Enough is enough

Illustration: Brendan Leach

Kids have always complained (and complained) about homework overload. But these days, parents are joining the fray. Take Peter Loffredo, a 52-year-old psychotherapist from Park Slope, whose nine-year-old son, Bennett, often ends up in tears as he struggles to finish his spelling, math or reading assignments—all of which take him an hour, on average, to complete. “Imagine if you had to spend 60 minutes on taxes every night,” says Loffredo. “Bennett rides the bus for an hour and then has to find time for dinner and a bath before going to bed—there’s no time for him to do much else besides hit the books. A playdate shoots the whole schedule.” Loffredo fears that Bennett’s missing out not only on social time but also on creative pursuits, like playing guitar. “The imaginative side of the learning process is being stinted,” he says.

Fed up, he recently put Bennett on the waiting list for the Brooklyn Free School—a Park Slope institution that doesn’t give its students compulsory homework assignments. Founded in 2004 by Alan Berger, a certified New York high school teacher and former assistant principal who became disenchanted with the way curricula were being designed, the school allows children to seek out knowledge on topics they’re curious about; each student has a personalized, self-directed learning experience.

Like Loffredo, a growing number of New Yorkers (including the 50-odd parents with children on the Brooklyn Free School’s waiting list), and educators and activists around the country, think homework loads have become way too burdensome in recent years. And they might be right, at least for the youngest of schoolchildren. According to social scientist Brian Gill, who conducted a 2003 study for the Rand Corporation that looked at how much work teachers have assigned over a 60-year period, while “trends in terms of time spent on homework have been remarkably stable, we did see an increase for kids between the ages of six and eight—because most of them weren’t getting any homework until recently.” Take-home assignments are now the norm for kindergartners, says Sara Bennett, coauthor of The Case Against Homework (out in paperback now); and sociologists Sandra Hofferth, Ph.D., at the University of Maryland, and John Sandberg, Ph.D., at the University of Michigan, learned that the proportion of six- to eight-year-olds who reported having regular homework climbed from 34 percent in 1981 to 64 percent in 2002.

Ostensibly, the reason educators are piling it on is to help make kids smarter, but where’s the proof? “Researchers have failed to find a correlation between doing homework, or doing more of it, and standard measures of achievement for kids in elementary school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth. And Bennett notes that while completing a teacher’s assignments might help a child get a better course grade, it won’t necessarily make him a more analytical thinker. “Many kids who are graded on whether they do what teachers have asked flounder in college,” she says. “There isn’t anyone there telling them exactly how to pace themselves when writing a paper.”

So, short of sending your kids to one of the city’s few alternative schools, what’s a mom or dad to do? “Ask other parents to join you in discussing the homework problem with the principal,” says Kohn. “And at home, remember that your obligation is to look out for your child, not to be an enforcer of the school’s agenda.” You could also write a note to the teacher if there’s too much to get done in one night, as Loffredo has done. But the psychotherapist dad has also taken a more quirky approach to overcoming his son’s homework blues, using what’s called a paradoxical therapy technique. “I created an imaginary character—played by me—named Evil Peter, who wanted to keep Bennett from finishing his homework at all costs,” says Loffredo. “To thwart his villainous nemesis, Bennett whipped through his exercises.” And his father scores an A+ in creative problem-solving.