U.S. students hit the books, but not as hard as most

A few years ago, some experts were expressing concern that children were damaging their spines by lugging backpacks filled with heavy books to and from school.
Now comes a new study that suggests that if children are , indeed, lugging all those books they must be trying to prepare themselves for careers as hod carriers. Certainly they don't need more than a book or two to complete the amount of homework that the study shows they are doing.
On average, daily time spent on homework in the United States is 19 minutes, an increase of about three minutes over the homework load of 20 years ago.
Certainly there are parents reading this who will be quick to dispute the study's findings. Some will say that their children spend, quite literally, hours hitting the books at night. And those conscientious students -- who are also likely to be in families that have high expectations for their children and taking classes that make heavy demands on them -- may even be carrying too heavy a load, figuratively and literally. Other parents are thinking that if their kids actually spent a couple of hours a week on homework, they wouldn't be bringing home Cs and Ds.
Where we stand
But exceptions do not make the rule. And in this case the important thing to focus on is what this study says about the average commitment that a U.S. student makes to his or her education.
It debunks the notion that America's students are victims of an educational system and a culture that demands too much of them.
In a study of 20 countries by the Third International Math and Science Study, the United States had one of the lowest homework loads. Students in France, Italy, Russia and South Africa reported spending at least twice as much time on homework as American students.
And a summary of research to appear in November's Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a journal published by the American Educational Research Association, says that while public opinion about homework has been "volatile and contentious" throughout the last century, the amount of homework hasn't changed much in 50 years.
Sputnik caused a spike
Brian Gill, a social scientist at the Rand Corp., and Steven Schlossman, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University, say there has been no period between 1948 and 1999 in which U.S. students did "massive amounts of homework." Only in the decade after the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was there a temporary increase in homework for high school students, they say.
What has increased during that time is not the amount of time kids spend studying, but the amount spent watching TV. Data from the University of Michigan that showed children aged 6 to 8 spent an average of about two hours a week on homework. They spent 11 hours a week playing and nearly 13 hours a week watching television.
Doing the math, if kids spent half as much time studying as they did watching TV, they'd be out-studying their competition throughout the world.
And given that they'll have to compete in the world economy with today's students in Europe and Asia, that might not be a bad idea.