Closing the Book on Homework: Enhancing Public Education and Freeing Family Time.

CLOSING THE BOOK ON HOMEWORK: ENHANCING PUBLIC EDUCATION AND FREEING FAMILY TIME

By John Buell. Temple University Press, 2004.

Dogs, eat your hearts out: if John Buell gets his way, there won't be any more homework to snack on. Professor, journalist and homework reform advocate, Buell first sprang to semi-national attention when his 2000 book The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning drew attention during a controversy over a New Jersey school district's decision to limit the amount of homework teachers can assign. The wordy subtitle of that book neatly summarizes Buell's basic orientation toward (or, really, against) homework, as reiterated in his current book.

This is not to say that Closing the Book on Homework is a mere rehash, however: the arguments have been expanded and refined, and some interesting new angles developed and explored. One chapter, for example, examines the parallels and connections between the growing call for more and harder homework, and trends in the corporate workplace and the world of global capitalism.

The heart of the book remains Buell's cogent and clear analysis of the problems with homework. At its root, Buell's argument goes something like this: time that students spend at home on pages of worksheets and spelling drills is time that, by definition, cannot be spent in imaginative play, social activities, reading for the child's own pleasure, or any of a dozen other categories of vital formative experiences. One would hope that such a drastic reordering of a child's early interior life would only be mounted on the basis of convincing evidence that this trade-off is of significant educational benefit to the student.

One would be wrong, at least as Buell reads the research. His chapter reviewing the various arguments pro homework quotes Harris Cooper's 1989 meta-study of controlled trials of homework's effect on academic achievement: "There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary school students."

This is no surprise for anyone who has encountered a nine-year-old reduced in tears of frustration and rage by page upon page of math drills, or a poorly explained assignment to outline a research project that is incomprehensible to child and parent alike. After all, as Buell explains, the idea that homework--and lots of it--is an unalloyed good depends on something like the following conception of the process: a teacher explains something (well) during a class day; the students practice it at school with the teacher's help; and the resulting homework assignment is both challenging enough that it allows the child to practice the new skill and basic enough that it can be completed with little or no adult guidance. The hoped-for result would be a deepening of the student's familiarity and ease with the new concept.

But something happens at the moment that homework is conceived of as something other than practice--the moment a teacher decides (or is required) to "grade" the homework for anything other than completeness, say. Buell posits several scenarios in which students turn in homework with errors and asks what the student and the teacher are likely to get out of the experience. From the teacher's point of view, does the student lack the skills required, or was the homework slightly too hard and the student's parents slightly too unhelpful or unskilled to clarify the assignment for the student?

Without the opportunity to observe and interact with students while they are working on an assignment, the final output of that assignment is of limited use to the teacher, at the same time that making an exhaustive examination of it for correctness requires a massive time investment. Buell imagines a "young student who turns in disorganized and incomplete answers in a social-science essay" and wonders how the teacher can possibly determine what the problem was: "did [the student] fail to comprehend the reading ... or [have] difficulty understanding the question or in outlining and organizing a response?" What is it, in other words, that this student needs? The teacher can learn little to nothing of the answer to this question from a page of error-riddled homework.

No use to the teacher, of no proved academic benefit to the students--like war, then, what exactly is homework good for?

Of course, improved academic performance is not the only goal of some homework advocates (or at least it often ceases being one when the lack of "research-based" evidence supporting their position is pointed out). The favored backup argument is that long hours of frustrating drudgery help children develop certain important--if dreary-sounding--character traits: responsibility, persistence, self-discipline and direction, and the like. Life is pain, in other words, and the sooner our children learn that, the sooner they'll wipe those silly smiles off their faces. Buell has a lot of fun taking on the argument that students who never have an unassigned moment to themselves will somehow cultivate self-discipline, or that presenting students and workers with a picture of unending work can inspire anything other than resistance and rebellion. Perhaps it is not surprising, though, that homework advocates are attracted to the idea of character education, since both are similarly unsupported by research, and since there are good intuitive reasons to distrust both.

Deftly disposing of the idea that students need homework to be successful, Buell recognizes that the process of coming up with an alternative vision of schooling that does not include homework is likely to be a long and hard-fought one. One of his arguments is that it is an issue with room for compromise across seemingly disparate beliefs, if parents can be convinced that decreasing the amount of homework their children must complete increases the amount of time for family interaction, customs and activities that are in line with and reinforce that particular family's values and beliefs. Buell wonders whether parents who have more time with their children, who feel less imposed upon by the values and goals of school systems, might feel less inclined to fight to control those values and goals, and this is his most intriguing idea. Would public education become less of a battleground if we lessened the imposition of school-assigned work on non-school time? It's an idea worth exploring, and I'll get right to it--as soon as I finish my homework.