Homework skirmishes go to court

Courts have tended to leave the question of homework — how much and how often — to local schools and local school boards, which is the proper venue for deciding such issues.

When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently sued the U.S. Department of Education in opposition to the Common Core, he pointed to his son’s math homework as the last straw.

The governor, however, is not the only parent to rail against a tradition nearly as old as school itself. Homework is a subject of lawsuits, state legislation, parent group meetings, and kitchen table debates across the nation. Both state and federal laws have been recent influences on a student’s homework.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) transformed academic expectations of students and thus their homework assignments. By contrast, the last few years have featured the creation and deployment of the Common Core State Standards — a forward-looking set of broad principles adopted voluntarily by all but a handful of states.

Gov. Jindal told news outlets that a negative encounter with homework sparked his August 2014 federal lawsuit. When his son brought home an “indecipherable” math paper one day, Jindal said, it flipped his previous support for Common Core into intense opposition. Jindal asserts in his 29-page complaint that the Common Core “forces states down a path toward a national curriculum” and is being implemented “. . . in contradiction to 50 years of Congressional policy forbidding federal direction or control of curriculum, the cornerstone of education policy.”

Even though more than 40 states adopted the English and math standards on their own, Jindal suggests that states were coerced because adopting the Common Core was the easiest way to qualify for billions of dollars in Race to the Top funds and to receive waivers from NCLB requirements.

Jindal has used legal means before to challenge the Common Core. In June 2014, he issued executive orders to halt Louisiana’s Common Core testing. Two months later a Louisiana state court reversed that order, ruling that Jindal’s deed would create “a state of chaos” in Louisiana’s K-12 public schools.

The summertime blues

Jindal’s courtroom defeat is mirrored by another parent who earlier responded to homework frustration with legal action. In 2005, a Milwaukee-area parent, Bruce Larson, and his 17-year-old son, Peer, sued to quash a teacher’s rule that precalculus honor students must complete three homework assignments by certain dates during summer break.

The father and son duo from the suburban Milwaukee hamlet of Hales Corner included the state superintendent of public instruction, the Whitnall High School principal, the math department chair, and Aaron Bieniek, his math teacher, as defendants. Peer said he submitted his homework late (and got a lesser grade in response) due to his challenging job as a camp counselor.

Our three branches of government — judicial, legislative, and executive — are ill-equipped to make fine distinctions about what’s best in the homework arena.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Richard Sankovitz was not amused. He called the lawsuit frivolous and said Peer should be directing his homework angst to the school board. “Had the Larsons done a bit more homework,” Sankovitz wrote in the opinion, they would have noticed that “the people of our state granted to the Legislature . . . the power to establish school boards.”

The Larsons appealed the decision and lost again, but this time the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ordered them to pay court costs and attorneys’ fees. “The Larsons have utterly failed to present an arguable legal basis showing why their case should not have been dismissed,” the state court decision explained. “Summer homework — particularly for an honors class for which students receive additional credit — fits comfortably within the range of what is reasonable.”

This kind of clash is not unique to U.S. public schools. In 2009, a Calgary, Alberta, couple sued over the amount of homework their children received. Tom and Shelli Milley prevailed, signing a settlement with their Catholic school. The agreement allowed their son and daughter to be graded only on work done in the classroom.

“With two children in school, there was just an inordinate amount of homework coming home and a lot of it was busy work,” the dad, Tom Milley, said.

Conflicting studies, policy solutions

The conflicting social science research on homework is unhelpful. Some studies say homework is an essential reinforcement of classroom work; others say it is a waste of time and a barrier to quality family time.

The pro-homework side says homework assignments help students develop good study habits, foster independent learning and good character, and gives parents a chance to see what is happening in school. The anti-homework crowd counters that homework only applies pressure on students, tempts parents to get too involved in the student’s school work, and prompts boredom.

A University of Phoenix-Harris Poll of 1,000 teachers released in February 2014 found that K-5 teachers assign an average of 2.9 hours of homework a week, while 6th- through 8th-grade teachers assign 3.2 hours weekly on average. High school teachers each assign an average of 3.5 hours of take-home work weekly. That means a high school student with five classes would typically get 17.5 hours of homework per week.

Increasingly, school boards are passing districtwide policies that limit homework. That authority is often delegated by policy to principals and teachers.

Once a school board adopts a policy, the policy has the force of local law. That means policies are binding upon school district employees, students, and outsiders who interact with the system. Board policy outlines what an individual may do, must do, or must refrain from doing.

Increasingly, school boards are passing districtwide policies that limit homework.

Some homework policies provide guidance on how much homework is appropriate. Others set parameters on how much homework can be weighted toward a final grade. Still others tackle the topic that bugged the Larsons in Wisconsin: homework during summer breaks or school holidays.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District board adopted a policy in 2012 requiring that “routine homework assignments will comprise no more than 20% of a student’s academic achievement grade.”

The Davis, Utah, school board shuns a mandate in favor of “guidelines.” The guidelines include a chart that establishes maximum homework time per day. The chart starts at five to 10 minutes in kindergarten and increases in 10-minute increments per grade to 120 minutes daily (two hours) for 12th graders. The board cites a variety of social science research to support that approach.

Even with the decision-making power vested in school boards, state lawmakers frequently have entered the homework fray with proposed legislation. For example,  in January 2014  Mississippi State Rep. Omeria Scott introduced a bill that would require teachers to assign daily writing and reading homework. The bill also mandated that Mississippi students “must be required to complete vocabulary and spelling homework lessons” each week. The proposed law died in committee one month after it was introduced.

Homework is controversial — period

The bottom line is that homework has historically been a contentious issue. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics published “A Brief History of Homework in the United States.” The overview observes that, “Media-fueled outcries for more or less homework occur cyclically, about 15 to 20 years apart.”

Homework presents a Goldilocks dilemma: This amount is too little, that amount is too much, the one in the middle is “just right.” But what is just right? It depends on the subject. It depends on the age of the student. It depends on the expectations of the teacher and the community. It depends on a lot of other factors including parents and school boards’ sensitivity to parental pressure.

But one thing is certain, at least to me. Our three branches of government — judicial, legislative, and executive — are ill-equipped to make such fine distinctions about what’s best in the homework arena. That assignment should be left to local control and determined by educators and school boards.

Any other approach is likely to experience the same fate as undone homework: an epic fail.

Citation: Darden, E.C. (2014). Ed law: Homework skirmishes go to court. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (3), 76-77.