Subject matter expertise and teaching experience up to six years make teachers better, as measured by students’ results. That’s better than nothing. There are lots of things we reward teachers for that have no discernible effects, like education degrees but if you go from a system where many of the Math teachers have humanities degrees to one where they all have Physics/Math/Statistics degrees results will improve. Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Teachers are far from completely useless, even if selection effects are far stronger than treatment effects.
It seems the evidence is weaker than I thought and we have no strong evidence that subject matter expertise is any more helpful than an education degree. Likewise experience may not help as we can’t rule out greater texture in a school leading to getting better classes so the teachers look better. Great schools and great teachers exist. We have no idea how to make either.
> Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update
> The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.
This is, perhaps, the worst thing about teacher training programs. I'm a teacher myself, high school math and science, and the classes I'm taking for my masters are absolute bullcrap. Just lots of busy-work with ideas that have been tested once, on a small group with demographics extremely different from my school, and taken as gospel.
Not to mention that the classes are all geared towards elementary school teachers and so are of absolutely no help at all to me. Then couple that with elementary school teachers being generalists and often hating math, yet they're the ones we rely on to give these kids a good grounding in the foundational stuff they'll need later on! No wonder most kids are incompetent at it and can barely add/subtract/multiply/divide without a calculator.
Really, I think education should be an apprenticeship program, rather than an educational one. Make it be like several years of student teaching, which would get more results than anything else from new teachers. They can see how experienced teachers work and really discuss it with them over the course of a few years, not just pay to get told useless stuff and observe a semester.
Now you've experienced what school is like for bright kids. ;-)
For better or worse, the pay scale in most districts in the US guarantee a salary bump for having a higher degree. As a result, there are degree programs tailored to this need, that are practically degree mills. Why didn't you study math, or science?
I dunno if it's as applicable, honestly. I was one of those bright kids that never had to study in high school (or college, really), but I always felt like there was at least some purpose to what I was learning, whether it was math/science concepts or how to write better, etc. And it always at least felt on solid grounding; education training is just a load of bullcrap that supports what the teacher wants to hear and busywork. Hell, I even have one masters class that has exit slips! In a masters level course!
As for why I didn't study math or science -- I did. My actual undergraduate degree is in physics; just due to various issues I ended up teaching (which I admit I enjoy, even if I'm starting to get burnt out). Dunno if I'll stay another year, at least where I'm currently at.
in montessori training most of the time is spent by the prospective teachers in the classroom, observing children and other teachers at work. and then they have to write reports about the observation.
it's just a few weeks rather than years, but it's the right idea.
just like a pilot has to look so many flight hours before they get their license, a montessori teacher has to log observation and teaching hours before they get to lead a classroom.
The biggest piece of data that speaks to me against hours of homework being generally necessary for learning and academic success is homeschooling (at least secular homeschooling). Many homeschooled children, especially pre-middle school, have academic periods that last for a maximum of a couple of hours. Yet, these children are able to integrate academically back into traditional schools and excel.
I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload.
Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.
Very small class sizes make a huge difference. Homeschooling (usually) involves a very small effective class size. Lessons can be very carefully tailored, the teacher can change the course of a lesson entirely on a dime if the kid or small set of kids need them to, the pace is better tuned for each student, and so on.
AFAIK most prestigious private schools have much smaller class sizes than public schools, and that's not for no reason. 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less. Practically every single thing is harder for the teacher (except getting kids to participate in discussion, but that's likely a socialization/norms thing—I doubt kids used to small classes clam up the way kids used to 20+ kid classrooms do when they happen to be in a small class for some reason) and worse for the kids.
Homeschooling is a small effective class size, but my parents were by no means wonderful teachers (even though they are wonderful people). For homeschooling during 6th and 7th grades, I mostly used the purchased curriculum books myself without significant involvement from them. On a typical day, I probably received less instruction from my parents than a student in a regular classroom (sometimes no instruction).
It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone.
Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).
