Mr. Kalman leads with the child labor argument. You might not know this, but in the old days—we’re talking before the 1900s—kids didn’t have to go to school. They went to work instead. Farm work. Factory work. Or as helpers, called apprentices, in a trade. Some people took advantage of the kids, making them work twelve-hour days and paying them way less than they would adults. Congress passed a law to stop this.
“The Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits minors under fourteen from working more than four hours a day while school is in session. Yet millions of children are doing just that on homework.”
“The child labor laws apply only to minors who work for other people,” Gulch says. “Kids doing homework are working for themselves. For their own benefit.”
“Moreover,” Mr. Kalman continues, “pediatricians are recommending that children between the ages of five and ten get ten hours of sleep per night. Teenagers should be getting nine and a quarter.”
It was Sean’s idea to bring up the health angle. He did all this research on the brain and found out that most teenagers are getting between six and seven hours of sleep a night, which, if you ask me, accounts for their nasty moods at dinnertime.
“So sue for naptime in the high schools,” Gulch says. “But don’t get rid of homework.”
Mr. Kalman tries the Fourteenth Amendment argument. “When learning takes place in school, students have equal access to the teacher. When you send work home, learning becomes separate and unequal. Rich kids get tutors and technology. The poor struggle on their own.”
Alistair, Jaesang, Catalina, and I do fist bumps in our seats.
Livingston Gulch raises his hand.
“Yes, Mr. Gulch?”
“Two kids attend the same school,” he says. “One arrives with lunch from home: grilled salmon with miso sauce and a side of lobster sushi. The other is on the district’s lunch program: a burrito and a packet of hot sauce. By no measure is that fair. But our schools are here to educate children, not equalize them.”
Mr. Kalman holds up a bar graph. “I have here a copy of a graph from the CDC that we submitted. It shows the number of ADHD and GAD diagnoses among school-age children between 2003 and 2017. The CDC report shows a steady increase of five percent a year.”
Jaesang and Catalina fist bump each other. They found those statistics!
Mr. Kalman pulls a second graph from his briefcase. “And this chart shows the average amount of homework done per night, from the updated Cooper Study completed just this year. Note the same five percent a year increase in the number of minutes per night students at all levels are spending on homework. Side by side, these charts tell the story of the growing pressure we put on children and its impact on their mental health.”
There’s a long silence in the courtroom. The three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wait patiently while Gulch thinks of something to say.
And for a minute I feel like this is it. We’ve won. What can he possibly say to that? The more homework kids get, the more stressed they are. It’s right there in those two charts.
But just as a cobra’s head comes up when it’s about to strike, here comes Gulch’s hand.
“Your Honors,” he says, glancing at Sadie, “if I may suggest a flaw in my opponent’s logic. There may be a correlation between the increase in homework and the spike in ADHD and anxiety diagnoses among school-age children, but as any high school debater will tell you, that does not mean there’s a cause. Perhaps school has grown more stressful because there’s more to learn in each precious day. All the more reason why we shouldn’t constrain our teachers by telling them not to give homework.”
“We have testimony from over thirty thousand school-age children—” Mr. Kalman starts to say.
But one of the judges interrupts with, “If they had so much homework, when did they find the time to complain?”
I can see Mr. Kalman starting to wear out. I look at Sadie. She’s worried.
Another judge asks, “And what’s the constitutional violation?”
“The constitutional violation? Well, Your Honors, in Griswold the court established the sanctity of the bedroom. The same exclusion of the government from our nation’s living rooms, dining rooms, and kids’ rooms has to be applied. After four it’s family time.”
Mr. Kalman is talking about Griswold v. Connecticut, a case we looked up on PocketJustice. It’s this cool app Sean showed us on his iPad. You can search any Supreme Court decision and read a transcript of the case. You can even listen to an audio of the arguments.
Griswold was about privacy—that married people should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors. The court ruled that just as the Fourth Amendment won’t let the government search our homes without a reason, it won’t let them tell us what we can and can’t do inside those homes. Mr. Kalman is trying to show that by giving homework, schools are crossing the line that the Fourth Amendment draws at our front doors.
But Livingston Gulch points to another case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which the right to educate children belongs to the states, not the federal government. It’s the same argument he raised the first time we went to court.
Mr. Kalman tries bringing up Brown v. Board of Education to prove that some school-related cases do belong in federal court.
One thing I notice is there’s a Supreme Court case for just about everything, and you’d better know them all if you want to score points.
After about twenty more minutes of arguments, the justices of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signal that time is up. Then they announce that they’ll be going directly into conference. There are too many kids whose lives are affected by this decision. A swift ruling is the best way to restore order in the schools.
I couldn’t agree more—especially if they side with us.
16
Best Sundae Ever
We’re due back in
