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What is california's no homework law.

By Teo Spengler, J.D.

August 20, 2019

Reviewed by Michelle Seidel, B.Sc., LL.B., MBA

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• Pro & Cons of Child Labor Law

Don't get too excited, kids. "No homework" laws are not current California homework policy. But there was a "no homework" law in the state at the beginning of the 20th Century that the children of that era probably appreciated. Today the question of whether homework helps or hurts kids is widely debated in California.

No Homework Law in California

Is there a "no homework law" in California today? There is not today, but there was 100 years ago. The Ladies' Home Journal magazine crusaded against homework at the turn of the century, and medical professionals and doctors testified against it, saying that it was harmful to a kid's health. Some say that the actual reason society (and parents) frowned on homework was because school kids needed time to help with chores around the house.

As a result of that, a number of big-city school districts around the country eliminated homework from the school menu. California's three biggest cities – San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento – passed regulations forbidding teachers from assigning homework. And in 1901, the state passed a law banning all homework for school kids in kindergarten through eighth grade and imposing limits on the amount of homework that could be assigned to high school students.

California Homework Policy Changes

California's no-homework laws were repealed in the 1950s. That was the Cold War period and educators and politicians felt that the country needed better-educated students to create a skilled workforce, especially in the sciences. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 boosted the call for homework, since it appeared that Russian students might be more advanced than U.S. students.

The end of the Second World War also brought great changes to the United States and significant upheaval socially. Men in the military returned to their families, more people moved from agricultural lifestyle to urban areas and children were no longer expected to do as much physical work at home.

Since then, homework has crept back into the education system. People attacked progressive education as anti-intellectual, lax and dangerous for the nation. Then, in the 1980s, the United States Department of Education came full circle, publishing a pamphlet about the techniques that work best for creating smarter students, concluding that homework was a must.

California Homework Questions Today

Today, California kids from the youngest age through high school can expect homework assignments. But that doesn't mean that the homework/no homework debate is over. Various school districts or individual schools have eliminated homework in California, and while that approach makes some people happy, it makes others very unhappy.

Some educators and researchers argue that children would be better off if homework were abolished. They argue that the research does not demonstrate any tangible benefits for students, and this is especially true for younger students. In fact, studies have shown that elementary school students get no academic benefit from any amount of homework. And, the anti-homework crowd claims, excessive homework stifles a kid's natural curiosity.

However, not all parents agree. In the competitive atmosphere in schools today, just the suggestion of abolishing homework has some parents up in arms.

And high school students in the United States – who spend 5.5 to 6 hours a week on homework – are in the middle of their peers around the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 15-year-olds in Shanghai spend the most amount of time on homework, averaging 13.8 hours per week, while students in Finland spend the least time, at just 2.8 hours per week. It is noteworthy that Finnish kids perform just fine on academic tests despite the small amount of homework they do in comparison to teens in other nations.

• SF Gate: History of Homework
• SimpleGrad: Who Invented Homework?
• Time Magazine: Why I Think All Schools Should Abolish Homework
• The Telegraph: Homework Around the World

Teo Spengler earned a JD from U.C. Berkeley Law School. As an Assistant Attorney General in Juneau, she practiced before the Alaska Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court before opening a plaintiff's personal injury practice in San Francisco. She holds both an MA and an MFA in English/writing and enjoys writing legal blogs and articles. Her work has appeared in numerous online publications including USA Today, Legal Zoom, eHow Business, Livestrong, SF Gate, Go Banking Rates, Arizona Central, Houston Chronicle, Navy Federal Credit Union, Pearson, Quicken.com, TurboTax.com, and numerous attorney websites. Spengler splits her time between the French Basque Country and Northern California.

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Homework – Top 3 Pros and Cons

Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates

From dioramas to book reports, from algebraic word problems to research projects, whether students should be given homework, as well as the type and amount of homework, has been debated for over a century. [ 1 ]

While we are unsure who invented homework, we do know that the word “homework” dates back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Younger asked his followers to practice their speeches at home. Memorization exercises as homework continued through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment by monks and other scholars. [ 45 ]

In the 19th century, German students of the Volksschulen or “People’s Schools” were given assignments to complete outside of the school day. This concept of homework quickly spread across Europe and was brought to the United States by Horace Mann , who encountered the idea in Prussia. [ 45 ]

In the early 1900s, progressive education theorists, championed by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal , decried homework’s negative impact on children’s physical and mental health, leading California to ban homework for students under 15 from 1901 until 1917. In the 1930s, homework was portrayed as child labor, which was newly illegal, but the prevailing argument was that kids needed time to do household chores. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 45 ] [ 46 ]

Public opinion swayed again in favor of homework in the 1950s due to concerns about keeping up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances during the Cold War . And, in 1986, the US government included homework as an educational quality boosting tool. [ 3 ] [ 45 ]

A 2014 study found kindergarteners to fifth graders averaged 2.9 hours of homework per week, sixth to eighth graders 3.2 hours per teacher, and ninth to twelfth graders 3.5 hours per teacher. A 2014-2019 study found that teens spent about an hour a day on homework. [ 4 ] [ 44 ]

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the very idea of homework as students were schooling remotely and many were doing all school work from home. Washington Post journalist Valerie Strauss asked, “Does homework work when kids are learning all day at home?” While students were mostly back in school buildings in fall 2021, the question remains of how effective homework is as an educational tool. [ 47 ]

Is Homework Beneficial?

Pro 1 Homework improves student achievement. Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicated that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” [ 6 ] Students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework on both standardized tests and grades. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take-home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school. [ 10 ] Read More

Pro 2 Homework helps to reinforce classroom learning, while developing good study habits and life skills. Students typically retain only 50% of the information teachers provide in class, and they need to apply that information in order to truly learn it. Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer, co-founders of Teachers Who Tutor NYC, explained, “at-home assignments help students learn the material taught in class. Students require independent practice to internalize new concepts… [And] these assignments can provide valuable data for teachers about how well students understand the curriculum.” [ 11 ] [ 49 ] Elementary school students who were taught “strategies to organize and complete homework,” such as prioritizing homework activities, collecting study materials, note-taking, and following directions, showed increased grades and more positive comments on report cards. [ 17 ] Research by the City University of New York noted that “students who engage in self-regulatory processes while completing homework,” such as goal-setting, time management, and remaining focused, “are generally more motivated and are higher achievers than those who do not use these processes.” [ 18 ] Homework also helps students develop key skills that they’ll use throughout their lives: accountability, autonomy, discipline, time management, self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. Freireich and Platzer noted that “homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work.” [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 49 ] Read More

Pro 3 Homework allows parents to be involved with children’s learning. Thanks to take-home assignments, parents are able to track what their children are learning at school as well as their academic strengths and weaknesses. [ 12 ] Data from a nationwide sample of elementary school students show that parental involvement in homework can improve class performance, especially among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students. [ 20 ] Research from Johns Hopkins University found that an interactive homework process known as TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) improves student achievement: “Students in the TIPS group earned significantly higher report card grades after 18 weeks (1 TIPS assignment per week) than did non-TIPS students.” [ 21 ] Homework can also help clue parents in to the existence of any learning disabilities their children may have, allowing them to get help and adjust learning strategies as needed. Duke University Professor Harris Cooper noted, “Two parents once told me they refused to believe their child had a learning disability until homework revealed it to them.” [ 12 ] Read More

Con 1 Too much homework can be harmful. A poll of California high school students found that 59% thought they had too much homework. 82% of respondents said that they were “often or always stressed by schoolwork.” High-achieving high school students said too much homework leads to sleep deprivation and other health problems such as headaches, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems. [ 24 ] [ 28 ] [ 29 ] Alfie Kohn, an education and parenting expert, said, “Kids should have a chance to just be kids… it’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.” [ 27 ] Emmy Kang, a mental health counselor, explained, “More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies.” [ 48 ] Excessive homework can also lead to cheating: 90% of middle school students and 67% of high school students admit to copying someone else’s homework, and 43% of college students engaged in “unauthorized collaboration” on out-of-class assignments. Even parents take shortcuts on homework: 43% of those surveyed admitted to having completed a child’s assignment for them. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Read More

Con 2 Homework exacerbates the digital divide or homework gap. Kiara Taylor, financial expert, defined the digital divide as “the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology and those that don’t. Though the term now encompasses the technical and financial ability to utilize available technology—along with access (or a lack of access) to the Internet—the gap it refers to is constantly shifting with the development of technology.” For students, this is often called the homework gap. [ 50 ] [ 51 ] 30% (about 15 to 16 million) public school students either did not have an adequate internet connection or an appropriate device, or both, for distance learning. Completing homework for these students is more complicated (having to find a safe place with an internet connection, or borrowing a laptop, for example) or impossible. [ 51 ] A Hispanic Heritage Foundation study found that 96.5% of students across the country needed to use the internet for homework, and nearly half reported they were sometimes unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the internet or a computer, which often resulted in lower grades. [ 37 ] [ 38 ] One study concluded that homework increases social inequality because it “potentially serves as a mechanism to further advantage those students who already experience some privilege in the school system while further disadvantaging those who may already be in a marginalized position.” [ 39 ] Read More

Con 3 Homework does not help younger students, and may not help high school students. We’ve known for a while that homework does not help elementary students. A 2006 study found that “homework had no association with achievement gains” when measured by standardized tests results or grades. [ 7 ] Fourth grade students who did no homework got roughly the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam as those who did 30 minutes of homework a night. Students who did 45 minutes or more of homework a night actually did worse. [ 41 ] Temple University professor Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek said that homework is not the most effective tool for young learners to apply new information: “They’re learning way more important skills when they’re not doing their homework.” [ 42 ] In fact, homework may not be helpful at the high school level either. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, stated, “I interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside.” He explains, “just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.” [ 52 ] Read More

Discussion Questions

1. Is homework beneficial? Consider the study data, your personal experience, and other types of information. Explain your answer(s).

2. If homework were banned, what other educational strategies would help students learn classroom material? Explain your answer(s).

3. How has homework been helpful to you personally? How has homework been unhelpful to you personally? Make carefully considered lists for both sides.

Take Action

1. Examine an argument in favor of quality homework assignments from Janine Bempechat.

2. Explore Oxford Learning’s infographic on the effects of homework on students.

3. Consider Joseph Lathan’s argument that homework promotes inequality .

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives .

More School Debate Topics

Should K-12 Students Dissect Animals in Science Classrooms? – Proponents say dissecting real animals is a better learning experience. Opponents say the practice is bad for the environment.

Should Students Have to Wear School Uniforms? – Proponents say uniforms may increase student safety. Opponents say uniforms restrict expression.

Should Corporal Punishment Be Used in K-12 Schools? – Proponents say corporal punishment is an appropriate discipline. Opponents say it inflicts long-lasting physical and mental harm on students.

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For the first time, California law will protect students’ right to recess

This is Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part One here.

A new California law is set to protect young students’ right to recess for the first time in state history.

