Daria Doering

Entire article, with reference to Parents United for Sane Homework:

Homework overload? Many schools equate more with better, but some are easing the

By Stephanie Dunnewind

Seattle Times staff reporter

William Seek, 12, panicked about the overwhelming homework he faced before starting seventh grade at Sequoia Junior High School in Kent.

His fears turned out to be unfounded, as this year the school took the novel step of reining in homework with a new schoolwide policy that requires 15 minutes of homework — and no more — in every class.

With six classes, that adds up to 1-½ hours a night, as opposed to previous years, when teachers of core classes such as English and math handed out up to an hour each, said Principal Chris Bigelow.

“It’s a really reasonable amount because it’s limited,” said William’s mom, Cheryl Seek, who also has a ninth-grade daughter, Krystal, 15. “When they come home, they still have time to do other things. We have time to sit down and have a meal together.”

Unlike Sequoia, many schools still equate more with better when it comes to homework, despite research to the contrary. National polls find most parents say children have the right amount — or not enough — homework, but talk to a group of parents and complaints about excessive homework are common.

“We looked at studies over the summer and found students don’t need any more than 15 minutes a night per class,” Bigelow said. “If it’s more than that, kids have a tendency to zone out.”

Common guidelines, advocated by the national PTA and others, recommend 10 minutes of homework per grade level each night.

“If those guidelines are followed, it leads to a balance so kids have time for other activities,” said Harris Cooper, a University of Missouri-Columbia psychology professor and author of “The Battle Over Homework.”

“Kids learn important life skills in other types of activities like sports. Homework shouldn’t crowd those out.”

But according to many parents, it does. Many teachers also require 20 to 30 minutes of reading (tracked in logs), in addition to other homework.

One mother, whose sixth-grade son attends TOPS, an alternative Seattle K-8 school, said some days her son starts homework when he gets off the bus and works until bedtime with only a break for dinner.

A week of homework might include math assignments, 30 spelling words with definitions, writing several pages in a journal, reading for a couple of hours and maybe an essay.

While her son is resigned to the load now, he ended some nights at the beginning of school in tears. “At 9:30 p.m., he’d say, ‘I’m too tired, I can’t do it.’ I’d tell him to just go to bed but he’d say, ‘I can’t; it’s due tomorrow.’ ”

Not like the ’70s

While some surveys have found an increase in the amount of homework, perhaps the most dramatic change is how ubiquitous it is. In 1984, a third of 9-year-olds reported having no assigned homework; by 2000, only one in 10 fourth-graders didn’t get homework, according to the National Center of Education Statistics.

Homework is “more difficult and more consistent now than it was 20 years ago,” said John Carroll, a teacher at Stevens Elementary School in Seattle who assigns 20 minutes of task work and 20 minutes of reading each night to his second-graders. “When I was in elementary school in the 1970s, we virtually never had homework.”

Nationally, four out of 10 fourth-graders spent half an hour or less on homework each night, according to 2000 statistics from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Three out of 10 spent one hour.

In 1983, following the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” which cited America’s lack of homework as a main cause in students’ poor academic performance compared with other countries, Seattle Public Schools adopted a lengthy policy that requires teachers to give homework but sets time limits by grade level.

Those minimum/maximum guidelines include: 5 to 10 minutes a day for kindergarten through second grade (for a maximum of 40 minutes a week); 10 to 20 minutes a day for grades three and four (40 to 80 minutes a week); and 20 to 40 minutes a day for grades five and six (160 minutes a week). At the high-school level, students are expected to spend at least two hours; honor students may spend more time.

However, “I can tell you lots of schools go way beyond this,” said district spokeswoman Lynn Steinberg.

She compared homework guidelines to the district’s academic standards. “The district sets standards but how specific schools reach those standards is left in their hands,” she explained. “If students are able to do way more, that’s a good thing. We encourage teachers to go beyond that.”

Blame the WASL

Carroll, for one, attributes the homework push to higher performance expectations. The district, for example, expects almost all its students to pass the WASL reading test, something unheard of three decades ago.

Indeed, “in order to reach those (standardized test) goals, we need to have kids do a lot more work,” Carroll said.

However, Cooper, a nationally recognized homework expert who examined the results of more than 120 research studies said, “It’s not a good idea to pile hours of homework on a second-grader with the idea it will improve test scores because it won’t.”

While homework does boost grades and test scores for middle- and high-school students, “studies have not found a relationship between the amount of homework elementary-school students do and their achievement level,” Cooper said.

“However, that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t do homework,” he said. Short, simple assignments in the lower grades help students establish good study habits and time-management skills and let parents show a positive attitude toward education, he noted.