If you're self-pacing then you don't have to waste time covering material you've already mastered or banging your head against material you're not ready for yet because you're missing fundamentals. If you're much ahead of or behind average then that can be a ton of time—most of your day, even—lost to waste there. Not productively repeating material to attain mastery, I mean, but stuff like taking four weeks to cover a math concept or technique that you could easily have completely understood and internalized in the first week, then moved on to using it in more complex work, if it'd all been presented to you that quickly.
Probably 10% of the school day's moving around or preparing to move around or settling down from having moved around, or recess or otherwise not-learning (not to shit on recess—I wish they'd give kids more time for it in lower grades). Another 10-15% is stuff you might not consider part of your "school day" if you're homeschooling (PE, music, library visits, "specials") or nonsense you don't have to worry about (assemblies). So there's maybe a quarter of the day accounted for with no allowances for faster and/or better-tuned pacing or more personalized instruction—poof, 90ish minutes of your day back, 180ish days a year, for 13 years, like magic. Self-pacing you fit it all that remains in 2 or 2.5 hrs, don't need more than minimal breaks so there's minimal padding to that time, and the rest of the day's yours.
Public school's alarmingly wasteful of children's time, but saves parents a ton of time, collectively, in exchange.
> 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less.
Anecdata: in my quite successful french public middle and high schools, I've never been in a class with fewer than 27 pupils. I would say success had more to do with geographic selection and other external criteria than from the internal educational benefits.
You can setup a big class as a pyramid scheme though, the smart first graspers, get to work as tutors for pre selected groups of students, effectively reducing class size as a lesson goes on. Of course this has to have a reward.
I spent a couple of hours last night helping my son with homework that involved getting him to understand the sieve of Erastothenes and I can totally see this - the number of detours we had to take to find a way of explaining it (I made it harder by insisting he understand how to prove that you only need to test up to the square root of the upper limit you choose) that made sense for him was maddening. I can't imagine trying to teach it to a whole class of kids even a year or two older than he is now.. And at the start, I thought it'd be simple - it's just a handful of simple logical steps...
I don't even think you have to add the qualifier "at least secular homeschooling". In the US, homeschoolers absolutely dominate their public school counterparts in educational outcomes. Of course, homeschooling parents are generally wealthier, but the statement holds true even when you control for income level and racial demographics. When tested, the average homeschooler ends up in the ~80% percentile compared to the general population [1].
Honestly, the statistics here are so stark that it shows something is deeply wrong with the US public school system. Personally, it always felt like a busy-work day-care when I went.
When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams, not how well I paid attention in class. Now I zone out in meetings because I don’t think they’re important and pine for the moment when I can go back to my desk and do my individual work. Homework trained me to behave disconnected, I don’t known if it has stuck with me because I’ve been able to get away with it or because paying attention in meetings is unnecessary.
I have to give the "flipped classroom" model some credit: doing the "homework" IN "lecture", collaboratively and interactively, and having free time at home sure feels better than the conventional model.
The conventional one always seemed absurd to me: I have to go to school and then continue being in school, mentally, AFTER school? Disassociation aside, it seems like that's training you for a 16-hour workday. How oppressive.
Maybe the flipped model can only support a lower cognitive ceiling though; I've never seen it applied to, say, calculus courses. Maybe hard enough material does require constant, oppressive grinding. D: (Not that young kids should be doing that though.)
I had an incredible calc 1 and 3 teacher who would start the class with a problem that we'd work on for 20ish minutes. usually it was something just out of reach with where we were topically, or something that required us to use like basic geometry (which many of us were rusty on), and then we'd talk about it, ask questions, and he'd segue into a lecture where he'd connect the dots with what we were studying. I vaguely remember one was essentially to prove herons rule which we only had the tools to do from vanilla geometry, then he showed how it could be done with calculus.
Lectures were almost Socratic. We were only graded based on exams and participation, which I think he kind of arbitrarily awarded based on how engaged he thought you were.
Brilliant guy, loved his classes. He'd studied under a couple members of the Bourbaki group and headed the math department at one of the top math schools in Latin America.
