In the United States, your best opportunity for upward mobility is to receive a high quality education. If you have a good work ethic, the ability to solve problems and marketable skills, odds are you will do just fine.
Which is why, of course, it’s so fitting that the California legislature wants to deny this ability to Golden State students in the name of…you guessed it…equity!
Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo is pushing Assembly Bill 2999, otherwise known as the Healthy Homework Act, which would develop updated homework guidelines across California school districts and mandate that school boards establish homework policies that support and consider impacts to students’ mental and physical health.
Assemblywoman Schiavo said, “As a single parent, I know how stressful homework time can be for our kids and the entire family. The Healthy Homework Act is about ensuring that our homework policies are healthy for our kids, address the needs of the whole child, and also support family time, time to explore other extra-curricular interests, and give students and families time to connect and recover from the day.”
Schiavo told KQED the inspiration came in the car while campaigning two years ago. The Assemblymember’s then 9-year-old daughter Sofie, asked what her mother could do if she won.
Schiavo answered that she’d be able to make laws.
Then, Sofia asked if she could make a law banning homework.
And presto, here we are!
If the Healthy Homework Act passes, Sciavo’s kid may have some other ideas, perhaps the Ice Cream For Breakfast Act, the Math Is Too Hard Act, and the I Don’t Feel Like Going To School Today Act, also known as Sofie’s Law.
A better name for this anti-homework law would have been the Your Kid’s Gonna Live With You Forever Act.
The bill cites a survey of California high schoolers from Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It found that 45 percent said homework was a major source of stress and that 52 percent considered most assignments to be busywork.
Casey Cuny is California’s 2024 Teacher of the Year, which considering the state of public education in California is more of an indictment than an accolade, and a supporter of the bill. Cuny says homework needs to be dialed back to make things more equitable.
“I never want a kid’s grade to be low because they have divorced parents, and their book was at their dad’s house when they were spending the weekend at mom’s house,” she told KQED.
Yeah, try running that one by your boss when your school days are behind you and you aren’t getting the work done at your job.
“But, you can’t fire me! My parents got divorced and I have anxiety!”
While we’re at it, let’s pass a law requiring that every school kid in California be encased in bubble wrap.
I guess “equity” means making everyone remedial.
This isn’t the first time the California legislature has done this. In 1901 they voted to abolish all homework for students 14 and younger.
Their argument was that hours of homework robbed children of outdoor play and was regarded as a form of child labor.
By the time we got to the 1940s, virtually no school in the country was assigning homework.
What changed?
According to David Roos’ of the History Channel, the Cold War hit and the Russians successfully launched Sputnik 1 in 1957.
A year later, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a $1-billion spending package to bolster high-quality teaching and learning in science, mathematics and foreign languages.
By 1962, 23 percent of high-school juniors reported doing two or more hours of homework a night, nearly twice as many as in 1957, the year of Sputnik.
If we were going to win the Cold War, we needed an educated population who could out think the Russians.
It worked.
So, now it’s okay to be dumb again.
Let’s face it, these kids are being set up for failure.
The term “homework” is just another word for “practice.” Regardless of what profession you end up in, you’re not going to be any good at it unless you’ve practiced it – a lot.
Would you want to be treated by a doctor who never ‘practiced’ at medicine? Or represented by a lawyer who never “practiced” litigating in a courtroom? Or pay huge sums of money for a NBA ticket to watch players who never “practiced” playing basketball?
The answer is obviously no.
In the 1980s, a report produced by the Reagan Department of Education called A Nation at Risk warned that, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
And now here we are again, with mediocrity being the goal.
Public schools in America today have become little more than dime-store self-esteem mills, churning out mindless drones who can’t read or write but feel really good about themselves (in addition to – yes – those who’ve been taught to despise themselves). But genuine self-esteem doesn’t come from being told you’re awesome every five seconds. It comes from achievement. Mastery. Accomplishment. Like learning how to do math or write a coherent essay. A healthy, daily dose of homework is the key to that.
John Phillips can be heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on “The John Phillips Show” on KABC/AM 790.
