When I was in high school, I took seven or eight classes each year, and I was in a gifted and talented magnet program that sent students to the top colleges and universities in the U.S. In order to keep us competitive with high-achieving students across the country, our workload was in many ways accelerated--which meant for most of us hours and hours of homework every night. I fought endless battles with my parents over the many, many math problems I had to solve each night, the lab reports I had to write to prepare for college (where, BTW, I never had to write a lab report as extensive as those I wrote in high school), the essays in Spanish and French, and the extensive reading for all my humanities and social science courses. I grew depressed because of my workload, and my parents, schoolteachers themselves, instituted mental health days, where they occasionally would write me a note so I could stay home from school and just chill--and in a couple of cases use the day to catch up on all my homework.

These days it's not just high school students with too much homework. Elementary school students, too, are bearing the brunt of the high-stakes testing industry. A recent study from Duke University says all this homework doesn't actually help young students do better on national tests. (Secondary students do benefit from regular homework assignments, although not, I imagine, from an avalanche of them.) The Evening Standard reports on the study and some UK teachers' reactions to it:

Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said she was not surprised by the results.

She said: "Children get extremely tired mentally and physically at school. Then they have to come home and do more work on top of that. It's counterproductive.

"While we're making six, seven and eight-year-olds do extra work, in some countries they wouldn't even have started formal schooling."

But David Fann, head of Sherwood and Broughton primaries in Preston, insists that homework does improve achievement.

He told the Times Educational Supplement: "Reading books at home, or doing half a dozen spellings, is an essential part of primary education.

"Without that process, a lot of children wouldn't have acquired confidence in their literacy and numeracy skills."

At present, the Government recommends that a Year Five pupil (ages nine and ten), should spend an hour a week on homework.

However, it is not uncommon for pupils in Year Five and Year Six (ages ten and 11) to be set two or three hours a week.

Last month, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for homework to be scrapped at primary school because it puts children under too much stress.

If you're looking to build a case against homework, and especially if you're looking for overwhelming anecdotal evidence against homework, your first stop should be Stop Homework, a blog by Sarah Bennett, co-author of the book The Case Against Homework. For example, she shares the story of an honors student who earned mostly As and an occasional B, but who dropped out of high school in his junior year. His story:

I was a bright student. I was quick to learn. And, I still passed all my tests. A’s. Maybe the occasional B. I paid attention in class. I took in the knowledge. And, I gave that knowledge right back to them when tested. Typically you would think that my test scores would show competency and success. I understood what I was taught without a doubt. Yet I failed four courses! Because I wouldn’t (no, because I couldn’t!!!) do my homework. It was too much. Way too much. Years and years of excessive homework took its toll on me. I was tired. I was fatigued. I was beat. And I dropped out.

The system turned a successful, smart kid into a worn out dropout.

Definitely go check out Bennett's blog. It's an eye-opener. I especially enjoyed the entries by Fed-Up Mom, who in one entry disabuses readers of common myths about homework. In responding to an apparently common response from schools that "A lot of our parents want more homework!" she writes,

This used to slow me down, but increasingly, I see it as a red herring. The bottom line is that nothing a parent says makes the slightest difference in how a public school is run. Parents don’t make policy. While it may be true that some parents want more homework, the school has no way to know whether they’re in the majority, and they make no effort to find out. And if some parents want more homework and others want none, how about an official opt-out policy?

I found that if I complained to the teacher and/or principal I could always get a deal for my child. One of the best-kept secrets at our school is that the homework is negotiable. But the negotiations are very unpleasant and had to start all over again every time my daughter got another teacher.

(Want to know more about The Case Against Homework? You can read a review of it at Teachers College Record. If you're not a subscriber, you can see the entire text at equip.)

A year ago, The New York Times reported on a student who managed to get the homework load reduced for students at his school. The article presented both sides in the debate over homework. An excerpt:

One faction of parents approves. But another complains that homework erodes childhood, leads to nightly squabbles and is responsible for ills like obesity and depression. The annual fall harvest of education books bring titles like “The Case Against Homework,” “The End of Homework” and “The Homework Myth,” which corroborate the argument of homework’s detractors. Advocates of severely limiting homework like to cite a letter to parents last September from the principal of Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park, Calif., declaring that one hour a night is more than enough for 9- and 10-year-olds.

“Large amounts of homework stifle motivation, diminish a child’s love of learning, turn reading into a chore, negatively affect the quality of family time, diminish creativity, and turn learning into drudgery,” the principal, David Ackerman, wrote.

What often gets lost in the debate is some common sense and some distinctions that need to be made for the children, courses and schools involved. One hour a night may be too much for a third grader, but not enough for a high-school junior taking three college-level classes. The demand for homework in a class of lagging readers from a neighborhood where parents may not be schooled enough to help or where the children may be frying burgers part time could be different than at a prep school where students shoot for the Ivies and parents are well educated.

Those who would virtually banish homework lose track of a reality pointed out by Eric Grossman, Stuyvesant’s assistant principal for English who has seniors read long novels like “Moby Dick.”

“That’s not something we can do in school in 40-minute chunks each day — and discuss,” he said. “One of the overarching goals in our department is to have students become lifelong independent readers.”

Over at the Region 19 Board of Education Gazette, the Caretaker dissects the differences between a 2007 survey on homework by Harris Interactive and the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education's interpretation of the report. The Caretaker writes,

CABE's framing of the results as supportive of homework practice is pure disinformation, inaccurate, and deceiving to CT Board members.

[...]

What CABE implies as does the CT State Board of Education is that homework is a silver bullet to success in school, that it is not the discrepancies in income and the quality of education in ghetto schools that is the problem but the laziness of students and a largely poor and uneducated minority population whose belief[s] (largely the result of state sponsored brain-washing) are far more important than the scientific research.

This myth is sold so successfully that most Americans believe that lazy parents and students are the cause of all educational ills and that it is the lack of homework and not quality that ails public education.

What are your thoughts?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.