Too Much

Every now and then a study comes along whose chief interest lies in how peculiarly askew its findings seem to be from the common perception of things. Sometimes, of course, the "surprising new study" itself turns out to be off in some way. But if the data are fundamentally sound, then what you really want to know is why sensible people hold such a contrary view.

That is certainly the question raised by a Brookings Institution report released last month showing that the amount of time kids devote to homework has not, in fact, significantly increased over the last two decades. Researchers took a closer look at an earlier study that had been widely interpreted, when it was first published in 2000, as proof that the homework monster was growing, and insatiable. A Time magazine cover article ("The Homework Ate My Family") spawned a minigenre of trend stories, all peopled by pale, exhausted kids and bewildered boomer parents whose own homework memories seemed to encompass only felt puppets and shoe-box dioramas. But the new report points out that while the amount of time schoolchildren 12 and under devoted to study at home did indeed grow between 1981 and 1997, the increase was small: an average of 23 minutes per week. Moreover, 20 percent fewer children between the ages of 9 and 12 were doing homework at all in 1997 than in 1981. And high-school students spent no more time on homework than they did in previous decades.

So why do so many parents seem to think otherwise? One answer is that the real increase in homework that has been documented is among younger children. In 1981, for instance, one-third of 6- to 8-year-olds had some homework; one-half did in the late 90's. Since parents are more likely to have to supervise a first or second grader doing homework than an older child, the earlier launching of a homework regimen might feel like a disproportionate increase in the parental workload. And since children 6 to 8 are the ones we particularly like to think of as engaged in unstructured play -- we imagine them riding bikes in the honeyed light of waning afternoons, even when what they might well be doing, in the absence of homework, is watching TV -- homework for them seems like one of those heavy-handed incursions on the freedom of childhood.

But the bigger answer, I suspect, is that the parents we tend to hear from in the press, at school-board meetings and in Internet chat groups, the parents with elaborated, developmentally savvy critiques of standards and curriculums, are parents whose children really are experiencing a time crunch. These children go to elite private schools or to demanding public ones where the competitive pressures are such that they either really do have hours of homework each night or take hours finishing it because they (or their parents) are so anxious that it be done well. They come from the demographic that makes a cultural, almost a moral, ideal of enrolling children in soccer and oboe lessons and karate and ballet, and so their time really is at a premium. They are likely to have busy professional parents, oversubscribed themselves but with an investment in seeing their children produce book reports of a kind that teachers, counselors and, in time, college admissions boards will find impressive.

Behind the seeming contradictions of steady homework levels and the anti-homework backlash, in other words, is the reality of social class. In her new book, "Unequal Childhoods," Annette Lareau, a sociologist at Temple University, argues that middle- to upper-middle-class families today tend to practice a child-rearing strategy she calls "concerted cultivation," which involves, among other things, frequent interventions at school on behalf of your children, active (and often opinionated) monitoring of homework and the organizing of family time around children's extensive schedules of team sports, lessons and performances. (One of the more striking documented changes in how children spend their time is the increase in hours spent watching siblings perform.) Children in working-class and poor families, by contrast, are more likely to be raised in a spirit of "natural growth," meaning they spend less time in the company of adults like teachers and coaches and more with other children in the kind of self-directed, open-ended play for which affluent parents often profess nostalgia these days. The effects of these differing strategies -- which are not only a matter of resources but also of beliefs and habits -- are to reinforce class divisions, helping to prepare middle- and upper-middle-class children for life in the middle and upper classes by accustoming them to asking (and nagging and negotiating) for what they want, and giving them the sense of entitlement that comes from having so much of the family's life formatted around their activities. In this context, homework can seem like a burden because it interferes with other cultivating activities.

Anti-homework crusades are not new -- in 1901, for example, California passed a law abolishing homework for grades one through eight -- but they have usually been led by the same kinds of people, which is to say, elites. This might sound surprising: after all, critics of homework sometimes argue that it handicaps kids who don't have computers at home, or parents with enough education to help with assignments. But then again, it also tells those parents what their children are doing in school and gives them a way to help that may be less intimidating and more feasible than volunteering in classrooms -- the luxury of parents who don't have to punch a time clock -- or meeting with the principal.

In any case, homework, subject to the test of democracy, fares very well indeed. One of the more surprising revelations of the Brookings report is that 64 percent of parents surveyed in 2000 thought the amount of homework their kids got was "about right." And 25 percent actually wanted -- guess what? -- more homework.