Hmmm. Let's see: the average young person in this country is watching 4 ½ hours of TV every school day, listening to 2+ hours of music, playing video games for 1 ¼ hours, and generally messing around and having fun, so not surprisingly, they're falling further and further behind their international peers… So what's the brilliant solution some dimwits have come up with? Let's have them do LESS studying and schoolwork! Ya can't make this stuff up!

It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school — 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth — and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.

Galloway, a mostly middle-class community northwest of Atlantic City, is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades.

Such efforts have drawn criticism from some teachers and some parents who counter that students must study more, not less, if they are to succeed. Even so, the anti-homework movement has been reignited in recent months by the documentary "Race to Nowhere," about burned-out students caught in a pressure-cooker educational system.

Seriously, some kids ARE overworked – I'd guess 5% (I suspect mostly Asian, with "tiger moms"), maybe 20% get the right amount of work, and 75% aren't asked to do enough (so not surprisingly they live DOWN to the low expectations that are set for them). Unfortunately, a lot of people with influence (like the makers of the documentary, Race to Nowhere) have kids in the first or second category, so they think their kids' problems are reflective of a larger problem, when in fact the opposite is true.

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New Recruit in Homework Revolt: The Principal

Cathy Clark, a teacher, with her students at Arthur Rann Elementary School in Galloway, N.J. The Galloway school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school and to ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.