COLUMN ONE : Kicking Homework Out of School : Half Moon Bay considers abolishing an educational icon. Proposal ignites a global storm and refuels debate over whether such assignments really help.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. —  The complaints came in fast and furious at Cabrillo Unified School District in this precious Northern California coastal town once known mostly for its annual Pumpkin Festival.

First was the woman who called from Jamaica. Half Moon Bay is the root of all evil. Then came the whispers at parent orientation for tony Stanford and Santa Clara universities. Your children will pay if anyone finds out. And now the threats. If this district abolishes homework, I’m sending my kid to private school.

The provocateur was farmer Garrett Redmond, an outgoing school trustee who dropped a bombshell two weeks ago at a thinly attended school board meeting: He wants this district of 3,500 students to do away with that scourge of family life, that torment of childhood, that untouchable American icon: the homework assignment.

What would Redmond have them do instead? “How the parents and children spend that time is not for me to say,” he said in an impassioned address. “That’s a private matter. But they sure as hell don’t even have the opportunity . . . if homework is handed out and homework takes priority.”

Tonight, under the glare of television lights, with radio audiences listening in, the board of trustees is scheduled to vote on the future of homework in Half Moon Bay. By the time the proceedings begin, Redmond and the other players in this homework hubbub will have been interviewed by media outlets from coast to coast, and in England, South Africa and Japan.

Such widespread interest in this most local of decisions has taken school board President Ken Jones by surprise. For even as students, teachers and parents here shrink at what they perceive as global ridicule, this unprecedented proposal has rekindled a longstanding debate.

“This issue,” Jones said, “has struck some nerve that educators did not even know existed.”

Homework policies nationwide have stiffened since 1983, when the controversial report “A Nation at Risk” accused American education of being eroded by “a rising tide of mediocrity” and kicked off a fury of reflection and reform. Today, it is not unusual for kindergartners to have daily tasks to complete before being tucked in for the night.

But there is little agreement on how, when, why--and even if--homework is effective in improving student achievement. Little hard information exists on how much homework students actually do and whether that amount is up or down. That is because asking a child about frequency of home study is a lot like asking an adult about sex--the result, at best, is often inflated.

There are educated guesses about why it works when it does; reinforcement of skills freshly learned is one good reason. However, not much is known about why homework fails when it does, according to at least one major study.

Homework is, however, the cheapest way to lengthen the school day. Although strapped schools cannot afford the daily cost of teachers and classrooms for an extra few hours, they can afford to send students home with assignments and admonitions: Do this by tomorrow.

But is that always good?

“Homework is absolutely part of the debate on school reform,” said Barbara Willer, spokeswoman for the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children. “There’s always this notion that kids aren’t working hard enough. However, there is also concern that kids’ lives are so overly structured that there’s no time left over to just be kids.”

Monilou Carter, mother and veteran teacher, will never forget the day last year when her sophomore daughter, Mariellen, came home in tears from Half Moon Bay High School, dropped her backpack in the hallway and fled to her room.

“I bent down to pick up her backpack, and I couldn’t lift it,” Carter said. “It became clear to me at that moment what we’re doing to our kids. We’re breaking their backs.”

Carter and her daughter are strong believers in the value of homework and think that even the suggestion of a ban borders on the bizarre. Limitations, however, are another story. In fact, Carter approves of a petition drive to restrict homework begun this week by students at Manuel F. Cunha Intermediate School where she teaches.

Mariellen, now 16, would just like a break. It is only October, but she has already quit the tennis team because it interferes with chemistry class and homework time. She recently skipped practice for a school singing ensemble to study for four tests on the same day. Last week she dropped Spanish 3 in favor of chorus so at least she can sing on a regular basis.

“It’s just overwhelming sometimes,” said the serious young woman with the wide green eyes and the red Converse All Stars. “The assignments that we get just pile up. And when you sit down to do your work and you realize you have seven or eight hours in one night . . . it’s almost impossible to start.”

Like many of its counterparts throughout the nation, the Cabrillo district embarked on a course of school reform in the late 1980s. It hired high school Principal Bud Eckert--a retired Marine who lost a leg in Beirut--and Supt. Jane Martin. It passed objectives that included improving student performance levels by 5% a year.

It stiffened the homework policy, like many other districts, by establishing mandatory times: 20 to 30 minutes a day, four to five days a week for the primary grades; 40 to 60 minutes for grades four and five; 60 to 90 minutes for grades six through eight and an average of nine hours a week for high school.

