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A fourth person was killed while plugging in a generator and a fifth when he was blown down trying to check on his hunting dogs in Lenoir County, north of Wilmington, said Emergency Planner Samuel Kornegay, emergency planner for the county's emergency services division.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Friday that several other deaths were under investigation as possibly related to the storm.
"We have days of rain ahead of us," he warned. "If you're asked to evacuate, go."
Meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels.com calculates that Hurricane Florence is forecast to dump 9.6 trillion gallons, enough rain to cover the Tar Heel state in about 10 inches of water.
The National Weather Service says 16 inches of rain has already fallen in parts of North Carolina.
Tom Collins, emergency management director in Pender County, N.C., says the woman in Hampstead had a heart attack Friday morning, but emergency crews could not get to her because of the downed trees. Collins says crews have a front loader they're using to clear roads, but a tree went through the windshield.
In New Bern, where the Neuse and Trent rivers intersect, around 200 people were rescued after being stranded in their homes overnight, according to Mayor Dana Outlaw. Another 150, including some trapped in second floors of houses or in attics, awaited rescue.
"What happens is that we rescue some people and then we find out there are still more who need it," Outlaw said. "People who live in New Bern have experienced hurricanes before, but it has been a long time since we have experienced something like this."
The mayor said at least 4,200 homes and 300 businesses sustained damage from flooding.
"Things here are very, very serious," he said. "If you've ever doubted the destructiveness of a hurricane, what's happening here will make you a believer."
Hurricane Florence is not likely to weaken below hurricane strength until Saturday. The threat continues to be flooding in the Carolinas with North Carolina projected to be the hardest hit.
More than 60 people, including an infant, children and their pets, were rescued from a collapsing hotel in Jacksonville, North Carolina, at the height of the storm, according to WITN-TV.
Cinder blocks that were part of the structure crumbled in some places and portions of the roof were missing. Police and fire teams forced their way into some rooms to free the residents, who were temporarily taken to the town's center for public safety.
Rescuers were able to reach a flooded animal shelter in Newport, N.C., after the Carteret County Humane Society put out a call for help on Facebook. The Cajun Navy, a group of volunteers in boats, brought two stranded shelter workers, 43 dogs, 80 cats and roughly 15 chickens to safety.
About 9,700 National Guard troops and civilians have been deployed, with high-water vehicles, helicopters and boats.
"I see a biblical proportion flood event that's going to occur," Wilmington Police Chief Ralph Evangelous told ABC News. "I see the beach communities being inundated with water and destruction that will be pretty, pretty epic in nature."
A mother and infant died in Wilmington, N.C. after a tree fell on their home Friday, Sept 14, 2018, during Hurricane Florence. The house was severely damaged.
Some 908,614 customers were without power in the Carolinas early Saturday, according to poweroutage.us.
National Weather Service forecasters said the storm would roam along the coast for at least two more days before reaching Columbia, South Carolina, early Sunday. It was also expected to slip briefly back into the open water during the journey.
The NHC said Florence went ashore near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, at 7:15 a.m. EDT with estimated maximum winds of 90 mph. Shortly afterward, the National Weather Service reported wind gusts to 105 mph at Wilmington International Airport, the highest wind gust measured in Wilmington since Hurricane Helene hit ...
The center said the water level could hit from 7 to 10 feet from Cape Fear to Cape Lookout, North Carolina, and from 6 to 9 feet from Cape Lookout to Ocracoke Inlet.
Even with the storm raging, the Army Corps of Engineers prepared to start work to restore power, install temporary roofing and remove debris.
While thousands chose to flee the coast, others hunkered down. Gigi Charlebois, owner of the Edenton Coffee House on the northern shore of North Carolina's Albemarle Sound, decided to stay with her family overnight in the shop's dining room, sleeping on couches, pull-out cots and a mattress.
She said the shop, with an electric generator, was safer than their nearby home.
Staying there also allowed her to keep an eye on their freezers and fridges holding food. Plus, they’d be there in the morning if first responders needed them.
“That’s why we opened an hour later, because we had to clean up all our bedding,” Charlebois said while standing in the dining room, which by Friday morning teemed with customers while rain poured outside.
The National Hurricane Center said the storm would move further inland across extreme southeastern North Carolina and extreme eastern South Carolina on Friday and Saturday. Florence will then move generally northward across the western Carolinas and the central Appalachian Mountains early next week.
A teenager helps her younger sister complete math homework at their Denver home, January 2018.
CAP analysis found that homework is generally aligned to Common Core State Standards, but additional policy changes would make it more valuable.
Far from academia, parents—not surprisingly—are some of homework’s most ardent supporters and, also, its most vocal critics. For better or worse, many parents help or are involved in their child’s homework in some way. As a result, homework can shape family dynamics and weeknight schedules. If a child receives too much...
