The homework slide has been happening since the early ‘90s and accelerated between 2021 and 2023, according to Monitoring the Future, an ongoing national research project that tracks behaviors of teens and others, and reported on in Education Week.
In 2023, 8th graders averaged 36 minutes of homework daily, down 17% from 2021; 10th graders spent on average 47 minutes daily in 2023, down from 60 minutes in 2021. Also in 2023, the most recent year of data available, “no homeworkers” reached a peak: 15% of 8th graders and 10.8% of 10th graders reported doing no homework that year.
Many teachers have scaled back on assigning homework for reasons including gaps in access to resources and parental help, the rise of artificial intelligence that could be used for cheating, and a shift toward grading policies that don’t give students credit for completing homework.
Still, some educators have seen an uptick in students not completing what is assigned.
“I think post-pandemic, there’s been a lot more cynicism, a lot more pessimism, a lot more pushing back on the idea of working hard, period,” says Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego University and author of Generation Tech, a Substack newsletter on teens and social media.
Related to “working hard,” Twenge notes that 36% of 18-year-olds in 2022 said they were willing to work overtime in their jobs, down from 54% in early 2020, according to the Monitoring the Future data.
Other surveys in recent years have noted persistent increases in student misbehavior and disengagement. Many adult employees today appear to be having motivational issues on the job similar to teens at school. And the factors blamed for low employee morale may be similar to those that plague students.
For example, the Wall Street Journal and NORC, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, polled 1,019 U.S. adults in March 2023, and 67% of respondents agreed that hard work was “very important” to them—down from 83% in 1998, the first year of the survey.
Findings from a recent national Gallup survey of U.S. employees show that engagement on the job began to fall in 2021 and reached a 10-year low in 2024, when only 31% of U.S. employees reported being “actively engaged” in work and 17% reported being actively “disengaged.”
This correlates to the workplace trend of “quiet quitting”: employees doing as little as possible on the job. Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report indicated that “quiet quitters” made up 59% of the total global workforce.
Gallup data published in January 2025 found a strong connection between low employee morale and employees’ feelings of disconnectedness. Only 30% of employees reported feeling connected to their company’s mission and purpose. Related data published in August asserted that only a minority of U.S. employees—23%—believe that their organization cares about their well-being.
Students, like adults, report working harder when they have a positive connection—in their case, to school and with a teacher or other staff member.
“When there’s a teacher that I have a relationship with, I—100%—try harder in class. Even if I got no sleep the night before, I’ll stay up for first period because I like the teacher,” Warren Coates, a then-senior at Smyrna High School in central Delaware, told Education Week in the fall of 2024.
Michael C. Reichert, a psychologist and executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania, believes all students, especially boys, learn best when they have a positive relationship with their teachers.
Reichert has developed “relational gestures” intended to help teachers initiate and maintain positive learning relationships with students. Gestures include proactively engaging with students to show interest in them beyond who they are in the classroom.
Students need to feel connected in order to perform their best at school, says Antoine Germany, an assistant principal at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif. Give students specific roles or responsibilities in class to boost engagement and effort, he suggests. Celebrate students’ work by displaying it publicly, in the classroom or hallways, for instance.
Students—not unlike employees—may be motivated by educators whose concerted efforts make them feel like an integral part of a community.
Education Week
