Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.
Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!
So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.
There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.
When I was in my first year as a nurse we were expected to complete a research project as part of our year long "nurse-residency" program. They gave us maybe 2-3 hours at most per month to complete it. They more or less made it impossible to do without working on your own time, something I didn't do, but my coworkers did. You could come in on your day off and have them pay you for the time you spent in the library, but most of my coworkers had a 30+ minute drive. In the end the person in charge of the program denied our research project stating that the highest levels of the CDC stated that their existing policies were good and correct and that our idea was wrong and impossible to test. In the 4 years since, I've only seen more academic papers come out and prove us correct, that IVs can be changed as needed rather than scheduled every 3 days. We didn't have to do the full project since our proposal was denied which actually let us all kinda coast through the rest of it and just state we were denied testing, but I can't imagine how much more time it would've demanded from us to come in on our days off to do extra work because of this. Most of the other groups went with dumb bullshit like placing more recycling cans around to encourage recycling. I wanted to do staffing ratios but my group was afraid of it being too antagonistic to administration.