Homework Critics vs. Me

I messed up in my Nov. 21 column, "Weak Case Against Homework," and failed to include comments from the authors of one of the books I was criticizing. I am way overdue for an appointment with the ophthalmologist, so my failing eyes missed their e-mail, waiting patiently in my inbox between a rant about George Bush and an appeal for help from a rich Nigerian widow.

I asked the authors Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, whose book is "The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It," if they would let me make up for it debating the issue in a future column. They said sure, perhaps not realizing that anything I write about homework gets a ton of readers, so it was they who were doing me a favor. Kalish, star magazine journalist and Brooklyn mom, took on the assignment.

At my request, she starts with a good long critique of my column, and then we debate this issues. It turns out we agree on much more than I thought we would:

Nancy: Thanks for this opportunity to respond.

Do kids really get much more homework today than they did in the 1980s? Some data indicates they do, some indicates they don't -- or that they're not getting that much more. But when we started researching our book, we had no trouble finding many children across the country in every kind of school who were overburdened with many times the amount of homework in the University of Michigan study you mention. For example, we detail a 2006 survey of 1,300 students at a public high school in Needham, Mass., which found that 18 percent were doing four hours of homework each night and 10 percent were doing more than five hours. This is a large, child-reported survey (not the parent-reported kind that you object to), it's more recent than the stats you do cite, and yet you don't mention it.

But more important, let's say that for the sake of argument that only 10 percent of America's children suffer from homework overload (although we believe it's much more). Isn't it still a problem for that 10 percent, for all the reasons listed by the many psychologists, educators and health experts whom we interviewed? If "only" 10 percent of America's children suffered from depression or diabetes, wouldn't it still be worth addressing? We found many such children and they are definitely suffering and losing their love of school and learning. Just because homework overload might not affect every child doesn't make it any less serious.

In addition, you completely overlook the fact that Harris Cooper of Duke University, who did reviews of homework research in 2001 and 2006 and is pro-homework, has concluded that even in high school, where there is some correlation between homework and academic success, the benefits start to decline after two hours each night. As he told me, "It is not going to improve a ninth-grader's achievement to do 2.5 hours of homework per night versus 1.5 hours." I'm sure the Needham students would be dismayed to hear that. In addition, Cooper told us that most of the correlation in high school reflects how well a student does on the unit test -- it's not any measure of long-term learning. In order to be completely fair, you should include Cooper's data and interview him.

We are definitely not pro-TV, and our example of a kid cuddling on the couch with a parent while watching a program was to emphasize how important it is to have some quality parent-child time. It's not that it's necessarily better than reading history, but that too much history reading (as well as tons of other assignments) is crowding out time kids need to spend with their parents, even if it's doing something seemingly mindless like watching television together. You're lucky you had the chance to watch "Dawson's Creek" with your kid. Many parents don't.

Chances are, when your daughter looks back on those years, she'll remember how great it was to have that time with her dad, perhaps even more valuable than the learning about the rise of organized labor in the 19th century (what would she say?). Of course, I acknowledge that many kids are watching way too much TV -- and some would watch too much even if they had no homework at all. But I believe that many kids overdose on TV because after hours at their desks, they are too mentally and physically exhausted to play actively outside. So, like their overworked parents, these "homework potatoes" collapse on the couch in front of the tube. We heard this over and over from the kids themselves and quote many of them in the book.

We also take pains to point out that too much television and too much homework cause exactly the same problems in kids: inactivity and obesity. Parents should be aware of this so that at the very least, they can encourage their kids to play actively before sitting down to study. Instead of TV watching, we advocate reading as the number one educational activity again and again in our book. But sadly, reading for pleasure often falls victim to homework overload. A 2006 national Scholastic/Yankelovich poll found that reading for pleasure declines sharply after age 8 -- and the number one reason given by parents was homework, not television. As one eighth-grader told me, "After I'm done [with homework], the only thing I want to do is watch TV or go on the computer. I don't feel like reading because that's a majority of my homework. All I want to do is relax and rest my brain."

Perhaps if kids weren't so depleted by homework, they might not feel the need to spend what little free time is left zoning out in front of a screen.

Another disturbing fact you fail to mention is how little training teachers get when it comes to homework. Only one teacher in hundreds that we surveyed said she had ever taken a class specifically on homework. If you look into this, as we did, you'll find that most teacher training programs, even at top universities such as Harvard, don't include such courses. As a result, Harris Cooper told me, teachers are mostly unaware of the research concerning homework and are "winging it." To us, this calls into question much of what teachers are assigning, no matter how many minutes it takes. Don't you think that parents should know about this lack of training?