Anyway, I had a great experience with this approach and I really think it's the best way to teach math.
I currently teach high school math and have been trying a similar approach, and received push back from every experienced educator I've encountered, but have been receiving great reviews from students (especially ones that have low math confidence). This post was really encouraging to me, thanks for sharing!
The best math teacher I ever had throughout all my schooling structured lessons that way. There'd be an introduction to a new topic, with problems we'd get a chance to work through alone then aftwards we'd all go through them together. That was pretty much the extent of the lecture part. Then we'd get an exercise to work on for the last half of the class that covered what we learned. The teacher was always extremely patient and would help everyone who needed it. Sometimes explaining the same thing over and over to different people without ever becoming frustrated. There was optional(but highly encouraged) homework if we wanted more practice. The teacher would be available for an additional tutoring session to work on the optional homework if people wanted it. We weren't graded on it. All our marks came from exams.
That class was really the first time a lot of concepts actually started to make sense for me and I went from being a pretty below average math student to having some of the highest marks in the class.
The very best teacher I ever had was my calculus teacher, who was teaching it for her first year, and although claimed she had trouble with calculus, was a truly gifted teacher and an enthusiastic “math nerd.”
The shtick about being bad at calculus, whether true or not, translated into a highly Socratic and collaborative learning environment, where all the students were legitimately teaching each other. This was modeled by us “teaching” our teacher.
Thinking back, it really is incredibly remarkable what she accomplished. Not that standardized tests are the greatest measure, but in less than a year of calc instruction, a full classroom of smart but fairly unremarkable students all scored top scored on the AP Calc BC test (in other words, every single one of us tested out of 100-level college calculus).
This was a scenario where having a “large” (ie more than 1-5 students) class (I think there may have been about 20 of us) with a gifted teacher brought out a positive side to non-small classes that you don’t usually see. We all learned the material well enough to teach it, and we all had many teachers we could go to for help understanding a concept.
My algebra 2 teacher in high school did this. Class started with an assignment. You had to read the book, collaboratively work on the assignments, and then the last portion of the class he lectured, which was mostly answering questions. It worked really well.
The jobs I've been most engaged at, I would usually attentively listen in meetings while others present would spin their wheels discussing technical stuff in the weeds until I'd see a clearly superior alternate solution and put that forward.
It would appear as if I were zoning out in meetings, but I was actually just listening and thinking about the problem. I don't think people are particularly good at thinking while also discussing/debating, but I also don't think I would have as quickly arrived at the better solutions without the ability to attentively observe the relevant discussions.
If you're not even paying attention / thinking about anything relevant while in a meeting, your presence is a pointless waste of time and space and you should be doing something else.
> When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams
1) College is very different from high school
2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks.
3) If you really understand that well, why come (I can only assume they took attendance)? I had a digital logical class that was required, but I didn't bother showing up and scored 150%. When I lecture, if you don't need to be there, don't show up. That's perfectly fine by me. However, don't expect me to have a lot of sympathy if you suddenly find that you don't really understand what I lectured on that you skipped.
> Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students.
Well, when I teach, my classes are technical material. One student knowing (or not) the subject has no material impact on any other student. I also have a fixed amount of topics that I need to get across--your grade in my class should reflect your mastery of the material. If you understand the topics properly, I should give you the appropriate grade regardless of how you came about that knowledge.
If I taught a class dependent upon discussion (Philosophy or Political Science for example), I might have a different opinion.
I don't know, I'm in a very international neighborhood and kids of immigrants are all spending extra time doing extra homework, and they have a near monopoly on the top scorers. So it obviously pays off. I don't know whether the argument against homework then is that it doesn't pay off in the long run (losing interest -- which my workplace is also very international and I see no indication of lost interest in learning), or that assigned homework doesn't help but maybe private after-school classes do, or what, but I don't see any way you can make an argument that "just school" is enough if you want your kids to keep up.