That law, Senate Bill 291 , defines what “recess” really means: free, unstructured time to play and socialize. It also requires that elementary students receive at least 30 minutes every day and makes it illegal for educators to take that time away as punishment.

The law will go into effect next school year. But San Diego Unified and other local districts were not yet ready to talk about their plans to meet these requirements.

These changes come at a critical time for young Californians. The way kids play has quietly transformed over the years, with full schedules of activities replacing the freewheeling lives of older generations. And experts worry about the repercussions on kids’ mental health.

School, and recess in particular, has remained one of the few places where kids still have access to free, unstructured time. Every day, blacktops and playgrounds across the country transform into places where kids invent games and bicker and learn to find resolutions.

But recess has slowly been gnawed away. Over the last 20 years, schools nationwide have been quietly cutting back on recess times in favor of more time in the classroom, reducing it by as much as 60 minutes per week, according to one analytics firm .

It’s difficult to say definitively how much recess has changed in San Diego County. Recess times and bell schedules are decided by individual schools, and districts largely said they don’t keep that information from past years.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents and educators have grown increasingly concerned about play and what it means for kids’ mental health. Now, they hope that California’s new law could change the direction for schools in the nation’s largest state.

“I'm really glad that the law is going to come into effect,” said Ana Cordova, whose 3-year-old son could start Transitional Kindergarten next year. “They're just kids — so they have all their lives to not have recess.”

‘A sea change’

Recess, experts say, is more important than some might think. It is often kids’ main source of time to play freely and without structure — something that is crucial to kids’ development of social skills, creativity and long term mental health. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommends that elementary students receive at least 20 minutes of recess per day.

“That interaction is an incredibly important part of child development,” said Rebecca London, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But recess has also been under threat for decades, with critics calling it a waste of school time and contrary to the mission of the education system.

Experts say much of that motivation to cut back recess times stems from a Cold War-era push by the federal government to keep pace with other countries by sharpening public schools’ focus on academic performance.

California districts and other schools across the country started cutting recess away in favor of class time, London says. In some cities, like Atlanta, Baltimore and Chicago, officials eliminated it altogether .

“We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on monkey bars,” Atlanta superintendent Benjamin Canada told The New York Times in 1998.

In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act brought new, sweeping changes. Schools with low academic performance now risked losing federal funding, and could even be shut down. It was, London said, “a sea change.”

“It was not, ‘you get bonuses if you do well,’” she said. “It was, ‘you lose financial support if you don't make this progress.’”

Educators were suddenly under tremendous pressure. They responded by focusing on academics, sending students home with more work and lengthening the school year. Since the law went into effect, at least a fifth of U.S. school districts have also cut back recess time .

In California, London and other researchers tracked these changes in poorer schools. London analyzed a sample of low-income schools from a 2020-2021 state survey. Only half said they gave students more than 20 minutes of recess.

Researchers also found that these changes also fell more on Black and Latino students. An analysis of federal data on students from 1998-1999 found that more than 77% of white students had some recess, but just 41% of Black students and 62% of Latino students had access to that time.

“Recess in school has really just filled the void of the kids being able to exercise that sort of free will,” said Dennis Lim, a San Diego parent. “We need to do whatever we can to make sure they get as much time for that.”

New protections in California

In California, the decline of recess was possible in part because the state had no laws regulating recess. Instead, the state law’s approach was to direct the Department of Education to “encourage” elementary schools to provide recess time.

“The law was effectively silent,” said California state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, who chairs the state Senate’s Education Committee.

California wasn’t alone. Just nine other states actually mandate that schools offer recess time every day, and most only offer simple recommendations or don’t address it at all. Districts nationwide also collect very little information on recess time .

Then came the pandemic. Across the state, schools closed down, isolating elementary-aged children from each other. When schools reopened over a year later, London said students were at a loss on how to cooperate or solve conflicts.

“One of the things that we heard from elementary school staff when the kids came back that first year was, ‘they don't even know how to interact with each other anymore,’” she said. “That was a year of development that children didn't get.”

For Newman, that was the turning point.

“We probably needed to explore this question about recess anyway,” he said. “But it seemed like it was really imperative to do it now — and hopefully do it right.

Newman sponsored the law adding new protections for California students’ right to recess. It defines recess as supervised, unstructured play time separate from both lunch and more structured physical education courses. It requires schools to offer 30 minutes of recess time every day and bans educators from taking that time away as punishment.

London, who testified in support of SB 291 before the Education Committee last year, is cautious about celebrating too hard. But she is certainly optimistic.

“It’s a huge change,” she said.

Are school districts ready?

Many San Diego-area schools already meet the requirement of at least 30 minutes of recess. But most district officials wouldn’t give interviews on how they intend to ensure schools follow all parts of the law.

KPBS reached out to four different San Diego-area school districts — San Diego Unified, Chula Vista Elementary School District, South Bay Union and National School District — and most declined to give interviews with top district officials or did not respond to a request for comment.

San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, did not agree to provide an interview in time for publication. A Chula Vista Elementary School District spokesperson said they did not have enough information on the law to answer any questions. National School District did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, many schools in the San Diego region say they do already meet the new minimum requirements for recess time this year, including South Bay Union School District in Imperial Beach.

Officials there said South Bay Union does collect bell schedules from each school, and that the district planned to review them to make sure that all schools were following the requirements of SB 291 for next year.

“Our K-8 daily schedule already includes 30 minutes of recess, so there will be no change next year,” wrote South Bay Union School District spokesperson Amy Cooper, in an email. “We value the importance of recess time in which students have the opportunity to interact with peers.”

Many parents are optimistic about these changes, including Cordova, whose son Nolan could be in Transitional Kindergarten next year. Nolan was born right after the beginning of the pandemic, and Cordova said he still has a hard time playing with other kids.

“Even still in preschool, when they have recess, he tends to keep to his own,” she said. “The teachers tell us it takes him some time to warm up.”

“And I cry,” Nolan added from the couch nearby.

Still, Cordova hopes that recess in elementary school will give Nolan another chance to keep learning those skills.

“We just want him to keep learning how to get along with different personalities and find his own group of friends,” she said.

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Legal Homework Rights: What’s the Limit on Homework?

Hi, I just read your article Titled “Can You ‘Opt Out’ of Homework?” ( Click HERE  for the original article. ) I enjoyed the article but I guess I need a more concrete answer to the question of my legal homework rights: CAN I LEGALLY OPT OUT OF HOMEWORK FOR MY CHILD? – Dawn, SOAR ®  Parent

The answer is a resounding, Yes!

You have legal rights to put limits on your child’s homework time.

When homework begins to erode family relationships and/or increases the students anxiety, its time to make modifications. First, try communicating and working collaboratively with teachers and administrators.  If that doesn’t work, then you do have legal homework rights…

Legal Homework Rights

You absolutely do have legal rights to put reasonable limits on your child’s homework time. The legal tool you want to use is called a 504. For a link that provides a quick overview to the 504 law, click HERE .

504: The Legal Homework Rights Tool

Basically, the 504 law refers to legal homework rights (known as “accommodations”) that must be made for a child’s “impairment.”  As you’ll read, “impairments” are defined very loosely throughout the law, and this is done purposely to accommodate all students’ various needs. If your child has a diagnosis of ADHD, Dyslexia, etc. that will help, but it’s not necessary.

I have seen the 504 law used throughout my career as an educator for students and families exercising their legal homework rights.  I have also used it with my own children to get schools to accommodate what I felt was appropriate.

The 504 Process

The actual 504 process includes paperwork and a series of meetings. The meetings typically include a school counselor, a teacher, an administrator, and you and your child. In the meeting, all of your concerns will be documented and specific actions or remedies (like limiting homework) will be recorded. This document becomes a legally binding contract that your child’s teacher and administrator are required to uphold.

Legal Homework Rights: What’s a Reasonable Amount of Time for Homework?

So, what is a reasonable recommendation regarding time spent on homework?

We support the “10 Minute Rule.”   That’s a maximum of 10 minutes times the grade-level of the child. So, 10-minute max for 1 st grade, 20-minute max for 2 nd grade, up to 120-minute max for 12 th grade.

The “10-minute rule” is a great accommodation for a 504, because it is set to increase the limit on homework time as the child progresses through school. We’re not talking about eliminating homework just to create an easy path for our children.  Parents that have significant battles over homework, that can easily last an hour or more, understand that homework reaches a point where it is not productive.

Too much homework is destructive t o motivation, self-esteem, and to family relationships.  So, don’t be afraid to exercise your legal rights. This is the point where we want to pursue our legal homework rights.

In addition to pursuing 504 accommodations, you may want to give your students better skills to handle the demands of school.  To learn more about the SOAR ®  Parent Products, click HERE .

Brian Winter, M.Ed.

Co-Author, SOAR Social-Emotional Learning Skills

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Too much homework? New CA bill aims to ease the load on students

Having less homework would be beneficial for some students like Kyan Vanderweel, a San Luis Obispo high school student.

With multiple band and orchestra practices a day, on top of taking AP classes, Vanderweel finds it difficult to balance the things he loves to do with what he needs to get done, saying it even affects his mental health.

“AP classes should have homework but only a limited amount but in my opinion, I don’t think English classes apart from reading should have any unnecessary homework,” Vanderweel said.

Vanderweel says his homework and classwork are very repetitive and he feels it's unnecessary to do some of the homework.

“By the end of the day, we already know what we're doing so I feel like it’s a waste of time to an extent,” Vanderweel said.

Other students feel like homework in high school is bearable.

“I think I'm pretty comfortable with how it is right now,” San Luis Obispo High School student Tamiyah Murrieta said.

The "Healthy Homework Act,” introduced by Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, would not ban homework altogether but would require local school boards and educational agencies to establish policies that consider impacts on students’ physical and mental health with input from parents, teachers and students.

This is something Tyler Gerbel, a San Luis Obispo high school student, says could impact some students.

“Homework has been shown to stress students out a little bit. I’ve felt that myself when I have so much work to do,” Gerbel said.

Although he thinks his workload is manageable right now, he understands how some might have it harder.

“If something is done to limit the homework it might relieve stress off of students and I feel like mental health is a very important thing for students today,” Gerbel said.

The bill is also tailored to people who might not have access to resources at home like high-speed internet.

The bill would require the adopted policy to be updated at least once every five years.

It is currently making its way through the State Legislature.

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The Homework Conundrum: Unraveling the Myth About Homework Being Illegal in California

The debate about homework has been a longstanding one, with some arguing it’s essential for academic success, while others claim it’s an unnecessary burden on students. One claim that has been making the rounds is that homework is illegal in California. But is this claim factual, or is it just a myth? In this article, we’ll delve into the world of homework policies in California and explore the truth behind this contentious issue.

Table of Contents

The Origins of the Myth

The notion that homework is illegal in California likely originated from a misunderstandings of the state’s education laws and policies. In 2019, California passed a law aimed at reducing the burden of homework on students. Assembly Bill 2826, authored by Assemblymember Jose Medina, aimed to address concerns about students being overwhelmed by excessive homework assignments. The law required schools to establish homework policies that ensured students had a healthy balance between schoolwork and personal life.

