Is homework done?

Homework is meaningless, say 58 percent of high school students and recent graduates on Fordham’s new survey. Most students are using AI to do the heavy mental lifting.

AI-using students learn less, writes Alicia Anderson. As a result, homework is not a reliable measure of students' effort or learning.

Photo: Joaquin Reyes Ramos/Pexels

In a study in China, 80 percent of secondary students used AI to do homework: Homework scores rose 18 percent, while scores on monthly exams fell by 20 percent. After two years, students did much worse on China's high-stakes college-entrance exams.

PISA results show the lowest reading and math scores on record among students in developed countries, she adds. Officials believe AI use is eroding students' work ethic.

Homework should be "a tool that reinforces in-class lessons and lets students learn how to work through difficult tasks independently," she writes. It should signal whether a student needs help to catch up.

But, increasingly, there are no reliable signals of how students are doing. Lower expectations and inflated grades let students zombie-walk through school without building academic skills or work habits. (Forty-four percent of students with below-average SAT/ACT scores say they earn mostly A's, according to the Fordham survey.) At some point, they're going to run into reality.

Homework -- done correctly and on time -- is good for kids, writes Elizabeth Grace Matthew, a foe of "gentle parenting."

Young Americans exhibit "worsening mental health and academic achievement," she writes. Employers "are noticing a pervasive decline in work ethic" among Gen Z employees, some of whom brag online bout “quiet quitting” -- doing the bare minimum -- while expecting to be paid.

"Requiring that children do reasonable amounts of homework is one way to push back on both our academic decline and our professional and interpersonal fragility," Matthew argues.

Homework's critics say it increases education gaps because some children have a parent with the time and ability to help, while others do not, she writes. Others say "homework contributes to kids’ anxiety — both as a source of stress in itself and as an opportunity cost compared to emotionally and mentally restorative activities such as spending time with friends and family."

Lowering expectations is no way to close achievement gaps, she writes. Instead, schools could mandate "an after-school study hall with academic attention available for those who are not getting their work done at home," rather than eliminating the work itself.

Concerns about stress come from middle- and upper-middle-class "intensive" parents, who've scheduled a slew of after-school activities, while fostering "intense anxiety about academic achievement en route to college," she writes.

Excessive homework can cause stress, she writes. But too little homework contributes to young people's fragility. Most kids are asked to do too little, not too much.

Of course, homework's no good if it's done by a bot. Some teachers now give a short quiz, based on the homework, at the start of class. Homework is optional. The quiz counts.

At universities, sales of blue books have soared, writes Walt Hunter, a Case Western humanities professor, in The Atlantic. "The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline."