The other unsubstantiated complaint about homework is that it is increasing. In 2003, Brian Gill (then at RAND) and Steven Schlossman (Carnegie Mellon) showed that, except for a post-Sputnik spike in the early nineteen-sixties and a small increase for the youngest kids in the mid-nineteen-eighties, after the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” by the Department of Education, which prescribed more homework, the amount of time American students spend on homework has not changed since the nineteen-forties. And that amount isn’t much. A majority of students, including high-school seniors, spend less than an hour a day during the five-day school week doing homework. Recent data confirm that this is still the case. Homework is not what most kids are doing when they’re not in school.