November/December 2000

The Homework Wars

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to talk about key issues in schools and school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these forums.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on September 20, 2000. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction by Dottie Engler, director of the Askwith Education Forums
Remarks of Etta Kralovec, co-author of The End of Homework
Remarks of John Buell, co-author of The End of Homework
Remarks of Kim Marshall, principal of the Mather School
Remarks of Janine Bempechat, HGSE associate professor
Discussion moderated by Emily Rooney
Question and answer session

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INTRODUCTION BY DOTTIE ENGLER

Good evening. My name is Dottie Engler, and I'm director of the Askwith Education Forums here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This is the first in our series of forums for the year. Over the year we'll be bringing you about 40 more programs, ranging from Diane Ravitch and Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Fuentes to conversations about teachers' unions, the latest findings in mind/brain education, and gender issues. And they are all unified by being relevant to something that's happening here at HGSE.

Tonight's topic is "The Homework Wars." There isn't any question but that homework is a provocative issue. Within schools and classrooms all over the country, we are challenged by increasing expectations of higher levels of achievement. But what does that mean for the expectations of what children and parents do at home?

Some of my fondest memories of my children's schooling were of homework and projects lovingly done, where my children owned the learning process and took great pride in their work--projects that expanded their horizons and utilized different skills; projects that took them out into the community, their neighborhoods, the woodlands, their libraries; projects that sometimes involved and occupied the whole family; projects and reports that will never be thrown away.

I also recall less fondly homework that seemed to require inordinate parent involvement: too much stuff, too many trips to the crafts store, too much expense, too much competition built into it; homework that was frustrating or incredibly boring, didn't seem well thought out, was meant as busy-work, or even ended up creating some hostility between me and my children.

Homework is a complicated issue, and tonight we have wonderful people who are going to help us sort it out. Etta Kralovec has her doctorate in philosophy and education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a teacher for over 12 years, and professor of education and director of teacher education at the College of the Atlantic for 11 years. She's currently vice president for learning with Training and Development Corporation in Maine.

John Buell has his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts. He has taught at the College of the Atlantic and is a former associate editor of The Progressive. His books include Democracy by Other Means and Sustainable Democracy.

Together, Etta and John have written The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning--a nice equivocal title.

Also on the panel is Janine Bempechat, an Associate Professor here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Janine's areas of research and teaching are achievement motivation and social and moral development in children and young adults. She is the author of two books: Against the Odds: How At-Risk Students Exceed Expectations, and her very new Getting Back on Track: Educating Our Children for the Future.

I want to just give you a little background about Janine, because I know her more personally than I do the other panelists. Here at the Ed School, during orientation, all the professors are asked to offer about 30 seconds' worth of information about who they are and the courses they teach. Janine stood up and said, "And I believe children need to suffer more." Of course the whole crowd laughed. I was sitting in the back, where one student leaned over to another and said, "She must be kidding." And I said, "Oh, no. She's dead serious." That gives you a little background about Janine, which will become clear, I think, as the evening goes on.

Our fourth panelist is Kim Marshall. He's principal of the Mather School, a public school in Boston. Kim received his master's degree here and is known in Boston and beyond as an exemplary principal who loves his work and his faculty and students. He's really worked at Mather to create a community of learners, and by that he means everybody: teachers, students, and parents. He, along with his faculty and students, deserved praise and attention last year for being one of the schools in the state with the most significant improvement in their MCAS scores--no small achievement.

Later on, you'll meet Emily Rooney, who is the moderator of Greater Boston. I hope you've all had the pleasure of watching Emily. For now, I'd like to welcome Etta, who will speak first.

ETTA KRALOVEC

The College of the Atlantic, where John and I were colleagues, was started by Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty. We like to think of ourselves as "Harvard North." So I sort of feel that, even though we're not directly connected with Harvard, College of the Atlantic considers itself a part of the Harvard family.

Our thesis, that homework punishes poor kids for being poor, that it intrudes into precious family time and parents' educational agendas with their own children, that it interferes with child development, and that there are serious questions about its relation to learning, is difficult on first hearing. But please bear with us tonight.

