It's funny that you should note this item today. I'm on the shcool board of St. Francis de Sales Catholic School in Lake Zurich, Illinois and right now my secretary is mailing school parent's our (first ever) annual school satisfaction survey.

We haven't run this survey previously and so this year will provide a baseline but I fully expect to hear about the extent of the homework burden we impose on our kids. My daughter is a fifth grader and every night she averages homework in three subjects and over two hours in total.

It's one more disparity between the general public and those of us who have maintained an active role in the Church. We control not just the moral content of our childrens' education but the whole curriculum as well.

I suspect that Mr. Judd is right, that middle class parents will once again want it both ways:

* Don't burden my child with homework and challenging classes.
* Make sure my child is well educated.

It's another "less tax, more service" viewpoint.

I had a college professor say once that, "students are the only people willing to get less than their money's worth." Maybe it's parents too?

Parents are also a big problem when you want to hold their child back in order to aid their long-term education. You hear all sorts of reasons why they shouldn't be held back, but none of them have anything to do with academics. (They will no longer be with their friends tops the list)

If any mandate should stick it should be one that denies promotion to the next level until a student can read at the grade level he/she is in.

And what would you say about the overall education status of the white middle class?

jim:

Disgraceful, but it suits them:

http://mrsdutoit.com/Right/Nock/disadvantagespv.htm

Maybe it is just my being of a certain age, but does anyone else remember doing the amount of homework that I hear about the kids doing these days. I don't remember much beyond the occasional essay and set of math problems - and I'm talking high school. Do they not have study halls anymore?

Seeing how this works can be quite chilling. For some parents, it isn't so much that they don't care about marks as they believe that achievement and success just flow naturally from some mythical wholesome emotional state. The teacher's responsibility is not to fill empty heads with skills and knowledge or turn little savages into the civilized, but to guide their charges through it all with smiles and without stress. Woe betide the teacher of a child who is not happy.

They have no conception of the unhealthy power they are bestowing on their kids, who are in for a rough time in later years.

Rick T.

About the same as my son has. The difference is that I didn't have a full schedule of competing activities that my parents thought the teacher should understand took priority.

I'd like to point out that having a "rigorous curriculum" doesn't necessarily require "assigning homework," especially not 2 hours a night. I would very much like my daughters to be challenged at school.

But once my daughters are home, I hugely resent the homework they have to do. That's my time with them that it cuts into. It also cuts into their time to practice piano, play soccer and other sports, play chess, read, etc. There's more to life than school and homework.

Bret:

Anything that takes them away from soccer is a good thing.

Bret:

No offence, but do you really think homework cuts into your time with your kids? What are weekends for? You know, I resent the time spent at the office and mowing my lawn because it cuts into my time with my kids. Besides, if you have your children practicing piano, playing soccer and chess and reading, all terrific, is it the job of the schools to move over?

Ho, ho, ho.

I went to Catholic schools, too. We got a fair amount of homework, but no more than my kids got in public school.

What I didn't get were math, physics, chemistry, foreign languages or music. The history was all lies.

I do believe Catholic school would have taught me to read, but I knew how before I went to kindergarten.

Jeff's submission reinforces the view I have steadily maintained: schools are what the parents want them to be. No Child Left Behind is a fraud, run by a crook.

Orrin scoffs at comparisons of breast cancer and antibiotics, but swallows whole comparisons between, for example, a class of 20 made-in-America middle class kids and, say, the kindergarten class my friend teaches -- also 20 kids, from 8 countries, speaking 6 languages.

Helping my kids with their homework is part of the time I spend with them. In part, it compensates for the latest idiotic fad in math instruction.

We are fortunate to have a good school system, but it is clear they try to establish standards without actually criticizing performance. It is virtually impossible to get a substantial critique during parent-teacher night.

I know my kids aren't that good.

Bret:
In fact, a rigorous curriculum does indeed require brute memorization and repetition to sharpen a child’s skill in many of the fundamental precepts. And those drills take time. Every day.

