A Student's Job Is Never Done

THE END OF HOMEWORK: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning , by Etta Kralovec and John Buell. (Beacon Press, 119 pages, $18.) This summer, my 10-year-old daughter, who had never been much of a reader, plowed through the Harry Potter series then moved on to C.S. Lewis. In late August, after finishing the Narnia books, she announced sadly that her reading streak was over. "With school and so much homework," she lamented, "there won't be time."

The goofy irony of the situation—namely that homework crowds out the kind of reading schools want to promote—is at the heart of this long-overdue book, which makes the case for reducing the amount of homework schools give kids.

Kralovec and Buell, both education researchers at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, cite studies showing that the primary reason dropouts give for leaving school is their inability to complete homework. As parents themselves, the authors also describe how excessive homework left their own imaginative children little time for extracurricular pursuits. And other parents, they write, frequently regaled them with stories of how homework was...