The research that led us into this book began in the early 1990s. Maine's Department of Education had commissioned me to conduct a two-year study of seven alternative schools in the state designed to retrieve high school dropouts. The state had us collect lots of quantitative data on the schools and the students, which we did by surveying and interviewing program directors, school administrators, local school board members, and business and community leaders. We tracked economic changes in the communities and looked at the dropout rate in relation to these changes.

I, however, had become very interested in qualitative research methodologies, having studied for a short time with Frederick Erickson at Penn, and having been deeply influenced by the work of Dorothy Smith. I was interested in finding out the meanings that students gave to their schooling histories.

At the time, John and I were colleagues at College of the Atlantic in Maine. We worked closely with my research associates, structuring an ethnographic interview instrument designed to elicit from the students their own meanings and interpretations of their schooling experiences.

We interviewed over 45 students. In answer to the question about when they knew they weren't going to make it through school, these students told tales of the hardships of life for the rural poor, citing problems of health care, transportation, and homework. My research associate and I could not believe that these students all cited homework as a factor that led to their leaving school.

Now none of the alternative schools assigned homework, because the directors all knew that these kids couldn't and wouldn't do it. I had never read that homework was one of those schooling practices that actually pushed kids out of school. I spoke at various conferences and professional meetings about our research, mentioning the homework finding. But I focused, really, on the methodology for studying kids and schooling.

After my prepared talk, professionals in the audience launched into their own problems with completing homework with their own children. Now here were mostly education professors, struggling to help organize their home lives so that they could support their own children's homework assignments.

Four years ago, I spoke about my research at a Harvard round table. When I was done, the Harvard students began recounting their problems with homework. Albeit different in nature from my high school dropouts in Maine, these Harvard students told tales of trying to do their best, doing it all, getting little sleep, and having to cheat to finish their homework after what were often 15-hour days of school, sports, and music.

The most troubling aspect of our work has been confronting the scanty, inconclusive evidence that homework claims are based on. All solid research on homework contains caveats about the need for improved teaching, the problems of methodology and causality, and the problems with correlational studies in education. Homework research is plagued by what I like to call "the fishing expedition problem." If researchers go looking for links between homework and academic achievement, they are likely to find something. In our own work, we did not go fishing for students' attitudes toward homework. In fact, we did what Janine calls for throughout her work: we actually talked to kids. Now I'm in the process of conducting similar interviews with students from around New England who have dropped out of school and are now in Job Corps centers in Maine.

Another aspect of our work that has been troubling is the assumption that if you question homework, you lack a commitment to academic rigor, you are cowtowing to students' inherent laziness and are willing to turn our children over to more hours of TV. In fact, there are no doubt many of you in the audience thinking those very thoughts as I speak. However, as we move into an age of greater accountability in education, with increased focus on test scores, homework actually becomes increasingly problematic.

In the last 25 years there has been a revolution in what we know about teaching and learning. Harvard's own Howard Gardner, for example, laid the conceptual groundwork for our understanding that schools focus on a very small number of the multiple intelligences that we all possess, only to send kids home with more of the same. Work calling on linguistic and numerical intelligence leaves other forms of intelligences starved for expression.

Homework simply doesn't make pedagogical sense in this brave new constructivist world of teaching and learning. When work goes home, teachers have little control over who does the work. Teachers wonder, did the student do their own work? Did they exchange answers with friends over the phone? This black hole leaves teachers unable to scaffold new knowledge for students, and unaware of each student's true educational progress.

Now we often hear, how did an educational philosopher and a political economist come to co-author a book on homework, and what's the global economy got to do with homework? As colleagues, John and I shared a deep commitment to social justice issues and the roles that schools can play in the achievement of greater equality of opportunity in this country. John's wife, Susan, served for many years on the local school board.

So the three of us spent many hundreds of hours discussing local school policy and debating local school issues. We all share a strong belief that, all too often, schooling issues are examined in a vacuum, as if schools were somehow unconnected to the larger political, social, and economic forces that shape history.