However, nowhere in the law does it state that homework is illegal in California. In fact, the law acknowledges the importance of homework in supporting student learning and promoting academic achievement. So, why did this myth gain traction?

The Power of Social Media

The rise of social media has created a breeding ground for misinformation and myths to spread quickly. A single tweet or Facebook post claiming that homework is illegal in California can spark a chain reaction of shares and likes, with many people accepting the information at face value. This is especially true among students, who may be thrilled at the prospect of having no homework.

The lack of fact-checking and critical thinking on social media platforms has contributed significantly to the spread of misinformation. It’s essential for internet users to be cautious when consuming information online and to verify facts through reputable sources before accepting them as true.

California Education Laws and Homework Policies

To understand the role of homework in California’s education system, it’s essential to examine the state’s education laws and policies. The California Department of Education (CDE) sets the framework for education in the state, and school districts are responsible for implementing these guidelines.

The CDE recognizes homework as an essential component of student learning. According to the CDE’s Homework Guidelines, homework should:

• Be reasonable in amount and frequency
• Be relevant to the curriculum
• Not be used as punishment
• Be designed to promote learning and understanding

The guidelines also emphasize the importance of communication between teachers, students, and parents regarding homework policies and expectations.

Local Control and Homework Policies

One of the key aspects of California’s education system is local control. School districts are given the autonomy to develop their own policies and guidelines, including those related to homework. This means that homework policies can vary significantly from district to district and even from school to school.

While some schools may have more relaxed homework policies, others may place a greater emphasis on homework as a means of reinforcing learning concepts. It’s essential for students, parents, and teachers to understand the specific homework policies in their school district to ensure a collaborative approach to learning.

The Benefits of Homework

Despite the controversy surrounding homework, it’s essential to acknowledge its benefits in supporting student learning. Homework helps students:

• Reinforce learning concepts and develop mastery
• Develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and time management skills
• Build independence and self-motivation
• Prepare for assessments and evaluations
• Develop a growth mindset and learn from mistakes

Homework also provides teachers with valuable insights into student understanding and can help identify areas where students may need additional support.

The Dark Side of Homework

While homework has its benefits, excessive or poorly designed homework can have negative consequences. Overly burdensome homework can lead to:

• Stress, anxiety, and burnout
• Decreased motivation and engagement
• Inequity, as some students may not have equal access to resources or support
• Negative impacts on mental and physical health

It’s essential for teachers and school administrators to strike a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of homework, ensuring that assignments are meaningful, relevant, and manageable for students.

In conclusion, homework is not illegal in California. While the state has laws and policies aimed at promoting a healthy balance between schoolwork and personal life, homework remains an essential component of student learning. It’s crucial for students, parents, and teachers to understand the homework policies in their school district and to work together to ensure that homework assignments are meaningful, relevant, and manageable.

By dispelling myths and misconceptions about homework, we can focus on creating a education system that supports the well-being and success of all students.

By understanding the facts about homework in California, we can work together to create a education system that supports the well-being and success of all students.

Is homework really illegal in California?

Homework is not illegal in California. Despite the myth, there is no law that prohibits teachers from assigning homework to students in California or any other state in the United States. The myth likely originated from a misunderstanding of a 2019 bill that aimed to reduce homework for elementary school students.

The bill, AB 2109, aimed to reduce the amount of homework assigned to elementary school students, not eliminate it entirely. The bill did not pass, and even if it had, it would not have applied to all students in California. The myth has since been debunked by education experts, policymakers, and fact-checking organizations.

What is the purpose of homework, and does it really work?

Homework serves several purposes, including reinforcing learning, promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and developing study habits. Research suggests that homework can be an effective tool in improving student outcomes, particularly when assigned thoughtfully and in moderation.

However, not all homework is created equal. Homework that is overly lengthy, irrelevant, or repetitive can be counterproductive, leading to frustration and disengagement among students. Effective homework assignments should be aligned with learning objectives, include clear instructions, and provide opportunities for feedback and reflection. When done correctly, homework can be a valuable tool in supporting student learning and development.

How much homework is too much homework?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the appropriate amount of homework varies depending on the student’s age, grade level, and individual needs. However, research suggests that excessive homework can be detrimental to student well-being and academic performance.

The National PTA and the National Education Association recommend the “10-minute rule,” which suggests that students should receive no more than 10-15 minutes of homework per night in elementary school, 30-60 minutes in middle school, and 60-90 minutes in high school. Ultimately, the amount of homework should be tailored to the student’s needs and abilities, and should not interfere with other aspects of their life.

Can parents opt their child out of homework?

While there is no law that prohibits parents from opting their child out of homework, it’s not a straightforward process. Parents may need to negotiate with teachers or school administrators to develop alternative assignments or accommodations that meet their child’s needs.

However, opting out of homework entirely may not be in the best interest of the child, as it can impact their ability to develop important skills and keep up with their peers. Instead, parents may want to work with teachers to identify ways to make homework more engaging, meaningful, and manageable for their child.

What can parents do to support their child with homework?

Parents can play a critical role in supporting their child’s homework habits by providing a conducive learning environment, encouraging a growth mindset, and offering guidance without doing the work for them. Parents can also communicate with teachers to understand the purpose and scope of homework assignments and identify ways to make them more engaging and relevant.

By being involved in their child’s homework routine, parents can help them develop essential skills, such as time management, organization, and self-regulation. However, it’s essential to strike a balance between supporting their child and allowing them to take ownership of their learning.

How can teachers make homework more engaging and effective?

Teachers can make homework more engaging and effective by making it relevant, meaningful, and aligned with learning objectives. They can also involve students in the homework design process, provide choices and autonomy, and offer opportunities for feedback and reflection.

By adopting a more student-centered approach to homework, teachers can increase motivation, promote deeper learning, and reduce the likelihood of student disengagement. Additionally, teachers can use technology and multimedia resources to make homework more interactive and fun, reducing the tedium and drudgery often associated with traditional homework assignments.

What is the future of homework, and will it become obsolete?

While the role of homework in education continues to evolve, it’s unlikely to become obsolete anytime soon. Homework remains an essential tool for teaching critical skills, promoting learning, and preparing students for success in an increasingly complex and competitive world.

However, the way homework is designed and delivered may change significantly in the future. With the rise of personalized learning, artificial intelligence, and online resources, homework may become more tailored to individual needs, more interactive, and more focused on promoting deep learning and critical thinking skills.

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Homework Helps Kids Learn

Homework isn’t a needless exercise: Reasonable, quality assignments expand on topics and skills taught in the classroom and — in the big picture — help develop lifelong learning habits.

Teachers use homework:

• To help students understand and review the work that has been covered in class
• To see whether students understand the lesson
• To help students learn how to find and use more information on a subject
• To teach responsibility and routine.

Most educators agree:

• For children in grades K-2, homework is more effective when it does not exceed 20 minutes each school day
• Older children, in grades 3-6, can handle 30-60 minutes a day
• For kids in middle and high school, 2 hours of homework may be assigned
• However, homework time and strategies can vary from teacher to teacher and school to school.

HELP YOUR STUDENT GET THE MOST OUT OF HOMEWORK

Parents and families play an important role in the homework process. Together, families can help children develop good study habits and attitudes that lead to becoming lifelong learners. Your job is not to do the work for them, but to provide support, encouragement and ask questions that help them arrive at the answers themselves.

Your child’s teacher can tell you, usually at Back-to-School Night, how much time he or she expects students to spend on homework. Your child’s teacher may have a website or other resource that posts homework assignments.

Your child’s school may have an online grading system, which allows parents to check their child’s grades, attendance and homework status on a daily basis. This can be an invaluable source of information that allows you to keep on top of any issues before they become problems.

Ask your principal, school site council or PTA if your school or district has a homework policy, including how to handle homework if your child needs to be absent. Make sure you and your child know and understand this policy.

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QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

California State PTA believes that, when it comes to homework, assignment quality — not quantity — should be the priority. Find out more with our resolution .

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• The Highlight

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

by Jacob Sweet

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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The end of homework? Why some schools are banning homework

Fed up with the tension over homework, some schools are opting out altogether.

No-homework policies are popping up all over, including schools in the U.S., where the shift to the Common Core curriculum is prompting educators to rethink how students spend their time.

“Homework really is a black hole,” said Etta Kralovec, an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Arizona South and co-author of “The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning.”

“I think teachers are going to be increasingly interested in having total control over student learning during the class day and not relying on homework as any kind of activity that’s going to support student learning.”

College de Saint-Ambroise, an elementary school in Quebec, is the latest school to ban homework, announcing this week that it would try the new policy for a year. The decision came after officials found that it was “becoming more and more difficult” for children to devote time to all the assignments they were bringing home, Marie-Ève Desrosiers, a spokeswoman with the Jonquière School Board, told the CBC .

Kralovec called the ban on homework a movement, though she estimated just a small handful of schools in the U.S. have such policies.

Gaithersburg Elementary School in Rockville, Maryland, is one of them, eliminating the traditional concept of homework in 2012. The policy is still in place and working fine, Principal Stephanie Brant told TODAY Parents. The school simply asks that students read 30 minutes each night.

“We felt like with the shift to the Common Core curriculum, and our knowledge of how our students need to think differently… we wanted their time to be spent in meaningful ways,” Brant said.

“We’re constantly asking parents for feedback… and everyone’s really happy with it so far. But it’s really a culture shift.”

It was a decision that was best for her community, Brant said, adding that she often gets phone calls from other principals inquiring how it’s working out.

The VanDamme Academy, a private K-8 school in Aliso Viejo, California, has a similar policy , calling homework “largely pointless.”

The Buffalo Academy of Scholars, a private school in Buffalo, New York, touts that it has called “a truce in the homework battle” and promises that families can “enjoy stress-free, homework-free evenings and more quality time together at home.”

Some schools have taken yet another approach. At Ridgewood High School in Norridge, Illinois, teachers do assign homework but it doesn’t count towards a student’s final grade.

Many schools in the U.S. have toyed with the idea of opting out of homework, but end up changing nothing because it is such a contentious issue among parents, Kralovec noted.

“There’s a huge philosophical divide between parents who want their kids to be very scheduled, very driven, and very ambitiously focused at school -- those parents want their kids to do homework,” she said.

“And then there are the parents who want a more child-centered life with their kids, who want their kids to be able to explore different aspects of themselves, who think their kids should have free time.”

So what’s the right amount of time to spend on homework?

National PTA spokeswoman Heidi May pointed to the organization’s “ 10 minute rule ,” which recommends kids spend about 10 minutes on homework per night for every year they’re in school. That would mean 10 minutes for a first-grader and an hour for a child in the sixth grade.

But many parents say their kids must spend much longer on their assignments. Last year, a New York dad tried to do his eight-grader’s homework for a week and it took him at least three hours on most nights.

More than 80 percent of respondents in a TODAY.com poll complained kids have too much homework. For homework critics like Kralovec, who said research shows homework has little value at the elementary and middle school level, the issue is simple.