Part of my job is hiring out for high performing teams. What I've noticed from 100s of candidates is that the high achieving kids of immigrants do well in university as well as school. However when faced with real world challenges, the more well rounded candidates (of which a large portion are the immigrants kids for sure) definitely produce the highest value in their work (orthogonal problem solving and communication). Hard to be well rounded when you're just doing a narrow set of training exercises after school. After school is for life
One problem with that is a well rounded candidates who dont get the best scores wont get entry into the best universities so will always be disadvantaged.
There are hundreds if not thousands of schools where a well rounded student can get a great education. Some parents and high schoolers fret about attending the top ten or so name brand universities far in excess of any plausible difference in educational or life outcomes.
Yeah, I was about to say that too. I went to a no-name state school in the south. Now the young guys from cmu and other top schools work for me, I'm an engineering director. Certainly cmu is training top grads, but ... so are most state schools too. Certainly I was lucky and worked hard, but other than a star by your name if you went to a posh school, once you have a few years of experience it's not that valuable to be from cmu. What you do with yourself is far more important.
Maybe that works in Software Engineering because of the current boom there is a huge shortage. Law, Finance, Medicine is not like this. Nor will SREs in the next downturn.
This is just mistaking correlation for causation, as if you had seen Romans conquering the Mediterranean world while making heavy use of augury by reading entrails and decided that the way to emulate them was to read entrails, not to have the best infantry, and the most infantry.
My neighborhood is in the backyard of a major public university, so I'm acquainted with the same cohort of kids, along with their parents. The parents tend to be highly competitive, focused, and organized, and come from professions -- doctors and professors -- that select for those traits.
I also know a kid who does practically no homework, but is still in that top-scoring cohort. His dad was the same way. ;-)
Just school is not enough. You also need great parents.
I've noticed that in at least one subject -- math -- very few students from any background retain an interest as adults. There has to be a transition from a subject being presented as a series of hoops to jump through, to it becoming an actual passion. Whether that transition occurs is a coin toss. It's easy for people to get busy enough at something productive that doesn't involve math, and so they don't miss it. At my workplace, the small handful of people who are considered to be "math people" come from an apparently random assortment of backgrounds.
Indeed. I think the hierarchy of what factors make the biggest difference goes like this:
1. the kid
2. the parents
3. the teachers
4. the school
The kid has to have at least the basic physical and mental faculties or they are seriously impacted no matter how good the rest of the things are.
Then the parents make the next biggest difference. Even if the teachers and school aren't very good the parents can make up for it and can even excel.
It can be a close call between teachers and parents, because if the parents are doing just the minimum a great teacher can still make a big difference.
Last but still important is the school, meaning the facilities and educational systems in use, separate from the teachers who teach there.
Where I live I see most parents focus on two things: extra tutoring, and schools with fancy facilities. Most don't think they should do anything themselves, that they already paid the school/tutor to teach. An example is that despite the teachers constantly encouraging kids to read with their parents every night, it seems like most kids do their nightly reading on their own if at all.
Homework (and education in general) is a classic arms race, which produces an enormous waste of time and resources. Teachers hate it too.
Humans are not meant to be happy, but to survive. Only the paranoid do. We have to fight back when others are prepared to destroy their lives to compete. There will be no respite until the demographics change, and there is an educational economy of abundant opportunity, not scarcity and existential threat. Ironically, the emancipation and education of women is the only way to achieve this outcome.
When I was young (11-18) I did an insane amount of studying and other activities: private school, 6-day school week, Sat am lessons, 1hr each-way commute, 2-3hr homework per night, Tue pm military cadets, Mon&Thur sports training, Wed&Sat pm school sports matches, Sun county/region sport; school holidays included homework assignments, exam revision, military camps, expeditions, then pre-season sports camps; summer holidays would include part-time jobs, some retail and delivery gigs, but mostly farming and harvesting.
If you live in some parts of Asia, there are no school-age children to be seen on the streets, or in the shopping malls - they are all busy doing something all the time. There are education-malls filled with small outlets providing tutoring and lessons for every subject, from English, to math and piano.