Now I'd like to turn the microphone over to John so that he can share his perspective.

JOHN BUELL

One of my mentors, Sam Bowles, convinced me that schools can expand equality of economic opportunity, but they can also entrench privilege. The actual course depends on politics. Early 20th-century struggles over tracking and rote instruction reflected corporate attempts to prepare workers for hierarchical and narrowly specialized work places. Likewise, the salience of homework today reflects not merely legitimate pedagogical concerns, but a set of battles over how much time parents and children have, and who makes these determinations.

The late British historian E.P. Thompson pointed out that traditionally, work was a part of community life. Workers came and went through the day, trading gossip and following a pace of their own. But with the emergence of corporate capitalism, owners were no longer willing to tolerate simply milling about. Workers lost control of their time at work. They then demanded that their working hours be limited, so that they could enjoy time unstructured outside the workplace.

Underlying both mainstream political parties' education positions today there is a kind of Field of Dreams optimism. If children and parents are asked to do more, they can. And if schools succeed, young graduates will surely get good jobs. I'm skeptical of both aspects of this scenario. In the last decade alone, white middle-income working hours have increased nearly 250 hours a year, with African American families seeing an increase double that. The typical suburban mom now spends about three times as many hours in errands in the car as a decade ago.

In addition, corporate America fails to utilize and nurture the talents of many employees. In the early 1980s, General Motors hoped to catch Japan by installing the smart robots that Japan had pioneered. When General Motors introduced the technology, to much fanfare, it omitted one crucial detail: it neglected to teach the workers how to use the robots. The factory became one of the least productive in the United States. Sadly, there are many analogous examples today.

A few firms do pioneering work in the development of high-performance work places, where even bank tellers and wait staff are given a voice in designing the product and fashioning job ladders, and time off is regarded as crucial to workers' morale, creativity, and productivity. But most businesses are not interested in sharing power and are too obsessed with the quarterly bottom line to make the long-term commitment to worker development. They will do so only when workers have the power to demand it.

Innovative schools can graduate students who are willing to pose broad problems and engage in cooperative problem-solving. But school boards and policy elites will hardly encourage such teaching when workers must be employed in hierarchical settings with long work hours.

Unfortunately, faith in tougher standards and more homework as the key to our future may be hard to shake. Like an addictive drug, the long hours of work can contribute to the sense that hard work is the way the world is and always will be.

Some of our global competitors, at least their labor unions, are groaning about time pressures on both work and children. Labor and progressive activists in the 1920s and 1930s in this country were admonished when they demanded an eight-hour day. Echoes of an earlier Protestant ethic, with its conviction that work and wealth are outer manifestations of inner grace, can be heard throughout the homework debate.

I'd like to have you listen to another voice, a 15-year-old boy interviewed in Talk Magazine:

"My sister, who is in second grade, is at one of those hot girls' schools and has two hours of homework a night. She cries about it, and I have to help her, because my parents are out a lot. And what is it all for? To go to Harvard or Yale, or maybe Bowdoin, if you aren't so lucky? To work your butt off at some law firm just to become another super-parent, raising super-kids?"

As a parent of a Bowdoin sophomore, I try not to take exception to that line.

Our parents were able to live more satisfying lives because unions and other progressive activists limited the hours of work and homework. Work places became more and not less productive. Children can and will study hard under well-trained teachers in a safe and well-equipped environment. But both students and parents are more likely to engage in fulfilling work and enjoy a high quality of life when each also knows that schools and work places do not and cannot demand work without end.

KIM MARSHALL

What are the factors that widen the achievement gap? On my list, which is on its 15th draft now, parent involvement is on the list. Homework is not. But there are ways of making parent involvement work for an effective urban school, things that can help narrow the gap, and I want to talk a little bit about those.

