California state legislature passed the Healthy Homework Act in September of 2024. This bill encourages each local education agency to formally adopt a final homework policy by the start of the 2028/29 school year.

The state asks education agencies to construct homework policies that consider students’ physical health, how long assignments take and how effective they are. The bill’s main concern is mental health and stress added to students’ daily lives.

The bill cites a survey of 15,000 California high schoolers from Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It found that for 45% of these students homework was a major source of stress and that 52% considered most assignments to be busywork. The organization also reported in 2020 that students with higher workloads reported “symptoms of exhaustion and lower rates of sleep,”. The language in the bill cites research that found that spending more time on homework did not necessarily lead to higher test scores. Homework also has potential to widen inequities between students. Language barriers, unreliable home internet, family responsibilities or other outside factors may contribute to a student falling behind on homework.

California has a rich history of leading the country on social justice issues. There are a number of other states that consider a limited homework approach, but this legislation is the first in the nation that takes a sweeping, state-wide approach to limiting homework from a strictly health-related angle.