For the CAP study, the authors used the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) online survey tool to collect from parents their child’s actual homework assignments. Specifically, as part of the survey, the authors asked parents to submit a sample of their child’s most recent math or language arts homework assignment and have t...
In addition, the homework sample is not from a single classroom or school over the course of a year; rather, it is a snapshot of homework across many classrooms during the span of a few weeks in May 2018. The assumption is that looking at assignments from many classrooms over a short period of time helps to construct a...
Moreover, the design of the CAP study has clear advantages. Many of the previous existing studies evaluated homework in a single district, whereas the CAP study draws from a national sample, and despite its limitations, the authors believe that the findings are robust and contribute significantly to the existing resear...
Homework is largely aligned to the Common Core standards. The authors found that the homework submitted is mostly aligned to Common Core standards content. The alignment index that the authors used evaluated both topic and skill. As previously noted, the analysis is a snapshot of homework and, therefore, does not allow...
Homework frequently fails to challenge students. Nearly half of the parents who responded to the CAP survey reported that homework is too easy for their child. In particular, parents of primary-grade children were most likely to agree or strongly agree that the homework assignment they submitted was too easy for their ...
Districts, schools, and teachers should ensure that the total amount of homework students receive does not exceed the 10-minute rule—that is to say, no more than 10 minutes of homework multiplied by the student’s grade level.16 According to research, any more than that can be counterproductive.17 Also, too much homewor...
Districts and schools should periodically audit homework to make sure it is challenging and aligned to standards. Rather than implementing homework bans, district policymakers and school principals should regularly review examples of homework assignments to ensure that it is aligned to grade-level standards and require...
Schools and districts should provide access to technology and other supports that can make it easier for students to complete rigorous schoolwork at home. Technology can also provide additional support or scaffolding at home, allowing more students to complete homework without help from adults or older siblings. For in...
Curriculum reform and instructional redesign should focus on homework. There are many states and districts that are reforming curriculum or adopting different approaches to instruction, including personalized learning. Curriculum reform and personalized learning are tied to greater academic outcomes and an increase in ...
The findings and recommendations of this study are discussed in detail below.
All homework is not created equal. The CAP study sought to evaluate homework quality—specifically, if homework is aligned to rigorous content standards. The authors believe that access to grade-level content at home will increase the positive impact of adopting more rigorous content standards, and they sought to examin...
The Common Core, developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, established a set of benchmarks for “what students should know and be able to do” in math and language arts by the end of the academic year in kindergarten through high school.20 The math standards focus on ...
The Common Core is not silent in the cognitive demand needed to demonstrate mastery for each standard.21 For example, a second grade math standard is “[s]olve word problems involving dollar bills, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, using $ and ¢ symbols appropriately.” For this standard, a second-grader has not mas...
There are numerous frameworks to describe levels of cognitive skills. One of the most prominent of these models, Bloom’s taxonomy, identifies six categories of cognition. The original levels and terms were knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; however, these terms have changed slig...
Over the past two decades, cognitive science has shown that individuals of any age retain information longer when they demonstrate deeper learning and make their own meaning with the content—using skills such as the abilities to conjecture, generalize, prove, and more—as opposed to only committing ideas to memory or pe...
In this study, the authors evaluated homework to determine if it was aligned to Common Core standards in two ways: First, does it reflect grade-level content standards; second, does it require students to use skills similar to those required to demonstrate proficiency in a content area. This multitiered approach is cri...
In spring 2018, the Center for American Progress used Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to administer a survey. MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace managed by Amazon; it allows organizations to virtually administer surveys for a diverse sample.24 The CAP survey asked parents to submit a sample of their child’s most recen...
Of the 372 parents who participated in the survey, 202, or about 54 percent of respondents, submitted samples of their child’s homework assignment. The researchers dropped a total of 15 homework submissions from analysis either because the subject matter was not math or language arts—but rather, science, music, or soci...
The authors found that the submitted homework, for the most part, was aligned to Common Core standards content or within the so-called “good” range based on content expert evaluations. As described in the Methodology, the authors used an alignment index that does not require a homework assignment to exactly mirror the ...
The analysis is a snapshot of homework and, therefore, does not allow the authors to determine if homework over the course of a year covered all required standards. In other words, it is difficult to say how many of the standards for a given grade are covered across a full school year, simply because of the limited sam...
The alignment index evaluates both topic and skill, but there was particular alignment in topic areas. For instance, there was a strong emphasis in the topic areas of number sense and operations for primary math homework. When combined with the third-most emphasized topic, measurement, these three areas accounted for m...
