Too much homework?

I don't recall doing much homework until I was in high school. My grade school kids already have quite a bit to do, although I wouldn't say it has reached an excessive level. It is however clear that school is more serious than when I was a kid. In elementary school they didn't really know what to do with me so I spent a lot of time reading in the library. For some reason our library had all six volumes of Gibbon's History and Decline of the Roman Empire and Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I could read pretty well but unfortunately no one tried to teach me any advanced math.

Atlantic Monthly: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week

... whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.

... My daughter has the misfortune of living through a period of peak homework.

It turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more. Why pile on the homework if it doesn’t make even a testable difference, and in fact may be harmful?

“It’s a response to this whole globalized, competitive process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming Homework. “You get parents demanding their children get more homework because their children are competing against the whole world.”

The irony is that some countries where the school systems are held up as models for our schools have been going in the opposite direction of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing narrower curricula built to encourage deeper understanding rather than broader coverage. ...