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This article examines homework's place in American K-12 schooling over the last century and draws three main conclusions. First, homework has always aroused strong passions pro and con. Second, despite prominent press reports to the contrary in the early 20th century and again today, the best evidence suggests that most parents have consistently supported homework during the last 100 years. Third, homework practice is slow to change but is not unmovable, as evidenced by increases in high school homework in the decade after Sputnik and recent increases in homework for children in grades K-2. Nevertheless, the academic excellence movement of the last 20 years has succeeded in raising homework expectations only for the youngest children.
TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE; too easy or too hard; a spur to student achievement or student alienation; a marker of enlightened or lazy teaching; a builder of character or a degrader of self-esteem; too demanding or too dismissive of parents; a stimulus of national economic vigor or of behavioral conformity. The range of complaints about homework is enormous, and the complaints tend-as much today as in the past-toward extreme, angry, often contradictory views.
This article provides a brief historical overview of the rhetoric and reality of homework's place in American K-12 schooling since the establishment of widely available, publicly funded education systems in the mid-19th century. We have divided our discussion into four time periods. We begin with a brief discussion of homework in the 19th century, followed by discussions of the era of progressive education, the mid-20th century, and the period covering the academic excellence movement of the last 25 years. Throughout the discussion, we address three key issues:
1. Was homework a hot-button issue, and how was it viewed in educational discourse?
2. What did parents think about homework?
3. How much homework were children actually doing?
Homework in the 19th Century
Homework was rarely viewed as a problem in the 19th century. Students in high school were the only ones burdened with much homework; the common expectation was 2-3 hours per night, weekends included (Reese, 1995). Because compulsory attendance laws extended only to age 14 and adolescents' labor was key to the family economy, just a tiny portion of the population chose to attend (and...