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.

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. 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.

And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.Īccording 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. 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. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework.

No more homework