Dive Brief:

• Parent and student complaints about the amount of time consumed by homework are leading several schools nationwide to drop the assignments all together.
• Many of the schools banning homework are simply requiring kids to read for 30 minutes every night, with California private school VanDamme Academy, for example, calling homework "largely pointless."
• Another approach sees schools continuing to assign homework, but not for a grade.

Dive Insight:

Parents have joined their children in bemoaning homework as the assignments have become more time-consuming. University of Arizona South teacher education associate professor and "The End of Homework" co-author Etta Kralovec told Today that while some don't mind their kids being heavily scheduled and focused on school, others want more time with their kids and want them to have more free time to explore their interests.

The National PTA, of course, has a "10 minute rule" that suggests homework take up no more than 10 minutes per night for each year a kid is in school, which Today explains as 10 minutes for a first-grader and an hour for a sixth-grader — amounts of time that are reportedly often exceeded.

Of course, with the rising popularity of models like flipped learning, which places emphasis on assigning short reading assignments or video explanations to students for the evenings, homework as it exists today could be on the way out regardless.