Homework as a central educational strategy fails this test. At the rhetorical level, asserting that students, especially those from poor backgrounds, need the chance for sustained, disciplined endeavors on their own fails to recognize the many forms of discipline many poor children must display daily. It implies once again that lack of internal motivation is the reason why these children and their parents haven't gotten ahead. Secondly, any educational reform worthy of support must not only avoid stigmatizing the poorest, it must also not rob them of their greatest asset, the power to mobilize. Homework intensification fails that test as well.
Time is the scarcest of modern commodities.
The increased time pressures on poor families from both work and homework are a major contributor to our decline in civic participation. And without civic participation, the kinds of reforms in our broader institutional life that sustain and are sustained by public education will wither, including democratic unions and broad-based political parties and movements. Hard work surely was one factor that has enhanced the quality of American life, but so too did a politics of time. Our parents were able to live more satisfying lives than their ancestors because unions and other progressives assured that the fruits of human labor were fairly distributed. They engaged in broad politics to equalize educational resources and to limit the hours of work and homework so that parents had more time to spend in their own pursuits with their children.