I was recently looking at some business analysis for a traffic management project, including patterns of congestion. One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...".
I don't see how "the emancipation and education of women" will work towards "abundant opportunity, not scarcity and existential threat".
If anything, the entry of women on the job market decades ago increased the supply side of the equation and competition. And whereas before one working adult could provide for a family, now it takes both of the adults working to provide for the same family.
I agree with your comment about women entering the workforce (note that I said ironically). It's another good example of an arms race. The equilibrium with just men working was unstable. As soon as some women start to work, the cost of property in particular starts to rise, then other women are forced to work to afford a mortgage.
(Property is often the constrained resource in the system, which means it captures most of the value from any beneficial change in the economy - e.g. SV startups are ways for geeks to work hard transferring money from VCs to landlords).
However, liberation of women from the home is a goal in itself, and part of the long run solution. When women are emancipated, legally and socially, with access to contraception and education, in a society with a base level of utilities and appliances in the home (or village), and just enough of a welfare system to ensure that children are not seen as a pension policy, then progress can be made towards the sunlit uplands.
The West, NE Asia and China are already past their peaks. India, Africa, Middle East and SE Asia are growing very rapidly. Countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines and Vietnam are all bigger than the largest European country (Germany). Turkey will overtake Germany soon. The first 3 in the list are bigger than Russia.
If half of India's population went to Europe, they would become the majority in every country, and India would still be the second largest country in the world. Nigeria is predicted (UN) to pass the US in 2050 and have 733m people in 2100.
> One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...". Luckily, kids are very resilient.
Resilient yes, but you'll be harming them for life making them get up so early. Their brains just don't work like that and it's inhumane to force somebody into the school system so early. No wonder people hate it.
I sincerely doubt that the buses in question are filled with kids that early. Most likely they're just starting their routes to pick up some high school kids around 6:30. Still way too early IMO, but not quite what you describe.
"I do feel heavy-hearted to see my girls waking up at 4am daily to get ready for school..."
"Traffic during the first few years was not too bad, as we only had to leave the house at 6am, but congestion on the Causeway has gotten worse year after year, so we had to leave at 5am to arrive on time for school at 7.15am."
I felt terrible even getting up at 8:30 for years upon years as a kid/teen. I was unable to sleep early for years so I ended up sleep deprived for the better part of childhood, and on top of that get punished if I turned up late.
Feelings about homework might have non-obvious broader impacts.
Science education content is wretched. Current reform efforts like Common Core and NGSS barely scratch the surface. But still there's a lot of community opposition. Years ago, I had a long conversation with an anti-Core activist, exploring their perspective. It seemed their root cause was their child had found some Core-ish class too hard, and notably here, its homework. And thus a movement gained an activist, trying to prevent other children from suffering similarly. With science education reform as collateral damage.
Which isn't to say that current homework isn't as wretched as the underlying content and pedagogy.
While parents whining about homework isn't new, what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age.
I am, quite rightly I think, skeptical about most educational "research" (remember "new math"--aka set theory?). However, educational research has gotten much better. And there are starting to be consensus answers that conventional psychological research seems to bear out that educational systems simply ignore.
What worked to create human inputs to an assembly line may be quite suboptimal for creating humans capable of functioning in a knowledge-based economy.
I do think homework helps but it should be once a week (maybe it is) and it should be something assigned on say Monday and due the next Monday so you have the weekend if you need it. You should also have opportunities in school to actually do the homework.. maybe homeroom was supposed to be where this was done? I also had kids in homeroom who had no interest in doing homework so it was more of a social hour. Or a zero period which doesn't necessarily have to be in the morning. Or there should be opportunities to do the homework in class. Homework should be more like work.. project based..
>what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age.
This isn't new though. From the article, every fifteenish years there seems to be a shift back and forth between homework being useful and homework being detrimental. And every time this has happened, you could say that better methods were starting to reach consensus answers.
