Building a hate for learning

Is homework bad for kids? Author Nancy Kalish tells Salon why she believes it inhibits learning, strains familes and stunts social development.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Rebecca Traister, Life

Sept. 5, 2006 | Homework. For many of us, the word still sounds like a drag. Nights spent hunched over algebra books, memorizing vocab lists and filling out graph-paper lab reports while the smell of burning fall leaves and a cool October breeze teased just outside our bedroom window. Homework was spinach: We did it because it was good for us, because it made us smarter, because it taught us how to study, because it prepared us for college, and because if we didn't do it we'd get detention.

But this fall, as students across the country load their JanSports with textbooks and start down the road to lower-back pain, a group of parents and educators are desperately trying to send a message that maybe nights spent cuddling the periodic table aren't so fortifying after all. This month, two books about homework and its discontents are on shelves: "The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn.

To hear these homework protesters tell it, recent years have seen an almost comical inflation of the work kids are bringing home from school. Kindergartners and first graders, those squirmy squirts who can barely make it through "Blues Clues," are being asked to do 30 minutes to an hour of studying a night, while middle and high schoolers are forced to slog through four and five and six hours of the stuff. And some of the assignments sound like something out of a Fellini movie: translating arithmetic problems into alphanumeric code and plotting them on a graph to look like Abraham Lincoln, building popsicle-stick replicas of the Pentagon and baking cakes in the shape of Roman ruins.

Salon recently spoke by phone to Nancy Kalish, coauthor of "The Case Against Homework." This Brooklyn, N.Y., journalist and mother of one said her eyes were opened to the scourge of homework when her daughter hit middle school. Kalish teamed with former legal aid attorney and mother of two Sara Bennett to research and write the book, which argues that homework is actually diminishing children's educational experience, turning kids off learning, putting strains on families, turning students into "homework potatoes" and stunting cognitive and social development.

Is this the kind of book that the left and the right are likely to respond to differently?

Well, Time magazine ran a story about this issue last week and it was positive; the New York Post reviewed the book and it was negative. Homework has gone through ups and downs throughout history. In the early 1900s it was banned for a period because it was thought to be bad for kids' health to make them stay inside. The most recent step-up came in 1983, when there was a study called "A Nation at Risk" that specifically called for more homework. It was the first time that kids' achievement in school had been linked to the state of the global economy. Now, it has been proven that there is zero correlation between kids' academic achievement and the economy. At Penn State there are two guys [David Baker and Gerald LeTendre] who did research and discovered many countries that give lots of homework and do worse. The Japanese actually do less homework than we do. It's B.S. that there's a connection. But the belief continues to be put forth by business people and politicians, and of course by our lovely president, that basically it's all the kids' fault and we're not as competitive as countries who give kids more homework; that's why people think homework is such a necessary thing, that if we don't give homework, we're undermining our entire country.

If that's the socioeconomic angle, how does it play out in family attitudes?

It filters down to the parents, along with how hypercompetitive and tough it is to get our kids into college. In New York City and other places it's tough to get them into preschool, so there is an attitude that more is better. Parents mistakenly assume that a lot of homework shows that a school is rigorous, and if the school is rigorous it's going to give their kids an edge. I was one of those parents.

What changed your mind?

Well, I was very lucky. Because now they start overloading kids in kindergarten, dealing with an hour's work each night. My daughter didn't get overloaded until middle school, but then suddenly she was doing four hours a night, which really was excessive.

What were the ill effects?

Her love of learning started to plummet. Her grades didn't dip, but her enjoyment of the whole process went downhill. At the time, I was doing assignments for parenting magazines about how to get your kids to knuckle down and do homework. I just assumed it was a good thing, and assumed schools knew what they were doing or they wouldn't put us through it. Then I met Sara Bennett, my coauthor, and I started to research it and found out the research doesn't back this up at all. All my assumptions were challenged. We've been going along with it because we assume homework is good for our kids. It turns out that it's not.

Do you believe there is no correlation between academic success and homework?

I had an eye-opening interview with Harris Cooper at Duke University. He looked at 180 studies on homework and found that there was only a very tiny correlation between homework and achievement in elementary school, measured either in grades or on achievement tests; a minor correlation in middle school; and still only a moderate correlation in high school. And after kids started doing more than two hours a night, [even the moderate correlation] plummeted. It's very counterintuitive. It's hard to get parents and teachers to accept; you think more has to be better. Not true.

The other thing Harris Cooper told me is that teachers are not trained in homework. They're winging it. I interviewed [Baker and LeTendre] and we interviewed people from Stanford and Harvard. No one has a course specifically on homework. We surveyed hundreds and hundreds of teachers, and only one claimed ever to have taken a course on homework. They are taught general "purposes" of homework: that it reinforces lessons, builds study skills. But teachers are not taught how to make assignments. We learned that only 35 percent of schools have written homework policies. Teachers are trying their very best. They want what's best for the kids, but they really don't have the tools that they need.

Next page: "When a kid can't face doing his homework without his mother by his side, that's not building independence"