Where's Daddy?

The new book, published by Stanford University Press, asserts that the amount of homework appears to have little, if anything, to do with scholastic achievement -- the latest in a growing number of studies that suggest homework alone doesn't make kids perform better.

LeTendre and Baker led a team of researchers who analyzed educational data collected in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades in more than 40 countries in 1994, as well as data from an identical study in 50 countries conducted five years later.

Virtually wherever they looked, the researchers found no correlation between the average amount of homework assigned in a country and academic achievement.

For example, teachers in many countries with the highest scoring students -- such as Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark -- gave little homework. At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average achievement scores -- Thailand, Greece and Iran -- have teachers who assign a great deal of homework, Baker noted.

U.S. teachers assigned more than two hours of math homework per week during the 1994-95 school year, compared with an hour in Japan. And while American teachers have been piling on homework beginning in the 1980s, Japanese teachers have been reducing the amount of after-school work for their students.

Neither the American nor the Japanese educational reforms of the 1980s seems to have affected general achievement levels in either country, the research team reported.

The Politics of Vacations

Gas prices remain out of sight, but a majority of Americans say they still plan to take a summer vacation this year -- a majority of Republicans, that is.

Nearly six in 10 Republicans -- 58 percent -- said they're going to take a vacation away from home this summer, compared to 48 percent of all self-described Democrats, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Overall, 53 percent of all adults told the survey interviewers they plan to take a vacation this year, 6 percentage points fewer than the proportion who say they normally head off for a little rest and relaxation during the summer.

A total of 1,002 randomly selected adults were interviewed June 2-5 for this survey. Margin of sampling error for the overall results was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

morinr@washpost.com