But first I have a story about my own father. I can remember very clearly in the fifth grade, I had a horrendous homework assignment, the kind that Dottie talked about. And I put it off and put it off and put it off and put it off and finally went to bed with the intention of getting up at about 4:00 and doing this damn thing on Russia or something like that. And I got up, and there on my desk was the completed project. And who had done it? My father had done it--a very, very touching story of parent involvement there. But what's wrong with this picture? I didn't do it! He did it. I just copied it over into my own handwriting.

Does everybody have the kind of father that I had? Not at all. So we have an equity problem here. Homework that is dependent upon a highly educated and little-sleeping parent is not good homework. This is homework that widens the gap. So what schools like ours--and we're an inner-city Boston public school--have to think about constantly are ways of framing homework so that it doesn't widen the gap, so that it perhaps narrows the gap, or so that at least it approaches zero efficiency, does no harm.

So parent-neutral homework--this sounds a little bit heretical. Because, you know, the best homework is supposed to involve the family. And yet I'm arguing that any homework that is dependent upon the family being involved is going to widen the gap and is not good homework. So we're looking for homework that's really neutral, that the kids can do on their own. And then there's the question of parents motivating their kids to do it. And I think in the suburbs this may become an oppressive thing, where parents are on their kids all the time, and they're not having any fun. They're not watching enough television, and so forth.

But in our setting, the issue is getting parents involved and getting them to actually motivate their kids to do it. And we have a lot of kids who come in without their homework. One of our first-grade teachers came up with a very thoughtful comment a couple of years ago: "What's the kindest thing that we can do to a kid that comes in without their homework?" And I think the kindest thing we can do is to keep them in from recess, make them accountable, build up their own ability, if they're not getting it from their parents. That's the kindest thing we can do, because homework is absolutely going to be a reality for all those kids, all the way through school. They have to learn how to do it alone. But underlying what I'm saying is that there is a certain skepticism about whether homework really does any good at all. So, why are the Boston Public Schools forcing kids to do all this homework?

Well, I have four reasons why. And these are probably trashed pretty effectively in the book, but I'm going to give them to you anyway, as a public school principal. First of all, I do think homework teaches responsibility. It is an act of remembering and being responsible for something that someone asks you to do, which has some workplace implications. The second thing is that it tells parents what's going on in the school. Third, it's a communication link between teachers and parents, who may not be in the school, and that's important. Fourth, and perhaps most important because we're getting into symbolism here, is that I think homework is a powerful signal to many parents, especially parents of poor children, that the school means business, that it's serious. Now I tell you, I've run into this again and again and again. Any softening on homework is taken as a signal by parents that the school isn't serious about its business, that it doesn't have high expectations. We can mock this, yet I think it's a very strong reality, and it won't change.

Let me tell you about two attempts to get parents more involved in their children's education, because that is the bottom line. A couple of years ago we got very excited about the idea--and this came from our parent group--about giving parents a preview of the curriculum that was coming up the next week. So we sent this preview out on the back of our Friday parent letter, faithfully, every single week. But when we took a survey of parents in our school, what do you think we found? Many weren't using it. This is a gap widener. It wasn't helping at all.

Now let me tell you about another idea that one of our first-grade teachers, Kate Roth, came up with. Every week she sends a newsletter home. Part of the newsletter has a section called "Ask Me." "Ask Me" is a set of specific questions that the parent asks the kid. It prompts the parent to ask the child questions about what they've been covering in the curriculum: "Write your five spelling words that I will dictate to you." "What season is it?" and so forth.

I think this is the best homework idea I've ever seen, because the parent becomes an instrument, an extension of the teacher. They are prompted to know what it is that their kids are doing. The kid shows off to the parent. This is a neat idea, and we're playing around with it this year, and we're encouraging all teachers at all grade levels to do this.

So let me just wrap up with where I've sort of come out on homework: homework should be useful, it should be well aligned with the curriculum, and the kids should be able to do it alone. They should be autonomous and independent, which is a good thing to learn. But we've also got to do what's within the control of the school.

JANINE BEMPECHAT

I am a researcher of students' and parents' beliefs about schooling. I also have two school-age children. My son is in the first grade, and my daughter is in the fourth grade at the public school near where we live. So I know a little something about homework, both from the theoretical and research end of things and from the day-to-day "Did you do your homework?" end of things.

