The Politics of Homework - school reform

Humanist, Nov, 2000 by John Buell

My father went to medical school during the Depression on $4,000 in gold his grandfather had stashed under a bed many years before. During my childhood, I was constantly admonished that the only way to avoid poverty was to "study hard." Etched as these words are in my memory, I doubt they make sound public policy. I am inclined to reverse my father's advice.

Most Americans will not enjoy jobs with adequate salaries and benefits--let alone the opportunity to deploy skills and creativity--unless some of us are willing to study less and raise a little more hell. Monitoring our kids' long hours over their homework is a zero-sum strategy that works for fewer and fewer people. And paradoxically, it may keep us and them from organizing on behalf of reforms needed to extend and broaden opportunities for all.

The United States has a long history of regarding school reform as the key to social change. In a nation often resistant to other forms of economic redistribution, schools are thought to level the playing field. Nonetheless, previous ventures in school reform promised far more than they delivered. Sending young graduates into workplaces not receptive to their intellect or idealism often doesn't change those institutions. It can just as easily elicit growing elite demands that schools heal themselves and learn some "real world" lessons.

The current emphasis on school failures and school reform is at least an implicit recognition that all is not well in this "booming" economy. However conservative the tenor of our times may appear, discontent lurks below the surface and events like the demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, this past spring against the World Trade Organization may not be an aberration. Whether sincere or in an effort to contain more radical demands, many leaders in business and politics now invoke educational reform as the way to ease the transition to a new global economy. But their faith in education as a panacea is unlikely to be justified. Worse still, much of the education reform they promote may in fact make the lives of many poor and working class citizens even more burdensome.

On an individual level, it is, of course, hard to quarrel with my father's advice. Citizens with the most formal education seem to occupy the upper echelons of law, medicine, engineering, computer science, and business. Even in the face of general declines in working-class incomes over the last two decades, these professional classes--termed symbolic analysts by Clinton's former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich--have done quite well. But will improving our educational system by itself help more of us become engineers, lawyers, doctors, and computer programmers? And what social and economic price will we pay for some of the most fashionable reforms?

Increasing numbers of students are now facing batteries of new standardized tests, and both parents and teachers feel the pressure. In our underfunded and highly inegalitarian public school system, many educators are now pursuing school reform on the cheap. They turn to an old remedy: ratcheting up the homework. Over the last decade and a half, children as young as nine to eleven have seen a nearly 40 percent increase in homework. Not only do these requirements create enormous psychological stresses on both children and families but there is little evidence that increased homework demands--even in well-funded districts--pay off.

Studies of homework vary all over the place, even as to what they mean by success. Is it the ability to pass a particular test or to retain core elements of knowledge over long periods of time or to remain committed to life-long learning? In much of the prevalent public discussion of this topic, all these elements easily merge, but such substitutability has hardly been demonstrated.

Other problems also abound. Summarizing hundreds of studies, Harris Cooper, a close student of the subject, reports:

   The conclusions of past reviewers of homework research show extraordinary
   variability. Even in regard to specific areas of application such as within
   different subject areas, grades or student ability levels, the reviews
   often directly contradict one another.

Even where a positive correlation is established, it is not clear whether homework makes good, well-motivated students or whether privileged and well-motivated students do homework.

Conventional wisdom also holds that the computerization of our economy will open up more opportunities for those whose schooling affords increased skills. Plausible as this claim may seem, neither past experience nor the most recent labor market projections bear it out. New York Times reporter Richard Rothstein reported recently that "employers will hire more than three times as many cashiers as engineers. They will need more than twice as many food counter workers ... than all the systems analysts, computer engineers, mathematicians, and database administrators combined." Rothstein went on to point out that we are already turning out more college graduates than any foreseeable vacancies in these professional fields.