Parents to District: Teachers Assign Too Much Homework

Many parents in believe their children’s teachers are assigning too much homework.

That was a message they sent Superintendent Joseph Farley recently at a seminar on the subject. Parents, particularly of advanced students at the middle-school level, complained about the inordinate amount of homework.

After hearing question after question about too much homework during the Q&A session of the seminar, presented by the Capistrano Unified Council of Parent-Teacher-Student Associations last week, Farley asked the 150-person audience how many of the parents feel their children are over-burdened with homework. One-third of the hands went up.

“Homework is meant to reinforce—not teach, but reinforce—what the students learn in the classroom,” said Julie Hatchel, assistant superintendent of education services.

The district has a formal homework policy, Hatchel said. It’s something of a mathematical equation: Students should have 10 minutes of homework times their grade level, plus 10 additional minutes. So a fifth-grader would have one hour of homework. Only students in advanced placement classes, which are designed to be college-level courses, deviate from this.

“It’s not busy-work, and it’s not meant to be punitive,” Hatchel said. In general, homework should not contribute more than 30 percent to a student’s grade.

The district recognizes that students have lives outside of school—scouting, athletics, doctors’ appointments, church activities and the like, Hatchel said. The key is to keep everything in balance.

But many parents told the panel their children’s after-school lives are out of whack, especially because of the enormous amount of homework.

“I’m in the health-care profession. I see the kids who are banging their heads and getting ulcers,” said one mom. “I don’t think the system is allowing what you’re telling us.”

The mom, who did not identify herself, said her eighth-grade son has one hour of math homework alone. He usually falls asleep past 11 p.m. and cannot participate in sports, all because of homework.

“This is something we need to discuss as a district,” Farley told the audience. A district spokesman did not return a reporter's messages for an update since the meeting.

A father suggested, and the panel agreed, that parents need to let their children take responsibility for their homework, reaping the consequences if they don’t get it done. “You have to have the courage to let the children face the consequences. Let them fail for the teachers. It’s not a reflection on the parents.”

Tim Reece, principal at in Laguna Niguel, said middle school is a good time for parents to allow their children to learn some tough lessons. That way, they’ll have good study and homework habits for high school, when their grades count most for getting into college.

In preparing to serve on a the panel of homework experts, Patrick Harris, a counselor at , took a close look at how the United States' educational model compares with those of other countries. He looked at numbers provided by Programme for International Student Assessment, which keeps tabs on 65 educational systems across the world.

In many countries, especially the Asian countries, it is extremely difficult to get into a good university, Harris said. Students return from a day at school, then promptly turn around and head off to a “cram school” for hours and hours of homework and studying.

“There are higher suicide rates in [top-rated] PISA countries,” Harris said. By the time the students make it to college, they are burned out. They may be able to cite by rote numerous facts, but their ingenuity is sapped.

American students, on the other hand, tend to blossom in college, Harris said. They’re known for their creativity and risk-taking. Those are the traits that will keep the United States strong despite the lackluster results on standardized testing when compared with the rest of the world.

In some ways, we may be picking up the world’s bad habits, Harris said. Cram schools are starting to crop up in the United States. Additionally, the pressure for students to get into the “right” college is taking its toll. He says he’s seeing more and more depressed students.

“Our response as a country, as families, [is to think] we have to work harder. The result tends to be this anxiety and fear,” he said. And parents don’t necessarily relieve the pressure. “We feel our children will fail, and if our children fail, we feel we fail.”