The increasing discussions about the quantity of homework for which students should be responsible demonstrate to me the degree to which our commitment to education is simultaneously unwavering and maddeningly ambivalent. There is no doubt that education is a top priority in most families, both urban and suburban. However, as a society we do not tend to value children who place a high value on intellectual pursuits. Rather, we laud those students who are popular, who are athletic, who play a musical instrument, and--oh, by the way--are doing passable work in school. These are the "well-rounded" children.

For fear of undermining other students' self-esteem, we have become increasingly reluctant to publicly recognize one student's academic excellence, say, by naming her valedictorian. In some communities in Massachusetts, there are no valedictorians or there are 20 valedictorians. Yet we think nothing of parading the winning quarterback down Main Street.

I have to tell you that I hate self-esteem. I hate self-esteem and what it has become. It has taken on a life of its own, one never imagined by those who study it and research it. There is a growing view that if children have high self-esteem, then they will do well in school, that you need high self-esteem in order to be high-achieving, when in fact the opposite is true. Beth Delamater, one of our doctoral students, has been studying the importance of students experiencing failure in order to increase their self-esteem. Delamater has found that students actually need to struggle in order to develop qualities that all teachers like to see in the classroom.

We have no one to blame but ourselves when we find that the national discourse on homework has embraced extreme positions. Doing homework is either a punishment of Dickensian proportions or is a task that students can do or not do, or their parents can tell them they can do or not do it, as they wish. All of us, parents and teachers alike, have managed to communicate these views to our children.

We've come to this in part because we have adopted a very narrow and shortsighted view of the benefits of homework. Buoyed by the educational research that Kim discussed, conducted by Harris Cooper, we know that homework is of little educational benefit in the elementary school years. And so many educators have come to believe that children's social and emotional development is ill served by the stress that homework imposes.

What these well-intentioned individuals are overlooking is the fact that the assignment of homework over time serves to foster the kinds of qualities that are critical to learning: persistence, diligence, and the ability to delay gratification. These become increasingly necessary features of school success as students graduate to higher levels of scholarship in middle school, high school, and beyond. In fact, Harris Cooper has written, "All students should do homework." Homework can have many beneficial effects on young children. It can help them develop good study habits so that they're ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help children recognize that learning can occur at home, as well as at school.

Homework can foster independent learning and responsibility. Homework can give parents an opportunity to see what is going on in school and express positive attitudes toward achievement. But homework can also have negative effects. It can lead to boredom with school work, since all school activities remain interesting only for so long. Homework can deny children access to leisure activities that also teach important life skills.

Parents can get too involved in their children's homework; for example, they can confuse children by using different instructional techniques than the teacher uses. Yet the question for educators and parents is not which list of effects--the positive or negative--is correct. Any of these effects can happen. To avoid the negative effects, homework policies should give individual schools and teachers some flexibility, to take into account the unique needs and circumstances of their students.

Boston school superintendent Thomas Payzant has stated--and he is absolutely correct--that "the primary responsibility of parents is in communicating to their children the value of homework and in ensuring that their children complete their assignments." We do no one, least of all our children, any favors when we try to protect them from the kinds of stresses that teachers deem appropriate at different age levels.

And, in fact, there is a way in which administering homework to children, giving kids something to do every night, can make them feel smart. Mary Ann Christie, who is graduating [from HGSE] this year, is conducting an ethnographic study in an urban high school in Boston with 10th graders in which she is asking them what they think it takes to become intelligent. And one of the things they have told her is homework. They believe very strongly that when their teachers give them homework, it's because the teachers want them to get smarter. They see for themselves the value in having homework.

All of us--parents, teachers, students themselves--are all partners in our children's achievement. We all need to take appropriate responsibility for the educational challenges that lie ahead. And these are challenges that are formidable indeed. The reality is that we are living through a period of massive underachievement in our nation's schools. We cannot simultaneously bewail the dismal performance of American students on every successive international comparison of academic achievement and complain that we give our children too much homework.

