A FATHER BEMOANS, "MY DAUGHTER’S HOMEWORK IS KILLING ME"

“What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week?”

 

Karl Taro Greenfeld’s provocative article in The Atlantic recently really hammers home the problem in this country of overcompensation in many school districts. As education in the US tries to keep up with global competition, the trend toward more homework seems to be heading us in the wrong direction. Greenfeld notes:

It turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more. Why pile on the homework if it doesn’t make even a testable difference, and in fact may be harmful?

The irony is that some countries where the school systems are held up as models for our schools have been going in the opposite direction of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing narrower curricula built to encourage deeper understanding rather than broader coverage.

Certainly food for thought as well as ammunition for parents who want to advocate for children who are losing a large part of their precious childhoods to busywork every night. Check out the full article.