“Kids are at school 7 or 8 hours a day, that’s a full working day and why should they have to take work home?” she asked.

Follow A. Pawlowski on Google+ and Twitter .

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New Legislation Would Guarantee Daily Recess for All California Students K-8

Sacramento, Calif.— Senator Josh Newman, Chair of the Senate Committee on Education, introduced his first education bill of the year, SB 291, which will ensure all K-8 pupils in California have access to a minimum standard of recess while prohibiting the withholding of recess as a form of punishment or discipline.

A wide body of research has found that recess serves as a critical outlet and break for students to reset their minds and bodies during otherwise structured school days filled with academic demands. Recess offers students numerous cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits and results in students being more attentive and better able to perform school tasks.

“As California finally emerges from the pandemic and its impacts, we are seeing some of the lingering effects on children’s social-emotional development play out in the form of behavioral disruptions which have become increasingly prevalent in classrooms,” said Senator Josh Newman (D-Fullerton). “As schools and students seek to recover from COVID-related educational disruptions, the benefits of the unstructured play and peer-to-peer social interactions offered by recess are more important now than ever.”

Despite the research, the denial of all or part of recess still remains a common practice in schools, employed as punishment for infractions such as failing to finish work, talking out of turn or not following directions. Recess detentions also tend to disproportionately impact students from disadvantaged communities, as well as those with disabilities.

"Recess is the only unstructured time in the school day where students have the opportunity to stretch their social, emotional, and physical development through play, socialization with peers, and interactions with adults. It is essential that all California students have the right to this downtime every day, and that it is not withheld for punishment. Recess is an important opportunity for building a positive school climate and for helping all students to go back to their classrooms after recess feeling restored and ready to learn. I applaud Senator Newman for prioritizing Recess for All and fully support these efforts," said Rebecca London, Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of Campus + Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been studying recess in California for more than 15 years.

Unlike other states which have adopted standardized school recess policies, such as Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Arizona, California currently has no statewide standardized policy governing the quantity and quality of recess time in its schools. In fact, under existing state law, school districts are actually directed to adopt policies authorizing teachers to restrict a student’s recess time for disciplinary purposes. As a consequence, gaps exist across the state’s school systems with respect to access to daily recess, and the presence of these gaps tends to correlate with other equity and performance deficits across California’s educational systems.

"I am so glad to see Senator Newman prioritizing recess in California schools. Evidence from other states shows that when recess is legislated at the state level, schools are more likely to provide students with the minutes. And providing students with the opportunity to, as my 8-year-old son calls it, ‘get the wiggles out,’ is more important now than ever. There are countless documented benefits to school recess, including increased student physical activity; increased social and emotional development; and improved attention, memory, concentration, and on-task behavior in the classroom, said Hannah R. Thompson, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Research Professor, UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Under SB 291, elementary and middle schools in California will be required to provide students with a daily recess period of at least 30 minutes, to be held outdoors, weather permitting. Additionally, SB 291 would prohibit a student from being denied recess as a disciplinary measure, unless their participation would pose an immediate threat to the physical safety of others or their own physical safety.

To schedule an interview with Senator Newman, contact Lizzie Cootsona at 916.651.4029.

State Senator Josh Newman represents the 29th Senate District, which is comprised of portions of Los Angeles County, Orange County, and San Bernardino County. The 29th District includes all or parts of the cities of Anaheim, Brea, Buena Park, Chino Hills, City of Industry, Cypress, Diamond Bar, Fullerton, La Habra, La Palma, Placentia, Rowland Heights, Stanton, Walnut, West Covina and Yorba Linda. Senator Newman is a former United States Army officer, businessperson, and veterans’ advocate, and lives in Fullerton with his wife and daughter.

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Student Opinion

Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

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Why (Most) Homework Should Be Banned

The 30-minute rule is there to justify giving a lot of homework

Anthony Malcolm ‘23 , Staff Writer December 8, 2022

There are plenty of reasons why (most) homework should be banned. I’ll start out with some general facts and look at homework in general, then go into some detail about our school.

Stanford conducted a study surveying over 4,300 students in 10 high performing high schools in California. More than 70% of the students said they were “often or always stressed over schoolwork,” with 56% claiming that homework was the main stressor. But here’s the kicker: Less than 1% said homework was not a stressor. 

The researchers then asked the students if they had exhibited symptoms of stress like headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems. More than 80% of the students reported at least one stress related symptom recently and 44% claimed they experienced 3 or more symptoms. The study also found that students who spend a lot of time working on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, and a lack of balance in their lives. The study claimed that any more than 2 hours of homework per night was counterproductive, and that the students who spent too much time on homework were more likely to not participate in activities and hobbies, and stop seeing friends and family. 

A smaller NYU study claimed that students at elite high schools are susceptible to chronic stress, emotional exhaustion, and alcohol and drug abuse. About half of the students said they received at least 3 hours of homework a night on top of being pressured to take college level classes and participate in extracurricular activities (sound familiar?). The study claims that many of the students felt they were being worked as hard as adults, and they said that their workload seemed inappropriate for their development level. The study reported that the students felt that they had little time for relaxing and hobbies. More than two thirds of students said they used alcohol or drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with the stress.

Back to the Stanford study for a second; many of the students claimed that the homework was “pointless” or “mindless.” The study argues that homework should have a purpose and benefit, which should be to cultivate learning. One of the main reasons is that school feels like a full-time job at this point. We, as in BC High students, are in school from 8:25 till 2:40; most of us have some sort of extracurricular activity on top of that, and most of us have significant commutes, which means we are getting home much later. On top of a rigorous day at school, an afterschool activity, and a commute, we have to deal with a varying amount of homework every night. Sometimes it is 2 hours, sometimes 3, sometimes even 4. I will give you an example of a day in my life last year to provide a specific example, because we are not a one size fits all community. 

I live in Middleboro and Bridgewater, so I ride the train to school which takes 50 minutes to an hour. A spring day last year would start by waking up at 5:30 and then leaving my house to get to the train at 6:30-6:35, getting on the train at 6:50, getting off the train at 7:50, and arriving at the school before classes started at 8:20. I would go through the school day and stay after for track practice. After track, I would most likely get on the train at 5:00 and get home at 6:15. I would eat dinner, shower, and then start my homework around 7:30-8, and usually I would finish somewhere between 10:30ish to 11:30ish. Can you see how that can be misconstrued as a full-time job?

Some of you might be thinking (especially any teacher reading this), why didn’t you use the 30-minute rule? Well, because most (and I mean MOST) of the time the 30-minute rule is an ineffective rule that justifies giving students a lot of homework. If you use the 30-minute rule and don’t finish a homework assignment, it still has to be completed sometime, and you’ll be behind in class. It is only effective when a teacher plans for the 30-minute rule and tells you to stop at 30 minutes to get an idea of how long an assignment takes their students. The 30-minute rule is there to justify giving a lot of homework because if you say in class that the homework took a long time, you will probably be told about the 30-minute rule. But if you used the 30-minute rule, you would have an unfinished homework assignment which means, depending on the class, you would be lost and behind, and you would still have to do it at some point. If you should have to justify giving a lot of homework, then it is probably too much. 

Parker, Clifton B. “Stanford Research Shows Pitfalls of Homework.” Stanford University , 10 Mar. 2014, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/too-much-homework-031014.html . 

Communications, NYU Web. NYU Study Examines Top High School Students’ Stress and Coping Mechanisms . http://www.nyu.edu/content/nyu/en/about/news-publications/news/2015/august/nyu

-study-examines-top-high-school-students-stress-and-coping-mechanisms . 

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California Voices

California bills on homework, outdoor drinking and more stay alive.

Scheduling note: WhatMatters is taking Memorial Day off and will return to your inboxes on Tuesday.

California lawmakers started this week with more than 900 bills to wade through before today’s deadline for measures to pass their first house. They’re nearly done , advancing the vast majority of bills. 

I wanted to catch up on some that caught my eye and wrote about earlier this legislative session:

• Homework: The Assembly passed a bill Tuesday to require schools to adopt homework policies that consider students’ stress levels and well being . The proposal was inspired by Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo ’s daughter, and was brought up by the Santa Clarita Valley Democrat during a hearing of the Legislature’s select committee on happiness .
• Daylight saving time: On Thursday, the Senate advanced a proposal originally intended to set standard time year-round and do away with daylight saving time permanently . The bill has been amended to require the state to study the near- and long-term effects of permanent standard time (particularly on energy demands) and submit it to the Legislature by 2027.
• Alcohol outdoors: California cities and counties are one step closer to being able to designate “ entertainment zones .” The Senate passed a proposal Thursday that would allow bars and restaurants to serve alcoholic drinks that people can consume on public streets and sidewalks .
• Teen treatment centers: Also Thursday, a measure to bring greater transparency to the treatment of young adults living in state-run facilities heads to the Assembly after passing the Senate. The bill, backed by media personality Paris Hilton , would expand reporting requirements for these residential therapeutic programs, specifically their use of “seclusion rooms” and restraints.
• U.S. Semiquincentennial: And today the Senate passed a bill to establish a commission to help California commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding in 2026.

Other bills of note:

• Abortion access: On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the bill passed this week to allow Arizona doctors to temporarily provide abortions to women traveling to California while a ban is in place in their state.
• Voter identification: About a month after the state filed a lawsuit against Huntington Beach over its voter ID mandate, the Senate passed a bill to bar local governments from implementing voter ID requirements . All Republican senators voted against the bill.
• No-pet rental policies: The Assembly passed a bill that would restrict landlords from banning pets from rental properties “without reasonable justification.” Because of amendments made to the bill, landlords could still limit the number of pets and require a deposit to pay for pet-cleaning expenses.

Elsewhere in the Legislature: This week, leaders of the European Union concluded a years-long initiative by passing the Artificial Intelligence Act , regulating its use in 27 nations. But it’s Europe’s close partnership with California that may also help the state emerge as the U.S.’ leader in AI regulation .

As CalMatters tech reporter Khari Johnson explains, because of California’s unique position as a tech-forward state, it must walk a tightrope. The state must craft legislation that prevents harms caused by the technology — such as bills passed this week to oversee the use of generative AI and stop discrimination against marginalized groups — without stifling a significant and growing industry. 

• Sen. Tom Umberg , a Santa Ana Democrat and chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I strongly believe that we can learn from each other’s work and responsibly regulate AI without harming innovation in this dynamic and quickly-changing environment.”

Find out more in Khari’s story .

CalMatters on TV: This week, we launched a partnership with PBS SoCal for two-minute video stories each weekday. SoCalMatters will air at 5:58 p.m. on PBS SoCal and also be available online at PBS SoCal and CalMatters . Reporters will work with producer Robert Meeks on the segments, which will focus on a wide range of topics. The one that aired Thursday focused on financial aid fraud at community colleges , based on this CalMatters story . Read more about this new venture from our engagement team. 

Focus on inequality: Each Friday, the California Divide team delivers a newsletter that focuses on the politics and policy of inequality. Read the latest edition here and subscribe here .

