We all have those nights when the amount of time we spend on our homework surpasses the number of hours we spend actually sleeping. We beat ourselves up for procrastinating on that biology presentation, curse our English teacher for giving us a “small essay” due the next day and damn our math, history and french teachers for giving us tests, projects and homework all at the same time.

But that’s just the way school is, and those piles of homework are there for a reason, right?

Well, sort of. According to guidelines endorsed by the National Education Association (NEA), schools should be following the “10 minute rule” created by Harris Cooper of Duke University, the country’s leading homework researcher.

The “10 minute rule” states that students should be doing 10 minutes of homework per night, per grade level. For example, second graders should complete 20 minutes of homework per night, fifth graders should do 50 minutes per night and so on.

Cooper’s rule also states that by the time a child of any age reaches two hours of homework, they stop effectively taking in the material, and the homework will not affect their achievement. The average American high school student does two to four hours of homework a night, so according to Cooper’s rule, high school students could be anywhere between 12th to 24th grade.

Obviously something is wrong here. We shouldn’t be taking on more than we are capable of, but why is homework such an issue all of a sudden?

According to a 2004 national survey of 2,900 American children conducted by the University of Michigan, the amount of time spent on homework is up 51% since 1981. With the leap in homework, William Crain, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at City College of New York and the author of Reclaiming Childhood, said that the average high school student is glued to his or her desk for almost seven hours a day, has two to four hours of homework each night, and in total is working 45 to 55 hours a week.

So who’s to blame for why we sit at our desks night after night, feeling our brains melt into the back of our skulls as we reach our third hour of what Harris Cooper dubs, “counterproductive homework?”

As easy as it is to say that our teachers are the ones to blame because they are handing out the homework, that is not necessarily correct. True, maybe some teachers favor ten page papers more than others, but the real answer for why we have so much homework is a little thing called top down pressure.

In 2001, The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was established, requiring states to create assessments in basic skills in order to receive federal funding for their schools. NCLB supports standards-based education reform, which is based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education.

Since NCLB, there’s been a huge push for high test scores, which means covering everything from the ancient Sumerians to historians’ predictions for the future in only 180 days. Add the fact that schools for educators don’t offer “Assigning Homework 101,” and teachers are figuring this out on their own.

“Today’s educators are getting pressure from state school boards to cover more material and in greater depth – all without a corresponding expansion of the school day,” said Harris Cooper. “Students are spending homework time learning extra material rather than reviewing the day’s lessons.”

However, the thing that our country needs to understand is that the challenge of achieving high test scores and managing education can’t be met with an abundant amount of homework.

According to Etta Kralovec and John Buell, educators and co-authors of the book, The End of Homework, homework also doesn’t allow teachers to see how a student is progressing. A student may struggle and make many mistakes without the teacher being able to pinpoint the problem or even notice that the student has made an error in the first place. This ultimately hurts the student’s learning process and grades. Also, studies and statistics show that countries with lesser amounts of homework, such as Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic, report higher test scores than the countries that assign the most homework.

Luckily, as the homework issue has become more prominent, there have been some shifts in ideals, and some schools are making progressive changes to their homework policies. Mason-Rice School in Newton, MA now follows Harris Cooper’s “10 minute rule” to keep a handle on nightly assignments.

Raymond Park School in Indianapolis, IN wrote a policy instructing teachers to “assign homework only when you feel the assignment is valuable” and that “a night off is better than homework which serves no worthwhile purpose.” Other schools, such as Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park, CA, have even considered eliminating homework altogether.

The bottom line is, homework has evolved into an unhealthy way of life for American students. Somewhere along the road, homework became a safety net for teachers to cover extra material that they are impossibly expected to teach us. It became a way to put us all at ease, convincing ourselves that our education programs are succeeding because they have been meeting the state standardized bar. But now, it’s time to face the facts. Homework has a time, place and use, but like anything else, there can be too much of a good thing. It’s time to start a homework revolution.