My kids would come home with multiple worksheets to do every night starting in 1st grade. Potentially a good hour or more of work depending on the child.
My understanding is the type of work they send home has not shown to be beneficial based on my wife's graduate work in early childhood education.
Fortunately the school district saw it that way too and such homework was no longer counted as far as grading goes in the early grades.
I had several teachers in high school and college who would do things like homework could give you about a 10% boost in your grade (eg, from a C to a B), or you could just take your test scores. One class I vividly remember after every quiz/test the teacher would say something like "OK people, I'd like to tell you that you need to do your homework, so you can do well on the quizes, but [toast0] got the best score in the class, and didn't turn in any homework, so I can't; the rest of you, should do your homework though." That was high school chem; I did read the assigned texts, but I didn't bother to do most of the homework, because it was very repetitive, and I was doing just fine as-is; I can't remember if I would turn in the couple of problems I did do, or not even bother to write them down.
Sometimes quizzes/exams would have extra credit questions, so you could score something like 120/100 on them. Other classes had a bonus if you got a 5 on associated AP tests.
I've definitely had classes where the homework was optional. In my case it has been higher-level math courses, where there are regular quizzes to verify that you know the material.
There needs to be distinction between different types of homework. Most people probably envision worksheets, problem sets, and book summaries. These sorts of "busy work" are rightfully derided by activists and commenters in this thread.
However, my experience has been that more open-ended project-based learning is quite different. Things like science fair projects, making videos, and independently implementing math from class on programmable calculators engage students differently. Most students don't connect with every project, but it's a good way to feel out people's passions and harness them. When the student has agency in setting a concrete goal and deciding the specifics of how they spend their time, the material they are learning becomes a valued tool that saves them time and effort, rather than something being shoved down their throat.
I used to despise everything related to math because the curriculum kept it segregated from other disciplines, thus hiding it's utility. It wasn't until I was playing around with 3D modeling software for an art project that I really understood how useful trigonometry is. There is something psychological at play that makes it easier to learn something when it isn't the main focus of the activity, but a supporting element needed to achieve a self-defined goal.
Everybody is different. I never cared for rote but never cared for project oriented learning either. For me the preferable thing would be to skip all the busy work problems and go straight for the challenge problems. But most of my teachers graded such that challenge problems only counted if you did well enough on the busy work as well.
As a parent from an educated family, whose own parents surely never complained about my or my siblings' homework, I was surprised to see how much other parents complain about homework.
It is a hard subject even to discuss because it is always approached as if homework requirements are, and should be, the same for students of all ages, even though nobody really expects it to be so. Nobody (in the USA anyway) expects children attending pre-school programs to get homework. At the same time, it's preposterous to think that university students would learn everything inside the classroom. So, sometime between pre-school and university, students should probably start getting homework. One possibility would be to start with a little and gradually increase the amount of outside work required. Then, however, you open the door to questions of how much and how soon, and everyone will have a different opinion.
One of the problems is that many people seem to conceive of education of children like filling a vessel: the students sit passively while the teacher fills their minds with knowledge through their eyes and ears. In fact, the most important things kids learn in school are skills, and the process is not unlike learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. As with all skill learning, practice is required. The important basic skills (e.g. "reading, writing, and arithmetic") especially need practice, and so do meta-skills like "how do I track and prioritize tasks that may not be due for days or weeks?" Also, work like reading, writing papers, and solving math problems can be done without the teacher present, so it's not a particularly good use of limited resources to ask the students to do that work when the teacher is present.
I find it ironic that many of the parents I know who complain about their students' homework load would blink not an eye at sending their kids to football, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, cheerleading, or whatever sports practice for hours every week, knowing that the kids have to practice "if they're gonna be any good."
The only real similarity is that both involve cycles. I'm guessing that both parents and educators routinely hated school as children, so pushed strongly in the other direction as adults. The timing is similar to the fifteen year period described.
Evidence is sparse that anything works in education, once you control for social and personal characteristics of the parents.