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More Homework Doesn't Necessarily Mean Smarter Students. Memorization and regurgitation, a growing number of teachers are trying something different. They're eschewing homework, arguing that it doesn't work, and that out-of-school time should be spent doing other things, while in-school time could be made more productive. Though this makes some parents uncomfortable, the teachers claim excellent results. What's interesting is that the no homework approach isn't new at all; at several times in history people have suggested that piling on students with extra work after school isn't very affective.
By Patricia Smith
March 27, 2007
A day of school, an hour or two on the soccer field, 30 minutes of piano practice, and suddenly it’s dinner time. Your child is tired, grumpy, and overwhelmed at the prospect of several hours of reading and geometry still to come. You know you are about to enter a war zone with homework at the heart of the battle.
Does your child have too much homework? Is homework only busy work? Will homework make your child smarter? The answers: yes, yes, and probably not. At least according to Denise Clark Pope, director of the Stanford University School of Education Stressed Out Students (S.O.S.) project.
“The value of homework is overrated,” says Pope, author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. Based on her studies, Pope believes overburdened students are more prone to cheating, depression, unhealthy study habits, and a distorted view of success.
The campaign against homework is garnering popularity. Administrators in wealthy communities with high-achieving students appear to be the first to heed the message. Recently, David Ackerman, principal at Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park, California, made national news when he advised his staff to limit homework to reading assignments only.
Despite this growing movement, in most communities homework isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The U.S. Department of Education offers parental advice on winning the nightly homework wars.
You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain?
However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.
But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in her 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?
Homework haterzWhether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”
Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?
Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework, The Homework Myth, and The Case Against Homework and the film Race to Nowhere make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.
One Canadian couple recently took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won aruling that exempted their two children from all homework.
So what's the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?
From the homework laboratoriesThe good news: In an effort to answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting hundreds of studies over the past several decades. The bad news? Despite scores of studies, definitive conclusions remain a matter of some debate.
“A few studies can always be found to buttress whatever position is desired, while the counter-evidence is ignored,” writes the nation’s top homework scholar, Harris Cooper, in his 2006 homework meta-study at Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
How much is too much?If you’re not ready to make a national case out of your child’s nightly worksheets, it’s worth knowing that she may be complaining for good reason. For better or worse, homework is on the rise in the United States. A survey done through the University of Michigan found that by the 2002-'03 school year, students ages 6 to 17 were doing twice as much homework as in 1981-'82. The homework ante has been upped as school administrators respond to increasing pressure for their students to perform better on state-mandated tests.
So how can you know if your child is doing the right amount? Who came up with that 10-minutes-per-grade rule that’s become the accepted norm? (And if that is the magic number, why is my neighbor’s 8-year-old daughter doing two-plus hours a night?)