My daughter and I spend a lot of time drilling her in arithmetic (memorizing multiplication and division tables), grammar (English & Spanish), the appropriate use of the scientific method and the entire range of less vital skills involved in assembling collages and gluing little animals onto maps for geography projects.

I know exactly what she’s so good at she doesn’t even have to try (reading, writing and social studies) and the things that are more difficult (math) and which she will neglect if she’s not forced to conduct difficult, repetitive drills. In short, her homework is for me as much as her since it forces me to involve myself with her education in a detailed, hands on, continual process of reinforcing her will to perform by participating with her in her daily struggles.

And, yes, by 9:00 pm on some nights I just want to force her to quit working and go to bed but she never does until her homework is done. I think that’s referred to as instilling a work ethic. Or, maybe, I’ve just saddled her with a monomaniacal fear of failure and public humiliation.

Whatever works to make her work is my motto.

Self sufficiency is a necessity by the time kids are midway through high school since it's already too late if they don't have it by then. If your kids aren't self-propelled, you've deprived them of the primary motive force that will propel them through life.

That work ethic is in part instilled through repetition and the first hand example that only a parent involved in your daily home work can provide.

My son is mildly dyslexic. Never did well on the kinds of tests that No Child Left Behind relies on.

He's doin' OK, though, got clients on four continents and is turning 'em down left and right.

NCLB is a fraud.

The only question is, is it self-delusion, or, as some suspect, a ploy to destroy the common school system?

Either explanation fits.

Hardly a ploy, they've been pretty open about the fact that once you demonstrate the failure of public schools you can build a constituency for general vouchers--as is the program has vouchers within the public school system.

They've been open about their goals, not about their motives.

Do they believe their own propaganda about the public schools, or are they cynical liars? I cannot say.

Either way, they're selling garbage and calling it salad.

Public schools would improve if they had to compete in the maret, though there'd be fewer of them.

Why? Catholic schools are in an unfavorable position, marketwise, because the parents have to front up fees, but they provide a much worse education than public schools. Yet they survive.

Markets don't work, you know. At least, not very well.

Catholic schools do a much better job, which is why religion haters fear vouchers so. Markets don't produce excellence, but they do render a readily accessible mediocrity rather well--that would be a great improvement over what we have now.

I'd like to know how well qualified those parents are for their careers.

Catholic schools are awful. I was forced to attend them for 14 years.

I finally persuaded my father to let my younger siblings escape to the public schools. The earlier they escaped the Catholic schools, the more and more advanced degrees, from increasingly prestigious universities, they collected.

Me, I barely graduated from Cow College.

Peter B Writes:
> Besides, if you have your children practicing
> piano, playing soccer and chess and reading, all
> terrific, is it the job of the schools to move
> over?

Let's assume for a moment that it's not the job of the schools to "move over" to allow kids to spend time with their parents and do activities that their parents choose. Following this line of reasoning, Swift's lilliputians approach of taking children away from their parents at birth seems perfectly logical. After all, why allow children to hang out with potentially incompetent parents when they could be doing useful things like learning about the environment, redistributionist politics, and the like?

Ray Clutts writes:
> ...but she never does until her homework is
> done. I think that�s referred to as instilling
> a work ethic.

I'm already an obsessive workaholic, and I never did homework as a child, I'm not sure I want to encourage my daughter to be even more obsessive.

Ray also writes:
> Self sufficiency is a necessity by the time kids
> are midway through high school since it's
> already too late if they don't have it by then.

I don't think so. That may be true for some, but I don't even think very many. I think this very blog posted an article about how the U.S. had the worlds most incompetent 18 year olds and the worlds most competent 30 years olds. I'm more inclined to take that view. I've seen an awful lot of people rise to the occasion when they had to (our president comes to mind as a good example).

Oops. Forget to fill in my name. The above post is by me.

Harry:

Maybe you just aren't very bright?

That's certainly a possibility. I'm just a redneck from the peckerwooods and a simpliste to boot.

But having to unlearn all the crap the nuns handed out distracted me from achieving whatever limited aspirations I might otherwise have been heir to.

Well, swapping gold for dross certainly can't have helped.