Reading homework has “no discernible downside”

Tom Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has been making trouble again. His latest report asks, “How Well Are American Students Learning?” It upends hitherto highly regarded research based on data from several countries that says more time for instruction and homework has a negative correlation with achievement—in other words, the more teaching at school and more homework at home, the less you learn.

In the holiday spirit of giving, education columnist Jay Mathews of The Washington Post shares some of the ideas he has been gathering for getting beyond the homework standoff. One of them is that elementary students should get only reading homework and nothing else. Read more at washingtonpost.com.