Other Stories You Should Know

Breaking up ticketmaster.

For their stranglehold on the ticketing and live concert industry, Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster have drawn the ire of not only pop musician Taylor Swift , but also the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

On Thursday the federal Department of Justice announced it is joining 30 state attorneys general, including Bonta, in an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Live Nation has illegally maintained its monopoly over concerts, ticketing and promotions by locking venues into exclusive contracts, threatening retaliation, limiting artists’ access to the venues Live Nation owns and other practices.

• Bonta , in a statement : “While this illegal conduct benefits Live Nation’s bottom line — it hurts artists, their fans, and our economy. This lawsuit sends a clear message: Here in California, we’re committed to protecting consumers, holding industry accountable, enforcing antitrust laws, and ensuring a fair and competitive market.”

In addition to calls for Live Nation to sell off Ticketmaster, the lawsuit seeks financial compensation for California and ticket buyers who were overcharged by Live Nation, according to Bonta.

In its response, Live Nation said it’s not to blame for rising ticket prices , and said the lawsuit ignores the real causes “from rising production costs, to artist popularity, to 24/7 online ticket scalping.”

The lawsuit’s announcement comes a week after the Assembly appropriations committee held a bill that would have reined in some of Live Nation’s authority over primary ticket sales. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks , the author of the bill and chairperson of the committee, said in an email to CalMatters that if the lawsuit leads to the breakup of Live Nation’s monopoly, it will “benefit consumers and artists alike.” 

• Wicks , an Oakland Democrat: “Having spent the past six months trying to tackle this issue at the state level, I’m thrilled to see … from both red and blue states to call for an end to these companies’ anticompetitive policies. It’s a seismic step, at a moment that truly calls for it.”

Sen. Wahab recall falls apart

From CalMatters Capitol reporter Sameea Kamal :

The current recall effort against Sen. Aisha Wahab — provoked by her contentious 2023 caste discrimination bill — won’t move forward , after proponents say they were unable to submit signatures. 

The deadline was Thursday to turn in 42,802 valid signatures of voters in the district, which includes parts of Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

But Ritesh Tandon , one of the recall organizers and a congressional candidate in 2020, 2022 and the primary in March, said a line on the forms that were required to submit signatures was missing. He claimed they had collected more than 30,000 signatures by March. 

The Secretary of State’s office, which cleared the proponents to start collecting signatures in December , confirmed it was notified of the problem, but said it told the proponents on Feb. 20 that the issue was not enough to invalidate the petition.

Tandon, however, said it was impossible to go back to the petition circulators — he said there were 10,000 — to add their signatures.

The organizers say they’ve learned lessons from the process and will try again to recall the Democratic senator from Fremont, whose first term runs until 2026. 

• Wahab , to CalMatters: “It’s disappointing to see that this is their third attempt, based on the fact that I carried a bill about civil rights and they’re not happy with it. It’s disappointing to see the amount of time and energy and money that is going into this effort.”

The recall was originally started last year in response to Wahab’s bill to strengthen protections against caste discrimination in employment and housing. The Legislature passed a version of the bill , which was opposed by groups who alleged the bill unfairly targeted Hindu Californians, but Gov. Newsom vetoed it .

Now, recall organizers say the caste bill is no longer the reason, and instead take issue with Wahab’s work as the new chairperson of the Senate’s Public Safety committee and concerns over crime, including not responding to shooting deaths and vehicle fires in the district, and for introducing a bill that would prohibit asking housing applicants to disclose any criminal history.

And lastly: The price of protesting

College students and faculty members across California joined protests over the Gaza war. A grad students’ union is striking over how they were treated . What were the consequences for other students? Find out from CalMatters’ College Journalism Network . And don’t miss the timeline of all the protests at Cal State and UC campuses.

CalMatters columnist Dan Walters: With Newsom’s governorship ending in 2026, the decades-long Delta tunnel project is nearing a decisive moment .

As Oakland pours hundreds of millions of dollars into policing street crime, its enforcement for wage theft is lacking, writes Francisco Antonio Callejas Bonilla , a former maintenance worker at the Radisson Hotel in Oakland.

Don’t miss CalMatters’ first Ideas Festival: It’s in Sacramento on June 5-6, and the full lineup is now available . It includes a broadband summit; sessions on artificial intelligence, climate, elections, homelessness and workforce development; and an exclusive IMAX screening of “Cities of the Future.” Find out more from our engagement team and buy tickets here . 

Other things worth your time:

Some stories may require a subscription to read.

Meet the suburban moms helping Arizonans get abortions in CA // Los Angeles Times

Newsom prioritizes electric school buses over preschool for disabled children // EdSource

Private security firm accused of using force against UCLA protesters // Los Angeles Times

UCLA chancellor tells Congress he regrets not removing encampment sooner // EdSource

Alameda County DA sues Farmers Insurance over ‘widespread scheme’ // East Bay Times

PG&E customers face more increases in monthly utility bills // The Mercury News

Second judge finds workers at Tesla Fremont plant were racially harassed // The Mercury News

SF crime victims get help from an amateur sleuth // The San Francisco Standard

SF aquarium CEO resigns amid concerns about spending // San Francisco Chronicle

Lynn La Newsletter Writer

Lynn La is the newsletter writer for CalMatters, focusing on California’s top political, policy and Capitol stories every weekday. She produces and curates WhatMatters, CalMatters’ flagship daily newsletter... More by Lynn La

Is Homework Illegal? (Arguments In Support and Against)

Homework is not illegal in the United States.

But from a legal standpoint, it is a really fun argument to make!

In this article, we’ll cover some points that you could use for or against the question of the legality of homework, whether you are the student, parent, or teacher in this debate.

Is Homework Illegal? (FOR and AGAINST)

The contents of this web page are for informational purposes only, and nothing you read is intended to be legal advice. Please review our  disclaimer about law/legal-related information on this website  before taking action based upon anything you read or see.

Legal vs Illegal vs Unconstitutional

People have argued that homework is illegal because it counts as a form of “slavery.”

It is illegal to restrict/control with force the movement/life of other individuals if you do not have authority to do so (as parents do with their minor children).

It is illegal to commit the other acts slavery is well known for (assault, harassment, and more).

Not everything that would be unconstitutional (or goes against the stated words in the constitution) would be considered illegal, and vice versa.

For example:

Perhaps then you could argue that forcing kids to do homework is an illegal act, assuming that the threats of consequences are coming from an individual or entity that does not have legal authority to provide the threatened punishments, or those punishments are themselves illegal.

Sounds a lot like the crime of coercion , doesn’t it?

If you want to argue that homework is illegal, look for a statute like coercion to support your argument.

And if you want to use the 13th amendment in support of your case against homework, argue that homework is “unconstitutional” rather than “illegal.”

Consent As The School’s Defense

One of the arguments that homework is illegal or constitutes slavery is that the children do not want to do the homework.

They are being made to do it.

People under the age of 18 in the United States cannot make most decisions for themselves.

The parents have agreed on the children’s behalf to the homework.

Thus, technically, because the parents have voluntarily sent their children to the school, the parents have voluntarily consented to the homework, and the consequences of not doing the homework.

The child might not consent to the homework, but in the end, the parents have given their agreement.

The parents take the children to the school.

And since a crime like coercion requires that the act (the homework) be an act against the will or interest of the victim, a case cannot succeed because the will of the parents is substituted for the will of the child.

Arguing That Parents Did Not Consent

What if the parent was coerced to send their child to school, or to the homework?

In most states, there are laws covering the attendance of children at school.

Absent an exclusion or a valid reason to opt out (like homeschool), a parent could face criminal prosecution if he/she does not send a child to school.

Parents are under the threat of fines and jail time.

After all, a parent who goes to jail might lose his job, his driver’s license, or maybe even custody of his children.

A person cannot consent at the business end of a weapon.

State Laws Do Not Compel Homework, Just Attendance

Another fun wrinkle in this argument, especially as we get down into whether parents have consented or can consent to homework, is whether the applicable laws have any impact on homework.

But are there any laws that require children to complete the homework.

I mean, doing homework is important to getting a good grade.

But aside from showing up at school (and not hurting or disrupting others), can schools actually make children do homework?

But they can’t physically punish a child (like hitting him, in most cases), or prevent him from eating or drinking while at school.

And once the child is at home with his homework, he is subject to the will of his parents or legal guardians.

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Yes, You Can Opt Your Kids Out of Homework—Here’s How

One mom says her kids haven't been doing homework for years. Here's how she opted them out and what experts say.

Guille Faingold / Stocksy

When Juliana Porter thinks about the feeling that homework induces, one word comes to mind: dread. With afternoon and evening time constraints, the North Carolina mom of three wants her kids to have some time to relax and unwind, so homework is often pushed until during or after dinnertime.  

“The subject we’ve found to be the most challenging is math, in large part because strategies and ‘show your work’ are often required to get correct answers,” says Porter. “But as parents who are not in the class to learn new methods, we’re not able to help. Or we can help, but it’s not the correct method being taught and adds to our child’s confusion. These at-home cram sessions usually end in frustration for both child and parent.”

The Porter family’s experience isn’t unique. Research published in the Child & Youth Care Forum found more than 25% of parents and kids say homework “always or often interferes with family time and creates a power struggle,” while more than 36% of kids say homework sometimes forces them to get less sleep in grades 3 to 6. According to Stanford research , 56% of students surveyed say homework is a primary source of stress.

While many families do their best to help their children complete homework with as little frustration as possible, my family has chosen a different option: to simply skip it. And I don’t mean just skipping it on the nights it's difficult either. For four years, my family has totally opted out of homework, which I’ve learned doesn’t produce enough benefits for the stress it causes. And I want other parents to know that opting out of homework is an option for their kids, too.

Homework: How to Opt Out

If your child goes to an open admissions public school, opting out of homework can be something you consider. While it may be a particularly good choice if homework is causing major household stress, you don’t have to wait until your child is miserable to act if they (or you) would simply prefer to spend the time in other ways. There are no legal requirements that students complete work outside of school hours and, for many children, the actual determinants of homework outweigh the theoretical benefits. 

To opt out, I send a note to each of my children's teachers at the beginning of the year letting them know that my child will not be completing homework, that their overall grade should not be impacted, and that they should not be penalized in any way for not turning in homework assignments.

I also let them know that we're committed to our kids' education, that we read together most evenings, and that, if my child is struggling or needs extra support in any subject, we're happy to brainstorm solutions to help them get the practice they need. Though no teachers have pushed back yet (and several have told us they wish they were not required to assign homework and that more families knew they could opt out), we have a small folder of research on the detriments of homework that we could share with an administrator if needed. 

Opting out has worked well for our family but implicit bias might mean that other families don't receive the same neutral or positive reaction that our white family does. 

