More parents are doing kids' homework

Late one recent night, around 1 a.m., Janice Sansolo was frantically working on a Spanish assignment, looking up words in the book "La Casa en Mango Street" and translating them into English.

A high-school student? Hardly — she is the parent of one. "The amount of work was ridiculous and unreasonable," says the Potomac, Md., mother of two. "There was no way she was going to get it done."

The widely recognized increase in homework has resulted in an unusual twist this fall. A growing number of schools are openly acknowledging that parents are doing more and more of the work. Some teachers are formally changing policies to take into account the fact that the penetrating report on the Peloponnesian War was largely written by someone with a Ph.D., not a fifth-grader.

Capitulating to reality, a number of schools are giving parents wider latitude to help, even inviting it in certain cases. At the same time, some teachers are taking countermeasures to discount the impact of parental involvement on the child's final grade. To try and give equal footing to kids whose parents aren't the overinvolved type, several school districts have even set up "homework hotlines" with tutors or teachers to dispense help.

Rebecca Bergeron, an eighth-grade teacher at Cromwell Middle School in Connecticut, this year reduced the value of math homework to 20 percent of the grade from 50 percent last year "simply because I know the kids are getting too much help from their parents." She also eliminated science projects altogether because parents were playing too big a role.

At the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., home to children of many of the country's most powerful politicians, seventh-grade teacher Santha Bundy-Farah is taking the opposite approach. She recently assigned a science project due in December and sent a letter to parents inviting them "to help your child in any way" with "anything short of doing the project yourself."

Some schools have made especially stark concessions. Harriett Cholden, a fifth-grade teacher at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, says she now asks parents to include their names on assignments if they help. The new rule came after she noticed that about half her students typically lied about parents helping. "Crediting people should be a good habit," she says.

The changes are a reaction to a gradual but remarkable role reversal in who takes responsibility for getting homework done. While it has to some degree always been a family affair, parents and teachers say such assistance has taken on new dimensions in recent years as the work has piled up. Indeed, though many teachers aren't happy about it, the basic rules of thumb seem to have changed.