In My Teenagers' Homework Ate Their Free Time, an article written by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, a mother wishes her children actually had time to watch TV. In responding to a question about homework vs. TV, she wrote:
Although homework can be valuable for reinforcing and applying learned material, I think it has spun out of control. In theory, there is a fixed amount of time kids are expected to spend on homework, depending on their grade in school. This works okay, except that it can be tricky for teachers to anticipate how much time an assignment will take different students to complete.
I want my children to enjoy learning, not be dragged through it kicking and resisting because it consumes all their time and energy. How can we tell kids in health class that they need to live balanced lives in order to be healthy and then rob them of that balance with hours of homework?
Maybe students should have the option of choosing a class without homework where they are only admitted if they plan to work hard and pay attention during the entire class. If they start slacking off, they could be dropped from this class. With all of the choices out there, why not this one?
Once work goes home, the teacher loses control of it anyway. Who actually does the projects? Who writes the papers? If the homework is drill and practice, how many students copy someone else's paper? How many hours do teachers have to spend grading and recording homework that might be someone else's work? How many hours do teachers spend checking and asking for make up homework and late papers?
Another report, "How Much Homework is Too Much?" by Marian Wilde on GreatSchools.net is worth taking the time to read. It discusses research studies, parent and teacher views, and the history of homework. We can also see in one study how Americans compare to others.
International Comparisons
How do American kids fare when compared to students in other countries? Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle-schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong.
One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: "That really flummoxes people because they say, 'Doesn't doing more homework mean getting better scores?' The answer quite simply is no."
It seems the homework debate has been going on for a long time. I think it boils down to the fact that some kids take more time to complete homework assignments than others. For these children and their parents, life can be a struggle.