Our children are well-rounded enough. It's time they hit the books

DISCUSSION MODERATED BY EMILY ROONEY

Thank you all. When I first picked up this book--I don't know how many of you have had the chance to look at it--The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, I thought, "Huh. I don't know about this." As the parent of a teenager, I'm often grateful for the amount of work my daughter is burdened with, because she's lazy, and I figure if she's got something to do and there's a goal and a deadline, maybe she'll do it. Of course she doesn't. She waits until the last minute. But I started looking through this book and realized that I identified with more of what you're talking about than I realized I would.

Number one is what a priority homework becomes. I don't eat dinner with my child anymore--not that she wants to--but she's off doing homework. And it becomes something that, to use Etta and John's description, is sort of exclusive almost to everything else, to the point where it's hard to squeeze in everything else--if you've got the driving lessons and the drum lessons and a lot of other things.

On the other hand, I started thinking that there are a lot of things in the book that seemed like a lot of whining to me. I saw a little girl walking down the street, carrying a backpack in Newton. Literally, she was stooped over. The backpack probably weighed as much as her--about 67 pounds. But this is also by choice. A lot of kids bring all their books home. They're too lazy to go to their lockers or they don't want to fidget with the locker combinations, and it's easier just to bring the stuff back and forth.

So I'd like to start a little debate here tonight. One of the things that seemed to prompt the biggest response was that homework somehow gives kids a sense of responsibility that they wouldn't ordinarily have. And I want to ask Etta to respond to that. Do you think that's true or false?

Etta Kralovec: Well, I think even Harris Cooper, in his study, says that there have been no studies done that conclusively prove that homework does all those things that we think it does--teach self-discipline, teach responsibility, help kids reflect. We believe that that's true. Now where that belief comes from would be something that we all might want to consider, and to try to understand where our deep-seated belief in its value comes from. But there's really no evidence to support it. As one researcher quipped, "Taking a cold shower every day teaches self-discipline probably better than doing homework."

Emily Rooney: What about the issue of learning in school versus learning at home? Are we dragging stuff home that could be done at school? Practicing doing math problems is one thing, but having kids read chapter and verse--couldn't we be accomplishing some of that during school hours

Kim Marshall: Well, we must accomplish it during school hours. I think in-school factors are the factors that really make a difference. Homework is sort of icing, I would say. It doesn't hurt if it's done skillfully and well, along the lines that Janine talked about.

Emily Rooney: John, you touched on the socioeconomic discrepancies, that it's unfair, in a sense, to burden some of the poorer socioeconomic groups with the same amount of homework as you might a wealthier community. Why is that? What makes the difference

John Buell: Homework is, by definition, work students do at home. And I think one would want to begin by taking a look at the homes that some of these students are forced to go home to. Recent statistics out of California, for instance, indicate that something like 10 percent of the housing is sub-building code. So the idea that a student is going to be able to retire to a quiet, secure place--put aside questions of access to computers or whatever--and do the homework, I think is really ludicrous, frankly

Emily Rooney: Janine, respond to that.

Janine Bempechat: How do they compete on a level playing field? I think we make a terrible mistake when we hold some students to higher standards than others because of social class or race or ethnicity. I think we make a terrible mistake when we hold lower standards for poor children because we feel sorry for the circumstances under which they are growing up.

Sister Elaine, who is with us tonight, has been working with us for several years in our work in the Catholic schools of Boston. These are the schools in which we have spent time with children, where children are far from wealthy, far from growing up in homes where they can have anything they want, where they have modem hook-ups, etc. And yet, these are schools where personnel are adamant that every child will learn, that no child will fail. And that's not because they will promote them so that their self-esteem won't get affected. It's because they will work with them, and work with them, and work with them, and work with them until they understand. These are students not only in Boston, but across the nation, who do exceptionally well. And, in fact, it is the very poorest children who exceed everyone's expectations in Catholic schools across the nation.