In general, across all age groups, math homework was more closely aligned to content standards—both topic and skill level—than language arts. The alignment results for middle school math were particularly strong, at 0.56, based on 27 homework samples. The stronger alignment among math homework samples may be in part du...
The table below presents the alignment indices, which were calculated using the homework samples collected for each grade band.
While the authors’ analysis shows that there was significant alignment in the topic of standards and homework assignments, most of the homework did not require students to demonstrate the full depth of knowledge required of content standards. The analysis uncovered an emphasis on procedural knowledge, with an even stro...
As seen with the middle school grades, high school math standards—despite a continued emphasis on procedures—show increased emphasis on the more challenging performance expectations of “demonstrate understanding” and “conjecture, generalize, prove.” Interestingly, this shift toward more challenging performance expectat...
Nearly half of parents that participated in the survey reported that homework does not challenge their child. In particular, parents of primary-grade children were most likely to agree or strongly agree that the homework assignment they submitted was too easy for their child—58 percent for language arts and 55 percent ...
Parents’ opinions about homework difficulty varied between mathematics and language arts assignments. Forty-eight percent of parents who submitted a mathematics assignment and 44 percent of parents who submitted a language arts assignment reported that it was too easy for their child. There was some variance across gra...
Within the sample of homework assignments, there were some that fell short of rigorous. For instance, one assignment listed 24 pairs of numbers—three and nine, 24 and 21, and so on—and asked the student to circle the smaller number in order to build numbers sense. While homework can be critical when establishing founda...
A second example from kindergarten asked a student to create an uppercase and lowercase letter “f” by filling in dots with paint. The parent who submitted it highlighted the limited utility of the assignment, emphasizing that it does not hold students to high expectations. What’s more, the homework only gave the studen...
While many of the assignments submitted focused on procedures and, for math, computation, it is worth acknowledging some of the more exemplary types of homework included in the samples. These offer examples of how homework can challenge students, engage rigorous cognitive processes, and demonstrate that content standar...
Ally, Bob, Carl, and Dana each have a set of shapes.
The number of rectangles that Dana has is the same as the number of triangles that Carl has.
This example is interesting on two counts. First, the assignment goes beyond procedure, requiring the student to analyze the various sets of shapes in order to determine which set belongs to which individual. It is also interesting insofar as it demonstrates a common real-world situation: There is usually more than one...
Similarly, another example asked a student to determine actions that would help students beautify the school. The header of the assignment read, “Make a Decision: Keep Our School Beautiful!” The assignment had various boxes, each with a question above, such as, “Should we recycle?” or “Should we make art?” The assignme...
Homework offers a valuable window into the curricula, assessment practices, and instructional preferences of teachers. It provides insight into classroom learning as well as the types of knowledge and skills the teacher believes will reinforce that instruction at home.
This analysis shows that the content and value of homework varies. While most homework within the sample was aligned to content standards, there is still a significant need to increase the rigor of homework and create opportunities for students to use higher-order skills.
In many cases, the current debate over homework is short-sighted. Many arguments focus on whether or not students should have homework. There are entire school districts that have simply banned homework altogether. However, the debate should move beyond the merit of homework. Research shows that homework is linked to b...
Like all instruction, homework should be aligned to states’ rigorous content standards and should engage students in order to promote deeper learning and retention. To do this, homework should ask students to use higher-order skills, such as the ability to analyze or evaluate.
However, schools and districts, rather than simply assigning longer, more complicated assignments to make homework seem more challenging, should make strategic shifts. Homework assignments should be thought-provoking. But there is a such thing as too much homework. Districts and schools should ensure that teachers foll...
Rather than implementing homework bans, district policymakers and schools should regularly review homework samples to ensure that they are aligned to grade-level standards, are engaging, require students to demonstrate higher-order skills, and adhere to the 10-minute rule. The audit should review multiple homework assi...
In instances where the district or school principal finds that homework assignments are not aligned to grade-level standards or take too much or too little time to complete, they should help the school or teachers improve them by recommending instructional materials that may make it easier for teachers to identify appr...
Technology can go a long way to improve homework and provide additional support or scaffolding at home. For instance, programs such as the Khan Academy—which provides short lessons through YouTube videos and practice exercises—can give students rigorous homework that is aligned to the Common Core standards. Unfortunate...
Homework should be a focus of curriculum reform, and states and districts should consider how textbooks or other instructional materials can provide resources or examples to help teachers assign meaningful homework that will complement regular classroom instruction.
Personalized learning—which tailors instruction and learning environments to meet each student’s individual interests and needs—is also gaining traction as a way to increase declining engagement in schools and increase student motivation.37 These ideas are also relevant to homework quality. A 2010 study found that when...
