But she has seen her kids in tears over the amount of homework they get. "It really makes me sad." She quickly adds, "actually, angry."

The Schwarzes are a two-parent household where Marty helps out with math and Beth Ann assists with language arts. But Marty knows it must be harder for single parents with more than one child in school — inevitably, one child will get more attention than the other.

"It's a full-time job for both of us, sometimes," he says.

Daughter Maria takes it all in stride, though. "I just try hard," she says. And she usually gets all A's.

One solution to avoid those four-hour homework nights, Marty Schwarz suggests, would be for teachers to somehow coordinate with one another so a big project in one class doesn't conflict with a different class's workload.

Up to teachers

The State Office of Education stays out of the homework debate. There is no policy or guidelines.

"It's something that ought to be considered at the school level," says Superintendent Steven Laing.

And so it is.

Scott Crump, a social studies teacher at Bingham High School in South Jordan, was just named the 2003 Utah Teacher of the Year. He certainly didn't get the honor for being soft on homework.

"I just think it's a vital component of any educational process," he says. "I just could not teach what I do without having homework."

Crump ranks himself close to the top in terms of the amount of homework he assigns.

Crump's regular classes get one-half hour to an hour of homework per week, honors classes get about two hours a week and advanced-placement classes are assigned about three hours each week. That's just for one class.

Students tell Crump, "Your class is so hard, you expect so much homework." His response is, "They're raising themselves to the level they need to be in." And by the end of the year, many students say they learned the most in his class because they were challenged the most.

Crump says that coordinating among teachers to avoid homework logjams would be nearly impossible. He solves that problem by giving students their schedule of homework and project assignments weeks or months in advance.

"It works for me," he says. "It might work for other teachers — I would suggest that."

But he also sympathizes with students.

"One of the problems with homework is that students nowadays are working longer hours and doing so many things that sometimes homework isn't done as well as it should be," he says. "Kids now have jobs, they're so busy with extracurricular activities — if they're going to be successful in today's life, they need to have a lot of organizational skills."