With lengthening workweeks and commutes and shrinking family time, homework in US public schools -- which according to the authors is increasing -- must justify itself even more than before. (For many children, the "Rat Race / Junior Division" is characterized by a heavy homework burden at the end of a long day.)
According to the authors of The Case Against Homework, however (and other experts too, whom we’ll get to in a moment), homework in many cases can hardly be justified at all, and often produces the opposite of teachers' intentions: turning children against learning, taking the joy out of reading, and making school itself not a pleasure (or even a middling-interesting place to be), but a stressful and painful duty.
Even from here in "upwardly mobile" Northern Virginia, where my 8-year-old daughter routinely had one hour of nightly homework in second grade last year, and parents talk of their teens burning out on homework years before college, the book was thought-provoking, and an eye-opener.
Here’s a sample:
-- What is the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems for children 3-12? Not homework. Family meals, says a University of Michigan study. But on most weekdays, 42% of families don’t eat together. When homework intrudes, "[t]he first thing to go is often the family dinner hour," the authors say.
-- With homework increasingly invading family time, we’re teaching kids the wrong lesson, experts note. "The way things are now," says Dee Shepherd-Look, a California State University psychology professor, "we’re giving kids the wrong message: that work is more important than family."
(That’s a painful irony in particular for parents who complain that their spouses are "married to their jobs" -- the homework grind helps foster the "salaryman" and "salarywoman" of tomorrow.)
-- Every pediatric obesity expert the authors interviewed agreed on the connection between homework and childhood obesity. Yet as one expert noted, "no one has looked at whether there's a correlation between how many hours of homework kids do and obesity because no one wants to find it." (Physiologically, she pointed out, doing homework is the same as watching TV.)
-- Elementary school students average 78 minutes of homework per night, and middle school students average 99 minutes, according to a recent AP / AOL poll. (That's much more than experts and school guidelines often recommend -- 10 minutes of homework per grade level per school night.)
-- One of the foremost researchers on homework, Prof. Harris Cooper of Duke University -- who reviewed over 180 studies of homework and its effects -- found "very little correlation between the amount of homework and achievement in elementary school and only a moderate correlation in middle school."
-- Evidence from school systems internationally suggests that the more homework the teachers assign, the worse students do on achievement tests.
-- Homework for kindergarteners is the national norm.
Fortunately, Bennett -- a former Legal Aid attorney and long-time advocate for reasonable homework policies -- and Kalish, a former senior editor at Child, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines -- give excellent guidance from the homework battles they themselves fought.
Chapters like "What You Should Know Before You Talk to the Teacher," and "Getting the School on Your Side" offer well-thought-out advice on how to prepare the case for you and your child, and communicate productively with teachers of varying temperaments and points of view.
For more on the book, published by Three Rivers Press (2006) and available at Amazon, see Bennett's site at http://stophomework.com and Kalish's at http://nancykalish.com.
If you have a moment for some homework, see also the article by Emily Bazelon at http://www.slate.com/id/2149593/, and the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homework.
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