When it comes to change management, experts often advise to look for low-hanging fruit—the simplest and easiest fixes.40 In education, homework reform is low-hanging fruit. Research shows that quality homework and increasing student achievement are positively correlated; and yet, the authors’ analysis shows that some s...
As mentioned above, the authors used the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) online survey tool to collect from parents their child’s actual homework assignments. Specifically, as part of the survey, the authors asked parents to submit a sample of their child’s most recent math or language arts homework assignment and have ...
The homework samples were reviewed by two teams of content analysts—one for mathematics and one for language arts—who were asked to describe the academic content represented by the submitted homework, as well as the performance expectation. Each team consisted of three analysts who possessed the relevant content expert...
The teams used a taxonomy-based methodology that was developed by education researchers Andrew Porter and John Smithson during Porter’s tenure as director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.41 Researchers both nationally and internationally have subsequently used this ...
The Porter/Smithson approach is unique because it defines instructional content as a two-dimensional construct consisting of topic and cognitive demand, or skill. This approach to describing cognitive skill is similar to Bloom’s, which the authors have described above. It has five categories: recall, process, analyze, ...
The alignment index has a range of 0.00 to 1.00, where 0.00 indicates no content in common whatsoever between the two descriptions—perfect misalignment—and 1.00 indicates complete agreement between the two descriptions—perfect alignment. A measure of 1.00 is exceedingly unlikely, requiring perfect agreement across ever...
Generally speaking, what one might call “good” alignment for instruction tends to range between 0.4 and 0.6 on the alignment index, with a measure of 0.5 serving as a median indicator of good alignment. The description of the content standards represents the goal of instructional practice—the destination, not the journ...
The authors acknowledge that the analysis has shortcomings. The sample was relatively small and does not directly mirror the national population of parents of elementary and secondary school students. As such, the sample does not necessarily reflect the views or homework experiences of the larger U.S. population.
The current study analyzes a snapshot of homework across many classrooms, rather than homework from a single classroom or school. The assumption is that looking at individual homework assignments across many classrooms will help to construct a composite picture of mathematics and language arts homework that will be som...
For the current study, however, the number of homework samples available for each grade band were, in some cases, quite small—as low as five assignments each for middle and high school language arts. The largest sample sizes were for primary and elementary math, with 47 and 41 homework assignments collected, respective...
The respondents that participated in this study were a reasonably diverse group in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity, but there are notable differences between the makeup of the parents represented in the study and the makeup of parents of school-age children more generally. Respondents were predominantly female, wit...
Because the sample does not well reflect the population of parents of elementary and secondary students, the authors considered possible selection biases that may help to explain the differences in sample and overall population and that may have affected certain members of the population more than others.
For instance, the authors administered the survey using MTurk, which may have skewed the sample. In general, the population on the site is younger and whiter than the U.S. population as a whole. However, research has shown that MTurk yields high-quality, nationally representative results, with data that are at least as...
In addition, accessibility could have led to selection bias. Despite broad internet access in 2018, there remain families in low-income locales where internet access is not readily available for parents. It is also possible that older parents are less likely to be as active on the internet as younger parents, further c...
Ulrich Boser is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also the founder and CEO of The Learning Agency.
Meg Benner is a senior consultant at the Center.
John Smithson is the researcher emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The authors would like to thank Sarah Shapiro, a former research assistant at the Center for American Progress, for her support developing the survey. They also appreciate the valuable feedback of Catherine Brown, senior fellow for Education Policy at the Center for American Progress; Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the...
The author, Ulrich Boser, has a financial relationship with the creators of the online homework tool ASSISTments.
For Joshua Agriesta it was a summer to remember with an opportunity to be part of the 2018 Major League Baseball All Star week at Washington Nationals Park. The 12-year-old advanced from the Southeast regional championship in the MLB Junior Home Run Derby to compete in the 12-Under age division.
MLB had a series of free competitions and came up with finalists in eight regions for the MLB Jr. Home Run Derby and MLB Pitch, Hit & Run Softball Finalists. There was a total of 40 players from across the United States and Canada who advanced to the finals.
The third annual MLB Jr. Home Run Derby had 16 players qualify from more than 1,500 local competitions.
In a year without Jose Fernandez, what has changed? Quite a lot.
Disenchantment is the latest animated series from Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama.
The show premieres on Netflix on August 17, and we talk about our initial impressions on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast. Our guest host Brian Heater is a big fan of Groening’s previous creations, and he also interviewed Groening for TechCrunch.
While Disenchantment brings Groening’s funny, skewed approach to a medieval fantasy setting, it isn’t a parody, exactly. It’s packed with jokes, but they rely more on the characters and on general zaniness, rather than references to (say) The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones.

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