I. Hate. Homework.

Who doesn't hate homework? Parents and students alike? I can't tell you how many discussions I've had with friends and colleagues regarding the travails we suffer due to the loads of homework that students (and their parents) are leveled with. I'll never forget how shocked I was when my oldest started coming home with homework every night in pre-kindergarten. It was only a quick sheet a night, but I guess it was just preparing us for kindergarten, when they really started to sock it to us. The dual curriculum is hard enough for small children, especially considering the long hours that makes up a Yeshiva school day. But I really have come to resent the enormous outlay of my time that doing homework with three school-age kids unfortunately demands.

Let me tell you, the last thing I want to force my kids to do after they have sat in a classroom for most of the daylight hours is sit down and do yet more schoolwork. Especially those children that resist it, and for whom homework becomes an oppositional issue (who doesn't have at least one of those?). And my take on the matter has always been that I have never seen an appreciable difference in how much learning my kids are able to glean from the teachers that give large homework loads vs. those teachers who are more sparing in their giving of assignments.

Well, turns out that studies back up that assertion. From Time magazine:

• According to a 2004 national survey of 2,900 American children conducted by the University of Michigan, the amount of time spent on homework is up 51% since 1981.

• Most of that increase reflects bigger loads for little kids. An academic study found that whereas students ages 6 to 8 did an average of 52 min. of homework a week in 1981, they were toiling 128 min. weekly by 1997. And that's before No Child Left Behind kicked in. An admittedly less scientific poll of parents conducted this year for AOL and the Associated Press found that elementary school students were averaging 78 min. a night.

• The onslaught comes despite the fact that an exhaustive review by the nation's top homework scholar, Duke University's Harris Cooper, concluded that homework does not measurably improve academic achievement for kids in grade school. That's right: all the sweat and tears do not make Johnny a better reader or mathematician.

• Too much homework brings diminishing returns. Cooper's analysis of dozens of studies found that kids who do some homework in middle and high school score somewhat better on standardized tests, but doing more than 60 to 90 min. a night in middle school and more than 2 hr. in high school is associated with, gulp, lower scores.

Great. All of this struggling for negligible returns. Truthfully, I would like to see these studies get into the hands of my children's teachers and administrators. Because it's one thing if I'm torturing my children to do homework and getting some gains. But to take away their precious free time and make the home a battleground over their right to decompress after a long day in class - all for no measurable improvement? Can someone please explain it to me??

I don't even have any objection to unconventional homework assignments. You want me to sit down with my son and research some interesting topic for science class, from resources he doesn't have access to in school? Great. You want my daughter to pick a book from a list and read 20 minutes a night of it? Awesome. You expect my son to count how many green beans I prepared for supper and then ask him to calculate a fraction based how many get eaten vs. how many I served? Cool. Those take into account that different aspects of learning are found interesting by different students - and it also differentiates the methods of learning used in school from those used at home. But the endless math problems, the copying and recopying of spelling lists, and the constant memorization of English translation of Hebrew passages is just unimaginative and frankly, painful.

Anyone up for a call for homework reform in our schools?