Now, we can have a Talmudic debate about Catholic schools, but nonetheless it troubles me. It troubles me deeply to hear the argument that because some children are poor, it's unfair to give them homework, partly because of what I said and partly also because where does that leave us? Okay, so nobody gets homework. That seems a little self-serving to me.

John Buell: Well, I think Janine is misconstruing our point if she thinks we're arguing for a lower standard for children from a certain socioeconomic status. The question is how do you meet the standards? You know, whatever reasonable standards and expectations you have, do you want to meet them primarily through the use of homework as an educational strategy, or would you be more interested in trying a range of other techniques that might include smaller class size, more intensive sorts of professional development for teachers, better pre-school programs, or a variety of things like that?

And, I'm disturbed by the tendency to just separate out education from the larger socioeconomic context. If we're really serious about homework, then we've got to start being more serious about the conditions under which the parents are able to supervise or monitor that homework.

Emily Rooney: To that point, Kim, as you know, there are a number of schools in Boston that have gone to a longer school day. And in that school day they have after-school programs that are partly recreational. But a good chunk of that time is spent doing the work that might have been assigned to them during the day, so that by the time they get home at night, between 6:00 and 7:00, that work is done. They're free to do other things with the family: have a normal dinner, even watch some TV--what's wrong with that? Why don't more schools do that?

Kim Marshall: Well, I think we do try to do that. We had an after-school program that did something very much like that last year. But that's an example of what I was referring to earlier: parent-neutral homework, something that's educationally useful and reinforces the responsibility and the symbolic aspects of it, but that gets done without the gap-widening tendency that homework has had.

I think what we're dealing with here is the inexorable tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. You know, the kids come in at this level, and the gap widens as you go through, for a variety of reasons, including entering characteristics and things that happen during the day. What I'm saying is that educators need to be clever and responsible about not doing things that widen the gap and try to do things, as much as possible, that narrow it. If there is a good example of giving kids a safe climate where they can do their homework without their parents or with their parents, then I'm for it.

Etta Kralovec: Kim, you should sort of come clean here on the issue of why school days aren't longer, and why schools remain in the same kind of time schedules they've been in for years. I think there's a lot of pressure from teachers' unions not to mess with the length of the school day. I think there's a lot of pressure from the athletic programs to end the school day in time to get the sports teams out on the field. So I think there's some other stuff going on with the fact that we can't launch into a broader discussion about the school schedule.

But one of the things that we haven't talked about is the RAND study that looked at test scores around the United States in those states that had the greatest increases in the last six years. They did not find parent involvement to be a condition common to all school districts with higher achievement. They found pre-kindergarten instruction for kids, they found more teacher resources, and they found smaller class sizes to be the three greatest indicators of increased student achievement. Parent involvement wasn't on there, and neither was homework. But if you look at that list, it calls for a very expensive school reform program compared to more parents' involvement and increased homework time. So I think there's a whole political thing going on that leads us to say, increase homework because it's school reform on the cheap, and so we don't get in trouble with the unions.

Kim Marshall: Boston teachers don't object to a longer school day, but I think there's this issue of getting paid for the time. Attempts to expand the school day without appropriate compensation are stoutly resisted, and, I think, with good reason. I don't think anyone--athletic people, whoever--are against giving kids more time. And that is one of the proposals, I believe, that's on the table, although this is a very tough table we're negotiating at.

Etta Kralovec: Let's broaden this discussion. You know, parents have a responsibility. My job as a parent is, first and foremost, character education for my children, religious instruction for my children. I want to teach them to appreciate music; I want to teach them to appreciate art; I want to teach them how to cook the food of my ethnic background. That's not the agenda of the public school.

If I am the first teacher of my children, I want to set that agenda, and I want space in my life to do that. And I don't think that we have to narrow the discussion to a point where we can't include the parents' agenda. I'm waiting for the day when a school says, "Tell me what you want us to teach your child." I want to send a letter to the school that says, "Ask me these questions. I'm this child's parent." Because the communication is a one-way flow, from the public school to the parent. "You do this. You ask the kids these questions. You read this book." It's time for parents to say, "Wait a minute. We want you to do this." So there needs to be a two-way thing going on here. It's quite a narrow conversation.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Emily Rooney: Now, I'd like to take some questions from the audience.