Critics, however, contend even that assumption hasn’t been proven. In fact, asking children to sit down with regular homework at early ages may be developmentally inappropriate and therefore counterproductive, argue Etta Kralovec and John Buell in “The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children and Limits Learning.”

“Many of us would question whether fighting with our children for 12 years about homework could possibly foster good habits,” they write.

With much homework, “what kids are learning is to work a lot on something that is not relevant to their life,” contends Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author of “The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap.”

What’s sacrificed

Even if children who spent lots of time on homework did score better on standardized tests, Rosenfeld wonders what’s sacrificed in the process. “Imagination and creativity take down time when nothing is happening except time for reflection,” he said.

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan research center, believes it’s a popular misconception kids have too much homework. “Accept homework,” he advises parents in an article posted on the center’s Web site. “It’s essential.”

Odle Middle School in Bellevue instituted a schoolwide policy this year requiring students to turn in homework on time if they want full credit. Partial credit may be earned for day-late work.

“Teachers say they have more ‘A’ grades than they’ve ever had because kids know homework is due tomorrow — and they’re doing it,” said Principal Kenneth Lyon. “We want kids to be responsible for their own learning.”

However, many parents wish kids had more time for family and just being kids. “An 11-year-old should have time to play with the neighborhood kids,” said the TOPS mom, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions at school. “I’m afraid to let him do that until he’s got his homework done, and by that time it’s too late.”

On a path to Harvard

While many working parents feel family time is crunched by homework, Cooper says educators feel pressured by the high expectations of professional parents who ask for more homework because they believe it will increase their child’s competitiveness.

“We sometimes hear that kids need more homework,” said Steve Watson, a 30-year teaching veteran at Wilder Elementary School teacher in Woodinville. “Parents will say ‘Give something to keep them busy.’ ”

“The mentality is, ‘The more homework my child gets, the better he’ll do at Harvard,’ ” Rosenfeld said. “There’s no evidence to support that. It’s not all linear, as in ‘If my child works hard at age 7, he’ll work hard at age 18.’ We’re telling kids to run faster and faster to get to this goal, but they might also just burn out.”

Fear of sounding like they don’t care about their child’s education might clam up some parents, said Daria Doering, a San Diego mother of three who started a group called Parents United for Sane Homework.

“Teachers say all parents want lots of homework, but when I talked to other parents, everyone was upset,” said Doering, whose children are ages 13, 10 and 7.

“Nothing is more precious than time with your children,” she said. “Parents don’t want to spend it fighting over homework.”

When the Bernards Township Public School District in New Jersey surveyed parents of middle- and high-school students last year, two-thirds said homework often affects family time.

Parents were unanimously opposed to homework given over holidays, yet three-quarters of middle-school parents said it was assigned anyway over weekends and breaks.

While parents supported homework as necessary to reinforce daily learning, they acknowledged the toll on children: Seven out of 10 cited some impact on sleep and eight out of 10 said their child experienced homework stress.

For parents who complain kids don’t have enough time for homework, educators point to statistics showing children still spend a lot more time in front of the TV than studying. More than half of fourth-graders watch three hours or more a day, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Parents as ghostwriters

A recent Wall Street Journal article claimed that parental assistance with homework “has taken on new dimensions in recent years as the work has piled up.”

In his research, when Cooper asked parents if they helped children do homework in order to get it done faster, “many admitted they do that,” he said.

A trend toward “enrichment” projects rather than task work may also contribute. Doering calls them “parent ghostwriter homework,” noting that “what is really being shown here is the parent’s ability to do fancy stuff on their computer or drawing table.

“If these assignments are acknowledged as ‘family homework,’ they may be OK, but let’s at least get some intellectual honesty about what’s going on here.”

Angel Singh, whose children, Holly and Zack, are in third and fifth grades, respectively, at Seattle’s Sunset Elementary School, thinks it’s nice that teachers want parents to participate but says it’s hard when parents are busy.

For one project, for example, her son had to find a historic picture of a Seattle building on the Internet and then go downtown to take a picture of what that building looks like now for an interactive digital report. Given that he can’t drive or surf the Internet alone, all of that required her help.

Another project called for a papier-mâché doll of a historical figure as well as Internet research. She thinks it’s common for parents to help kids with reports, noting that teachers must be able to tell by the work’s improved quality.

While some parent help is expected on projects, it should still be mainly the child’s effort, educators insist. “We don’t want to grade parents’ work — even though some of them do a wonderful job,” said Beverlie Duff, principal of Daniel Elementary School in Kent.

Stephanie Dunnewind: sdunnewind@seattletimes.com.