"Many minoritized and historically marginalized families never consider opting out of homework, even when they know that it's not meaningful," says Sequoya Mungo, Ph.D. , an educational equity consultant and co-founder of BrownLight Inc. , a company helping to create positive diversity and inclusion results in educational, nonprofit, and corporate environments. "When white families make these types of educational choices, they are viewed as forward-thinking and seen as advocates for their children's education. Teachers and others often think that they're being proactive and identifying other enrichment opportunities for their kids. When non-middle class and non-white families opt out, the assumption is that parents don't value education and don't want to, or are unable to, help their kids with homework.” 

According to Dr. Mungo, coming with research or policy can be helpful as even some school level administrators are unaware that opting out is within your rights as parents. “The more prepared you are, the more likely you are to not be met with pushback.” 

Why Families May Want to Opt Out of Homework

Since homework is so prevalent, many assume it's vital, or at least important, to kids' academic growth. But the reality is murkier. "There's really no good evidence that homework completion positively impacts kids' academic growth or achievement," says Samantha Cleaver, Ph.D. , a reading interventionist and author of Raising an Active Reader: The Case for Reading Aloud to Engage Elementary School Youngsters . 

A 2006 meta-analysis of homework and achievement found moderate correlation in middle school and little correlation in elementary school, while there was negative correlation (that is, more homework means less learning) in third grade and below.

While research shows homework can help high school kids improve grades, test results, and likelihood of going to college, the reality is academic pressures in the U.S. have increased over the last two decades, and so too has the amount of homework that kids are assigned. The National Education Association (NEA) recommends no more than 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level, but that's often not what's happening. According to a 2015 study, elementary school students are being assigned more than is recommended , sometimes almost triple the amount. And, often, even when educators are assigning homework they think falls in this window, it can take some students, particularly those who are “behind” already or who have learning disabilities, much more time to complete. 

Excessive homework can negatively impact sleep, mental health, and stress levels. It’s also important to note homework is an issue of equity, since not every child has the same opportunities at home. "When kids are doing work in school, the classroom environment serves as somewhat of an equalizer,'' says Dr. Mungo. "Kids have access to the same teacher and generally the same resources within the classroom setting. At home, kids have different environments, different access to resources, and different levels of support." This means kids with less support and more challenges often end up getting lower grades or being penalized for not turning in work for reasons totally outside their control.

Making Change on Homework

Parents who don't want to be the only ones opting out can work to change the homework culture at their school. Consider reaching out to your principal about your homework concerns or connecting with other parents or the PTA to help build support for your cause.

And if you do opt out, don't be shy about letting other parents know that's what you've chosen to do. Sometimes just knowing there is an option and that others have opted out successfully can help families decide what's right for them.

What to Do With the Extra Time

When Porter thinks about what a life without homework would be like, she envisions a much more relaxed evening routine. “I imagine a scenario where my kids can do their after-school activities, read more, get outside, and generally just decompress from the daily eight-hour grind that is school with no more dread and no more crying,” she says.

If you opt out of homework and find your family with more time for other sorts of learning, leisure, or adventure, be thoughtful how you’ll structure your new routine and talk with your kids about the value of doing nothing, the importance of family time, or how to spend their time in ways that matter to them.

And if you want to be sure they're getting in some valuable post-school learning, consider repurposing your previous homework time to reading with your kids. "Reading aloud has benefits long after your kids can read on their own," says Dr. Cleaver. "Encourage them to choose books about subjects they're interested in, snuggle up together, and enjoy watching them learn through active reading."

But reading isn’t the only way to reap benefits. "There are lots of things that kids can do after school that will positively impact their growth and development that don't involve sitting down to do more of the work they've done at school,'' says Dr. Cleaver. "Time to decompress through play or relaxation isn't just fun, it actually helps kids' brains and bodies relax, making them more open to learning."

Related Articles

Is Homework Illegal In The United States?

When Horace Mann invented school, homework became an important part of it. But there is one question in students’ minds “is homework illegal? – because students have to do a lot of homework. They don’t have time to do other things. They want to play outside games and hang out with their friends. But teachers give them a lot of homework to do, and they have to complete it. 

In many American elementary schools, homework has been banned. Because they find it stressful, homework can affect students’ health by causing stomach and headaches issues. 

Homework is very time consuming and stressful for students. The homework issue is still debatable, but to be on the safe side, you have to be open-minded about it because, for many reasons, you could say it is illegal, and for some, it is legal. In this blog, we will start with is homework illegal.

What Is Homework?

Table of Contents

It is defined as an out-of-class task that teachers assign to the students to do at home. Students have to complete their homework at home. In the United States, a high school student will usually have several hours of homework per night. Homework is used to test students and see how they learn. It can also be used to make sure they understand their school work.

Why Is Homework Important?

Is homework illegal? Homework is important for many reasons. Here are some reasons why is homework important:

• It motivates students to structure their time wisely. And it also teaches students to take all responsibility for their work.
• Parents can also get the opportunity to work together with their students. Through that, parents can develop a strong relationship with their students. 
• Homework can teach students to solve their problems on their own. 
• Homework can help students to get ready for the next class.
•  It can help students organize their thoughts and prepare for tests and exams.
• It helps students understand a subject better and gives them a greater understanding of the material than they would get from just reading the chapter.

Is Doing Homework a Waste Of Time?

• Yes, it is a waste of time because they don’t have time to do other things when students do homework. Students only do homework when they come back home from school. Students should also have free time to enjoy life. Students should do other activities such as spending time with family, playing outside games, handing out with friends etc. 
• Many students take pressure to complete their homework every night, whereas they should relax their minds and body. 
• Many teachers don’t grade papers because they don’t have time as they are very busy designing lesson plans. 
• Homework can affects the performance of children. 
• Children should be students at school and children at home because, at home, students are children of parents. Parents should teach their children to be responsible at home as well. You can also read why homework is bad .

Why Should Students Have Homework?

Homework Motivates People To Do The Practice.

Many people believe that homework can motivate the discipline of practice. At the same time, homework can be boring and time-consuming compared to other activities. Homework helps students to make concepts more clear. It also gives them opportunities when they start their careers.

Homework Gets Parents Involved.

Homework is always a source of conflict between parents and children. Parents require their children to complete homework to develop discipline and get a good education. It allows parents to keep up with what children are doing in school. 

It Teaches Time-Management

Homework is not just finishing the assigned tasks. It can also develop time management skills when students require completing their homework on time. They have to make a schedule for their tasks. So they can finish their homework on time. 

Homework Allows For More Learning Time

Homework gives students more time to complete their studies. School hours aren’t always enough time for children to understand essential topics, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they don’t realize it.

What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Assigning Homework?

Advantages of homework.

Is homework illegal? There are many advantages of assigning homework . Here are some of the main advantages: 

• Homework can assist students in learning more material. 
• If students spend more time on their homework, they will be able to improve their learning better. 
• It can assist students in developing good study habits. 
• Homework can also prepare children for college and universities workloads. 

Disadvantages Of Homework

There are also many disadvantages to assigning homework to students. Here are some disadvantages of homework:

• For many students, homework is very stressful. They feel under pressure, and they will never have any free time. 
• Secondly, when students get more homework, it can be lead to cheating and academic dishonesty issues.
• Students have a lot of homework, that’s why they don’t have time for outdoor activities. you should also read why homework should be banned .

Is It Illegal To Do My Homework?

Is homework illegal? Legally, you don’t have to do your homework. No law enforcement body can arrest you for not doing homework on any day. But, schools have the right to decide what happens to a student who doesn’t complete homework. 

Homework is an important part of the learning approach in school. If you continuously ignore homework, you can be asked to leave the school. If your parents allow you to ignore homework, they can state their case to the school board and an attempt to get an exemption. But majorly, such cases result in a negative response and the child gets expelled from the school.

So, if you are refusing to do your homework and not breaking any state laws, you have no control over the school’s actions after refusing to do your homework. They have the authority to decide what they deem necessary in any situation.

Is It Worth Buying homework?

In my opinion, paying someone to do homework is beneficial. Because many students have a busy schedule and can’t do their homework on time, if you are one of them, I will suggest you take help from professional experts who can provide you with the best assignment solution.  

Many students get benefits from homework companies providers. Because they need free time for outdoor games, spending time with family, and hanging out with friends. Reputable homework companies always provide top-notch homework services within the given deadline. 

Is it illegal to do someone’s homework?

No! It is not illegal to do someone’s homework as you know that when we were young, our parents helped us with our homework. They helped us to do our homework on time and correct our mistakes. Even now, many students take help from professional experts. 

But When it comes to ethics, we should remember that students will be independent. When we do homework by ourselves, we can easily create other questions similar to the homework. And it helps us to explain to others and solve the homework ourselves.

This helps students in the long run with academics. And students learn to work well with little supervision. On the other hand, try to teach your friends similar tasks, and they can solve the homework themselves when you teach well to them. 

Can I Refuse For My Child To Do Homework?

Absolutely yes, you can refuse for your child to do homework. Because you have the legal right to put limits on your child’s homework time. 

Sometimes when students do a lot of homework it destroys family relationships. And also it increases the student’s anxiety. That’s why many people think that it times to make modifications. For this first, you should try to communicate with teachers and administrators. If that does not work, then you have legal homework rights. The legal right is also called a 504.

How Is Homework Harmful?

According to the research, when teachers give homework to the students they spend too much time on homework. Because they think that if they can’t complete their homework, then teachers will punish them. That’s why they spend too much time on homework at night. It may affect stress, physical health problems, and a lack of balance. 

Why Homework Should Be Banned?

Here are some reasons why homework should be banned :

• It is a waste of time for students.
• It can affect the student’s physical health
• Homework doesn’t provide student’s practical knowledge.
• Homework can also affect the student’s mental health.
• Many students start to hate studying because of homework.
• Homework force students to work like a robot
• It is very boring for many students 
• Homework doesn’t help students that much in the study.
• Homework can create the habit of memorizing concepts in the students.
• Many teachers give a lot of homework to the students
• Students have no time for other activities
• Students can’t spend time with family because of homework
• Many students lose their confidence when they can’t complete their homework on time.
• Many students start thinking of their teacher and parents as a villain

Conclusion (Is Homework Illegal)

We hope you enjoyed our blog post on whether homework is illegal or not. The bottom line is that it depends on the individual circumstances around your case. If you’re looking for someone who will provide you with the best homework help service , please visit calltutors. They have a large team of professional writers who are experts in many subjects.

FAQs Related To Is Homework Illegal

How is homework useless.

1. No efficiency  2. No productivity 3. No agenda

How is homework harmful?

According to the research, students who spend too much time on homework may affect more stress and physical health problems. According to the study, more than two hours of homework a night can be unproductive.

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A Landmark Lawsuit Aimed to Fix Special Ed for California's Black Students. It Didn’t.

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Darryl Lester was at his mom’s place in Tacoma, Washington, when a letter he’d been waiting for arrived in the mail. At 40, he was destitute, in pain and out of work.

The letter delivered good news: Lester would be getting disability benefits after blowing out his back in a sheet metal accident. But he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

Why? Because he couldn’t read it. From first through seventh grades, Lester had attended three public schools in San Francisco. At each, he struggled with reading and didn’t get the help he needed for it.