Since 1989, Eckert is proud to point out, average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores rose 28 points for the verbal part of the college entrance exam and 54 points for the math segment. With a combined average score of 1,003 out of 1,600, Cabrillo is above state and national averages. The district went from offering no advanced placement high school courses to offering five.

“I just want people to understand that we are very proud of our achievement,” said the defensive principal, who opposes the ban that has demoralized staff and students. “All of a sudden we’re getting painted with this brush. The school and the community are getting some negative comments.”

Eckert insists that homework is a road map to learning needed by all of his students--from the impoverished children of local agricultural workers to the affluent offspring of Silicon Valley executives. “It helps a student get to the place where he or she clearly understands new knowledge.”

Homework has been controversial for much of the 20th Century. In 1913, the Ladies’ Home Journal warned against the “useless and really dangerous practice of carrying books home and asking pupils to do evening studies.”

In the 1960s, two major reviews of homework research came to opposing conclusions. One said that homework leads to higher achievement, while the other said that there was not sufficient evidence to reach any conclusion.

In 1984, homework guru Herbert Walberg, a research professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, insisted that homework worked all the time. He and two graduate students had scouted out more than 1,000 articles and studies on homework from the first 80 years of the century. Picking the 15 studies that had empirical data, Walberg and his crew crunched all the numbers in a process called “meta-analysis.”

“We found that homework has a consistent and moderate beneficial effect on learning. But grading it and giving feedback has a very substantial effect on learning,” said Walberg, who considers himself a pro-homework fanatic and derides Redmond’s proposal as typical California “looseness.”

Four years later in the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, J. Michael Palardy concluded that most research does not show a statistically significant correlation between homework and achievement.

Some things, however, are clearly shown by educational research, wrote the University of Alabama professor of education: “The first is that homework for primary grade children seems not only inappropriate but in many instances counterproductive.”

How much homework students end up doing is another contentious point. Even if statistics were readily available, they would be questionable, researchers say. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 31% of American 13-year-olds have two or more hours of homework per day, compared to 44% in Taiwan, 55% in France and 66% in Ireland.

That high figure for Ireland should come as no surprise to Redmond, 65, whose Dublin childhood helped fuel his current anti-homework fervor. Redmond counts himself lucky that, as a Catholic schoolboy, he got homework help from his parents, older brother and sister and particularly from a retired schoolmaster who boarded with his best friend.

His less fortunate classmates--those who did not or could not do their homework--found themselves on the wrong end of a flogging at the hands of their instructors, men who “if they were running Singapore, it would be a lot more disciplined than it is today,” he said.

“Ever since then, the inequity of homework has stuck with me,” he said. Those who do not have able parents or computers in the home or a place to study--in short, those on the economic outs in this quasi-agricultural town just an hour from San Francisco--are at a distinct disadvantage in a competitive school district that prides itself on achievement.

Redmond also has been approached in his four years on the board by parents who complained about losing their children to schoolwork. In fact, Redmond contends that homework cheats him out of the company of Keelin, his studious, 14-year-old daughter. “I think the time spent on homework would be better spent with the family,” he said.

The first response of many in the district was a chorus of “There he goes again.” “I thought he was kidding,” said school board President Jones on first hearing of the proposal. But after Redmond’s typically flamboyant speech, Jones found himself a little swayed. “I’ll be damned,” he thought. “He’s making some sense.”

Martin acknowledges that new teachers receive little training in homework--how to give it and what it’s for. The superintendent believes that her district’s policy could stand a little improvement, perhaps an emphasis on coordinating assignments and maybe limiting them. “The policy won’t be abolished,” she said, “but we can change it.”

And so the spotlight is now firmly fixed on the man who many consider the antihero of Half Moon Bay. Redmond has been interviewed on the BBC and radio station 702 in Johannesburg, Africa. “Good Morning America” wanted this television-less farmer today; “Today” wanted him whenever they could get him. Until last week, he says, he had never even heard of “Bryant Grumble”.

He is loathe these days to sit with his back to a door, he jokes, in a town where some think of him as serious of heart and others accuse him of self-aggrandizement. If he could make a buck off all the attention, then maybe he would like it a little more, he said sardonically.

For now, all it has given him is a steady diet of Advil and Tagamet, 3:30 a.m. limousine rides to San Francisco television studios and a certain cachet with some high school freshmen.

“I’d rather not do homework,” said Jacob Lefler, 14, as he straggled back to Half Moon Bay High School after a fast-food lunch nearby. “I think this is pretty cool.”