exciting after-school activities or exotic family vacations.

She is working hard to dispel the idea that only certain after-school activities deserve

attention, she said, and has encouraged families to consider play dates and trips to the

park as good topics for presentations.

"You can do a presentation on anything," she said.

At the school on a recent morning, she showed off the results. In one third-grade class,

a boy recently wrote, directed and recorded a "fireside chat" with his father, who played

President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A girl arrived at school ready to showcase a PowerPoint

presentation on Greek mythology. And Mia Bornstein, 8, showed up one morning with a
broom handle bearing an oversize scroll that outlined life in ancient Egypt. Mia said she

had worked on it with her mother, an artist.

How much time had she spent on it? Hours.