What he didn’t know until last year: His reading difficulties had made him the lead plaintiff — under the pseudonym Larry P. — in a landmark lawsuit that changed special education for black students across California. October marks the 40th anniversary of the judge’s ruling, which was supposed to help fix a system he had deemed discriminatory. But many educators, black parents and advocates for black students say plenty remains broken.

‘Educable Mentally Retarded’

Before the Larry P. case, California education code required school districts to use IQ scores when assessing students for special education.

Based on the test results, black students statewide — young Darryl included — wound up categorized as “educable mentally retarded” at disproportionate rates: 27% labeled that way in 1968 were black — even though black students made up less than 9% of the student body.

That same year, a group of black psychologists broke off from the American Psychological Association in protest over black community concerns that they believed the larger organization was too slow to address. Their top priority was to stop districts from using IQ tests, which they thought were culturally biased, to decide who belonged in special education, said one of the breakaway group’s founders, Harold Dent.

When the Bay Area chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists learned of complaints from black parents in San Francisco, they teamed up with civil rights lawyers and sued in 1971.

As a group, African Americans across the country scored lower on IQ tests. The lawsuit alleged that was because the tests were biased toward Eurocentric culture. Questions like, ”Who wrote Romeo and Juliet,” they argued, didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn. It tested knowledge that some – and not others — had acquired at home or school.

U.S. District Judge Robert Peckham agreed, calling the tests “racially and culturally biased” and “discriminatory.” He ordered a permanent ban on IQ testing of black students across California for purposes of special education placement. Today, California is the only state that has such a ban.

The students who landed in classes for the “educable mentally retarded,” Peckham wrote, were doomed to fall “farther and farther behind,” because — instead of academics — the classes emphasized “personal hygiene and grooming” and “basic home and community living skills.”

Darryl Lester remembers those classes: lots of recess time and plenty of field trips.

“I walked to school and cried all the way,” he said. “I just didn’t like it, you know, because they wasn’t teaching us nothing.”

The District Labeled Her Son Mentally Retarded — and Didn’t Tell Her

Lester and his mom and older brothers moved from Marietta, Georgia, to San Francisco in 1965, he said, because “she didn’t want to find us dead one day hanging by a tree.”

Their first home was a Victorian in the Fillmore District. Lester said he learned his way around the “gorgeous” city by bus and bicycle. Life was pretty good, except in school. Although he was “very good at math,” Lester said, he had a hard time with reading.

Lester said he remembers a teacher telling him he was looking at words backwards as he sought to pronounce them. People with dyslexia see words the same way as everyone else — but have a neurobiological language processing disorder that’s often responsive to intervention.

Whether Lester has dyslexia is unclear. What is clear is that instead of getting help with his reading, he got teased, into fights and suspended.

“I would get frustrated, agitated, upset, and then I’d get sent to the principal's office,” he said.

Lester’s mom, Lucille Lester, didn’t learn that the school district had labeled her son “mentally retarded” until one of the black psychologists visited their home to evaluate Darryl and go through some tests.

“After he talked to Darryl, he turns to me and says, ‘Well, there is nothing wrong with this child,’ ” she testified in court in 1977.

That, she said, is when he told her what kind of classes Darryl had been attending.

“Naturally I didn’t feel good about it, and I got angry about it,” she told the court. “This is when I really found out what was really going on.”

Not long after, Lucille Lester packed up the family and headed to Tacoma, where an older son was serving on a nearby military base. There, Darryl continued to struggle, because as Judge Peckham had predicted, he had fallen behind.

His new high school placed him in a half-day special education program. The other half, he spent at Safeway. Every morning, Lester said, he reported at 7:30 a.m. to the grocery store, where he worked for high school credits — but no pay — until 11 a.m. before attending a few classes in the back of the campus.

After his family protested, the school put him in with the other kids.

He tried hard, going to “summer school, night classes, hardly getting any sleep,” but fell two credits short of a high school diploma, Lester said.

To this day, Lester, now 60, can barely read.

Lester knew he was part of a lawsuit. His mom had joined it on his behalf in 1971 — the year it was filed and when the family moved to Tacoma.

But until a reporter tracked him down last year, he never knew his pseudonym was “Larry P.” And he knew nothing of the ruling’s lasting impact on California schools.

Of the 1977 trip to the courthouse, Lester, then 18, recalled: “I asked my momma, ‘Are we done?’ And she said, ‘Yes son, we done.’ ”

They never spoke of it again.

Special Education Today

The Larry P. judge made California school districts reassess all black students who’d been designated “educable mentally retarded” — without IQ tests — and the numbers dropped. He banned the use of the tests specifically for black students. In time, more subtle special education categories replaced the old ones.

By the time the judge ruled in 1979, a new federal law enacted in 1975 guaranteed students with disabilities equal access to public education. Today, each special education student gets an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, which spells out their struggles and the support they’ll get at school.

But data released in 2016 show that black students nationwide are still being placed disproportionately in special education — particularly in categories like “emotional disturbance,” which are tied to behavior. They’re underassessed in categories such as autism spectrum disorder. And some who need special education don’t get assessed for anything. That, parents and special education advocates say, is because some teachers expect so little of them.

Despite those risks, plenty of black parents want their kids in special education because it gives families a legal avenue to hold schools accountable. Last year, a group of black parents gathered at a San Francisco school to talk about their struggles getting their kids assessed and making sure they receive the support guaranteed under the law.

Many black families find themselves navigating the system because nearly one in three black students in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is in special education — compared to one in eight non-black students, district data shows .

That overrepresentation is highest in special education categories dealing with behavior. And educators, studies show , are more likely to perceive the behavior of black boys as aggressive or defiant. That’s why black boys routinely post the highest rates of suspensions and expulsions in the country.

Mauricha Robinson said it’s not just boys: Her daughter Zariah excelled in school until sixth grade — when the curriculum got more complex. She tanked in her studies for the next two years.

Instead of seeking to assess Zariah for special needs, Robinson said, the school was kicking her out of class, sending her home or to the principal’s office.

“It was just, ‘How do we curb the behavior, behavior, behavior,’ ” she said. “And it was all punitive.”

Like all districts in California, SFUSD is working to reduce the disproportionately high numbers of black students in special education. Robinson speculates maybe that’s why no one in Zariah’s school sought to have her assessed, “to avoid stigmatizing another black child with a special education label.” But she thinks stereotypes played in, too, “of her being a black girl. Aggressive, 'adultifying' her, or ‘she’s sassy’ or ‘she’s outspoken.’ ”

That’s also common: Research has shown that adults at school often treat black girls “as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age” and punish them more harshly as a result.

So Robinson got some advice: If she requested her daughter get assessed, she’d be inoculated against expulsion. And she did: The assessment showed Zariah has a learning disability — a cognitive processing disorder that affects short-term memory and comprehension.

For eighth grade, Robinson moved Zariah into a regular class in a new school with some special assistance. It’s called “full inclusion” and aims to keep special education students from being singled out. Zariah’s grades shot up.

Jean Robertson, chief of special education services for SFUSD, said the push for “full inclusion” is among many changes the district has been implementing since a 2010 audit found black students were more likely to be segregated from the mainstream student population in special classes.

The audit also found black students were significantly overrepresented in several special education categories, like “emotional disturbance”: They were 8.5 times more likely than non-black students to be designated “emotionally disturbed.” Today, that number is down to about four times more likely.

California Department of Education data received in response to a public records request show 28 of the state’s nearly 1,000 school districts faring worse for black students in that category. The relatively low number of 28 is not surprising since many districts serve a very small number of black students, or none at all. At the high end, the data showed that one Southern California district is 12 times more likely to categorize black students as “emotionally disturbed.”

Other changes SFUSD has made over the past decade include working to support students early on so they don’t land in special education, doing deeper assessments and better tailoring services to each special education student instead of putting them in cookie-cutter programs.

But deciding who belongs in special education and who requires other types of support remains a huge challenge.

“That’s the crux of my tension in this work,” Robertson said. “That is with me every single day, particularly for black children.”

Putting an IQ Label on Students Is Like ‘Walking Around With Dynamite’

The IQ testing ban at the heart of the Larry P. ruling has created tensions of its own. The California Association of School Psychologists wants it lifted, noting that the persistent overrepresentation of black students in special education shows the ban hasn’t served its purpose.

But many advocates for black students want the ban to remain in place, saying so many other biases still exist in the educational system.

John Affeldt, a managing attorney at Public Advocates, one of the civil rights firms that filed the Larry P. lawsuit, acknowledged IQ tests have improved since then — but not by enough.

Putting an intelligence label on a student is “like walking around with dynamite,” he said. “It's not going to blow up for every kid."

But when it does, the cost is simply too high.

That’s what happened to Darryl Lester. His lack of an education, inability to read and the shame he carried cost him. He struggled with addiction and low-wage jobs before hard physical labor left him disabled.

Lester said he has worked hard to rise above all that. He has been sober for 18 years now, happily married for 14. He and his wife, Cecilia Lester, now live in a redeveloped Tacoma housing project.

But Cecilia sometimes finds him alone, crying.

“It hurts on the inside, but you have to swallow your pride and look over it and just find some strength somewhere and say, ‘Hey, come on, you can do this. I’m better than this,’ and that gets me through the day,” he said.

‘To Be Able to Pick Up a Book and Read it by Myself’

The Larry P. case remains the subject of academic articles , online tutorials and plenty of debate. But for decades, the identity of Larry P. — and what happened to him — remained a mystery.

That’s no longer true, and Darryl Lester said he wants some good to come of it.

Revisiting his schooling and the burden he carried into adulthood has been painful, he said. But it has driven him to share his experience in hopes that it might help today’s black students who aren’t getting the support they need.

Last spring, Lester returned to San Francisco for the first time since he testified. He was the guest of honor on a panel that included mothers of current black special education students.

“If a teacher’s not helping you, that is not good,” Lester told the gathering of educators, disability rights advocates and black parents, his voice cracking. “You’ve got other kids that will make fun of you. And if you’re a kid that can’t read something, it’s embarrassing.”

To the few students who attended the event, Lester said he had a special message: They should fight for an education and never feel ashamed.

Next week, he’ll tell his story again at the convention of the California Association of School Psychologists, the organization trying to lift that Larry P. ban.

Meanwhile, the grassroots group Decoding Dyslexia CA and the Northern California branch of the International Dyslexia Association are fundraising to create a “Larry P.” scholarship for African American students in Northern California who are struggling to read.

Decoding Dyslexia CA has also found a tutor in Tacoma to teach Lester to read. Lester knows it will be hard work, but he said: “My dream is to be able to pick up a book and read it by myself.”

An earlier version of this story aired on KALW’s news magazine, Crosscurrents. This story was reported with the support of the Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being, a program of the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism.

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Will students really get off cellphones? California’s Phone-Free Schools Act, explained

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California legislators have passed a milestone law requiring schools to devise plans to restrict or ban student cellphone use on campus, aiming to squelch classroom distractions and harmful social media use.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign the bill, which would mandate 1,000 school districts, charter schools and county offices of education across the state to draft their policies by July 1, 2026.