Questioner: I wanted to ask Professor Buell . . . you were saying before that different alternatives besides homework can help us close the achievement gap, like smaller class size. But do all those things have to happen at the expense of homework? Can we do all those things and still give homework?

John Buell: The advocates of homework will say that we should do all of those things, but I think that one needs to recognize that there are limited resources, and parental time is one of those resources. In our book, we've also talked about the need for having independent time that students can spend, especially at the high school level. We're not calling for the abolition of all independent work. I think it's too easy to say that anyone who opposes the current homework norms is out to trash work itself, totally.

Questioner: I know there is a study that shows that high-achieving students actually get on the phone and study with each other. Is there anything wrong with that?

Etta Kralovec: We know now that learning is a social activity. And the more social the activity, actually, the better kids do. And they do really well in study groups. I think that what we're arguing for is that, yes, those activities are really important; yes, independent work is really important; yes, kids should work in groups. They should do it in the context of the school day, where they have equal access to educational resources and access to trained professional teachers who are, in fact, experts at teaching kids. We want to see that work done in the schoolhouse.

John Buell: I'd like to add a comment about libraries. I'm certainly a big fan of and believer in libraries and what they can contribute, but that's one part of the public sector in this country that has suffered from a rash of budget cuts at all levels. I can't speak to the Boston area, but in many communities, libraries are not open as long as they once were. That's a whole area where austerity is incredibly limiting the quality of educational opportunity.

Questioner: Are you opposed to homework, also, in the high school grades? If so, if kids aren't being asked to work on their own, how will they be able to perform in college?

Etta Kralovec: I think that independent research projects at the high level and long-term independent research projects are vitally important to an academic program for any student. But I think that we would like to see schools becoming a place of study, where kids actually work. If that work is meaningful pedagogically to that child, that research needs to be done in the school house, under the direction of a trained educator, and where the kids have equal access to educational resources.

When you send a research project home, you are sending it home, frankly, into a black hole. You have no idea where these kids are going to get their resources, you have no idea who's going to participate in that. Teachers need to oversee those research projects in a very close way so they can actually scaffold new learning for students.

Questioner: As a public school teacher in California and here in Boston, having been at two different types of schools--one that ended the school day at 1:30 where kids had an enormous amount of time and one where the school day ended at 3:30--I saw homework as fundamental. And I think as a teacher, obviously, I don't think we're talking about piling on tons and tons of homework. But I think it does teach responsibility. And as a teacher, you know the students who do their homework are far more responsible than the students who don't do their homework.

Etta Kralovec: But, you know, the interesting thing about that is that even researchers like Harris Cooper who are supporters of homework say that we don't know which is the causal agent there. We don't know whether it's actually helped. Maybe doing homework is just part of a good student's behavior. So it's really hard to decide which is causing which there. But the real question to me is about the fundamental nature of homework. If homework is fundamental, it really needs to be part of the daily process that the kids do at school. We want to make sure that they do it, and they do it right, don't we?

Questioner: It seems to me like there's been a big discussion about homework. There's been no discussion or any mention of the differentiation between good homework and bad homework. I've been to the education section of the bookstore, and there are probably as many books as there are opinions on the way things should be. It's so easy to say "no homework" and so easy to say, "You must be totally accountable." But there never seems to be any middle ground, and I think that's just so important.

Etta Kralovec: Well, I'd like to sort of separate that compound word, and I'd like to take the work, which is school work, and say yes, if it's good it needs to be done in school, it needs to be done under the guidance of a teacher. And the work that kids do at home ought to be work that is their own guided instruction that they're interested in; it's their parents' educational agendas for their kids.

Wouldn't it be nice for kids to clean up their bedrooms periodically? That would teach them a good sense of responsibility. So I think that our point is that the work of school needs to be done in the schoolhouse.