“It is not overly prescriptive,” said Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), who introduced the bill. “We obviously require districts to take action by passing a policy to limit smartphone use, but we don’t tell them exactly how they have to do that.”

Many schools districts have already created their own policies to restrict phones in and outside of class, with varying success and ongoing adaptation. In the battle to determine what works and what doesn’t, the law holds promise but could also lead to a hazy landscape of policies at districts throughout the state. And for schools that have adopted bans, some crafty students find ways around them.

Here’s are the details of California’s Phone-Free Schools Act:

What does the bill mandate?

The bill builds off of Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi’s (D-Torrance) 2019 law that allowed school districts to adopt a policy to limit or prohibit smartphone use in schools. Under the new measure, restrictions will be required.

Schools must consult students, parents and educators to come up with their policies and update it every five years. The goal is to support “pupil learning and well-being” in line with “evidence-based use of smartphone practices,” the measure says.

The policy authorizes schools to use tools such as lockers or locking phone pouches to enforce the policy when students are on campus or under the supervision of a district employee, such as on a field trip.

The bill also clarifies that schools may not access, collect or monitor a student’s online activity. The measure does not set out the rule, but mandates school districts to come up with their own restrictions or bans.

What about emergencies during the school day?

Students will be still allowed to access phones during an emergency. The legislation, however, does not say that the phone must be a student’s own device — and it’s up to school districts to decide what constitutes an emergency.

L.A. Unified Supt. Alberto Carvalho said the district is working out what scenarios will be defined as emergencies and how they can provide students with “reasonable access” to phones in those circumstances.

Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), a co-author of the bill, said that policies may be different for different emergencies — such as an active shooter versus an earthquake. Regardless, he understands the desire of students and parents to connect in the aftermath of an emergency.

Are there other exceptions?

The law bars schools from prohibiting smartphones when a licensed physician or surgeon decides that a phone is vital for the health or well-being of a student. Phones may also be allowed if needed for a student’s individualized education program.

Students who are English learners, for example, may rely on their devices to learn, just as students with diabetes may require a phone to monitor their glucose levels, Carvalho said.

The law also gives teachers and administrators permission to override their school district’s policy, effectively creating their own.

How will schools pay for phone “lockers” or other enforcement tools?

A big concern with the ban is equity, especially when some schools may not be able to pay for tools to help them enforce it.

“For a school as small as ours it was going be about $20,000,” Girls Academic Leadership Academy Principal Liz Ackerman-Hicks said of their decision not to implement popular Yondr pouches , which use magnets to lock and unlock the pouches that contain phones. “That could pay for a lot of after-school tutoring and after-school activities.”

With LAUSD’s new policy set to take effect in January, L.A. school board member Nick Melvoin said the district is considering reimbursing schools that have taken on that cost and paying for implementation moving forward.

Because the law is a state mandate, schools can apply for state reimburserment or use their existing grants dedicated to pay for services that are required by law.

What do educators think of the law?

Though teachers have maintained that phone bans have been beneficial to their classrooms, they emphasize that it cannot be an unsupported mandate. It is particularly important, they say, that the burden of enforcement does not fall on them and take away instructional time.

David Goldberg, president of the California Teacher Assn., said the union supports restricting the use of smartphones on campus but added that districts must consult students and their families as they make their policies.

“Educators care deeply about the well-being of our students and their families and should be included in decisions about changes to our school communities,” Goldberg said in a statement to The Times.

Educators such as KJ STEM Academy teacher Ajaya Ram added that if parents buy into the policy, they can also take steps to limit student phone usage, such as setting parental controls that restrict access to certain apps during the school day.

The California Assn. of School Boards , however, opposes the bill. Spokesperson Troy Flint said the measure takes authority away from school district leaders who may do their own research and decide that limiting or banning phones would not benefit their students.

The group intends to ask Newsom to veto the bill, but if approved, Flint said they will support school districts and monitor the law’s impact and possible unintended consequences.

What are students saying?

Though students understand the reasoning behind stricter policies — agreeing that phones are a distraction — many wonder whether an outright ban is the solution.

If students don’t have a say in the new policies, schools may have trouble with compliance, said students who attended California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond’s Task Force to Close the Digital Divide meeting Tuesday.

“For my peers, it will say that they definitely struggled a lot because the Yondr pouches came out of nowhere and we didn’t really understand what was happening,” said an eighth-grader at Bayside Academy, a K-8 school in San Mateo. “Their focus then became trying to figure out ways to go around the policy and figure out how not to use the pouches.”

If students saw the policy as a consensus, rather than a punishment, she said many more would have been onboard. She also recommended that schools offer positive behavior incentives, like pouch-free days, to reward student compliance.

The high schoolers on the panel said elementary, middle and high school provide “radically different” environments that have to be considered when creating phone policies.

“The state of California has 2 million high schoolers,” said Mia George, a senior at Folsom High School. “If they’re going to be telling those 2 million kids what to do from ninth to 12th grade, when are those students going to be able to make that decision themselves?”

Trinidad Menchu, a recent graduate of Dorsey Senior High, said her phone helps her concentrate during independent work because it allows her to listen to music. She added that her teachers don’t typically lead by example, scrolling on their own phones during that time.

Sadie and Piper Hoodenpyle, students at Girls Academic Leadership Academy, added that phones can be beneficial for taking pictures of lecture slides, filming telenovelas in Spanish and checking their weightlifting form. They have also been a lifeline in cases of emergency, they added, so they can ensure that their sibling is OK and keep their parents up to date.

The Bayside eighth-grader recommended that schools put Yondr magnets in each classroom so that students can unlock their phones in case of an emergency.

More to Read

California passes school cellphone restrictions. But some students find workarounds

Aug. 28, 2024

Editorial: Yes, more schools should ban student cellphones

Aug. 19, 2024

California Legislature again rejects bill to make kindergarten mandatory

Aug. 16, 2024

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Veronica Roseborough is a summer 2024 reporting intern covering education for the Los Angeles Times. She is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where she studied media and the law and worked for Berkeley’s independent, student-run newspaper, the Daily Californian. She also previously covered education and policy as an intern at the San Francisco Examiner and the Hill.

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California schools may be required to restrict students’ smartphone use on campus

California school districts could soon be required to adopt policies that restrict or prohibit students’ use of smartphones during the school day after a bill passed the state Legislature on Wednesday.

Assembly Bill 3216 received bipartisan support from lawmakers and is now headed to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Earlier in the summer, Newsom announced that he wanted to work with state legislature to restrict students from using smartphones at school.

If the governor signs the bill, school districts will have until July 2026 to develop and adopt a smartphone usage restriction policy for students. The bill also states that the policy must be updated every five years.

California Senate passes bill allowing undocumented immigrants to get homebuying loans

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the nation, voted to ban cellphone use during the school day in June.

The new rule will take effect in January 2025, though the Los Angeles Times notes the details still need to be “approved in a future meeting by the Board of Education.”

Supporters of the ban say it would lead to less bullying, more meaningful communication among peers and adults and improved learning.

However, according to the L.A. Times, some parents who want their children to have cellphone access for safety and communication reasons are against the ban, while other school officials say it would be difficult to enforce.

Elon Musk backs California AI safety bill, but critics voice concerns

The statewide proposal also received some opposition from the California School Boards Association and support from the California Teachers Association and State Superintendent Tony Thurmond.

The current legislative session ends on Aug. 31 and Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign any bills passed by the Legislature.

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Musk's X, Media Matters headed to trial

The platform 'has provided sufficient allegations to survive dismissal,' judge says.

Elon Musk's X Corp and Media Matters for America are headed to trial next year following a judge's refusal to toss the billionaire's lawsuit. 

In an order [PDF] published yesterday, Judge Reed O'Connor of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas decided X had adequately argued the plausibility of its claims against Media Matters in a 2023 lawsuit . Media Matters, on the other hand, failed to convince the judge of any of its reasoning on why the case needed to be dismissed. 

"As the Court must accept all well-pleaded facts in the complaint as true and view them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff," O'Connor wrote. 

"Understandably, many of these facts are disputed," O'Connor continued, but because the allegations potentially could be true and were reasonably argued, X "has provided sufficient allegations to survive dismissal."

How we got here

For those that don't recall, Media Matters published a couple of research reports back in November 2023, documenting ads on X from companies like IBM, Apple, Oracle and AT&T appearing alongside posts promoting hate speech. Screenshots were presented as evidence, but it didn't take X long to call foul, alleging that the account Media Matters used only followed major brands and racist trolls in an effort to stack the deck for its purposes. 

"Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers' posts on X Corp.'s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform," the site formerly known as Twitter argued in its original complaint. 

Media Matters, which has called the suit "frivolous" and "meant to bully X's critics into silence," countered the lawsuit with a request to have it tossed back in March on the grounds the northern district of Texas didn't have jurisdiction, that the venue was improper and that X failed to state a claim. 

Unfortunately for Media Matters, X's lawyers did their homework, inasmuch as they were sure to include Oracle and AT&T - both mentioned in the original Media Matters reports - in their original suit. Both firms are headquartered in the Northern District of Texas, and thus, said O'Connor, his court has jurisdiction over the matter. 

Brazil, where no one will be Xeeting soon

Speaking of self-made messes, the conflict Musk has gotten himself into with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over X's plans to unblock several far-right accounts from the country is only getting messier. 

Judge Alexandre de Moraes earlier this week threatened to block X entirely in Brazil if the company didn't put a compliance officer in place to vet election misinformation in the country - a position that only opened earlier in August after X closed its offices in the country. 

That role, de Moraes' office said, is essential given the country's elections this October. 

In order to ensure X would pay fines levied against it by the Brazilian government, de Moraes reportedly froze Starlink's finances in the country, and X said it expects de Moraes will soon order the site to be shut down "because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents."

"Media Matters targeted Texas," O'Connor concluded. Likewise, X "sufficiently alleges a substantial part of the events occurred within the Northern District of Texas," thus satisfying the venue requirement, too. 

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"To survive a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, a plaintiff need only allege that the defendant has 'do[ne] something independently unlawful or tortious,' that would be 'actionable under a recognized tort,'" O'Connor reasoned, concluding X had done that. 

In short, this needs to go to court to get hashed out since the Northern District of Texas lacks any rules prohibiting companies from filing strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits , which was the basis for a California judge tossing a similar lawsuit X filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

X's advertising woes have been considerable and public, since Musk took over the company - as has a rise in hate speech on the platform. Musk has been publicly critical of advertisers who've left in the wake of Media Matters and others documenting hate speech on X, telling some to " go fuck [themselves] " before finally suing a bunch of them for cutting or eliminating ad spending on X. 

Because there's no way to prove you actually care about advertisers by suing a bunch of them for exercising their right to free speech.

If there are no other challenges to the X/Media Matters lawsuit, the trial will begin in April 2025. Neither X nor Media Matters responded to questions for this story. ®

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