And that’s just one weekend!
CHIEF JUSTICE REYNOLDS: Please, don’t show us another.
(The time clock is down to seventeen minutes.)
SADIE WARREN: Furthermore, we find that homework is a health hazard. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends sixty minutes of vigorous daily exercise to combat childhood obesity, which has tripled in this country since 1960. Homework is just another sedentary activity that lasts one to four hours a day.
JUSTICE ROSENBURG: Don’t they have PE anymore?
SADIE WARREN: Yes, Justice Rosenburg, but the physical education programs have been severely cut back. Many schools offer it only once a week.
JUSTICE FITZGERALD: What about recess?
SADIE WARREN: Recess is used as a privilege by some teachers and is taken away when students don’t turn in their homework.
JUSTICE RAUCH: Your concern about the health hazards seems to be far-fetched.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY FROM VISITORS’ SECTION: No way is it far-fetched! Take a look at this!
(Alistair drags his backpack up and plops it on the marble floor in front of the bench.)
My backpack. I brought it all the way from Los Angeles to show you. Had to pay an excess baggage fee at the airport. Every day I drag this thing to school and back home again. It gives me a crick in the neck. Not to mention the long-term damage I imagine it’s doing to my spine. And I’m not the only one. Kids all over the country carry this much and more. They’re weighing in on our website. Sean, what’s the national total up to?
OTHER UNIDENTIFIED BOY FROM VISITORS’ SECTION: 230,456,474 pounds on the backs of school children across America.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY FROM VISITORS’ SECTION: If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, what is?
(There is another pause. This time it’s the justices who are speechless.)
SADIE WARREN: Thank you, Alistair. Besides the bodily damage it does, homework has a negative impact on emotional health, too. If you could visit the homes of school-age children after school, you’d hear small fists pounding tables in frustration. You’d smell coffee being brewed by eleven-year-olds desperate to study for one more test, complete one more task. And you’d see bedside clocks showing one a.m. next to empty beds, where teenagers should be sleeping, but instead they’re hunched over desks, battling a deadline.
(She waits for another pitch, but none comes.)
SADIE WARREN: Moving on, if I may, to a purely legal argument, there is also the privacy question.
(We all look over at Justice DeFazio now.)
We accept that kids have to go to school. It’s the law, and it gives them the benefit of an education—
JUSTICE COHEN: While allowing their parents to work.
SADIE WARREN: Yes, Justice Cohen, but we feel that just as their parents get off work at, say, five or six o’clock, students should have away time too. And that away time should be free of intrusion by the state. In this case, the schools.
JUSTICE RAUCH: Parents take work home. Some of them work all the time. That’s the nature of a competitive society. Shouldn’t we prepare our children for it?
SADIE WARREN: Parents are paid to do the work they bring home, Justice Rauch. Kids are just pressured to do it. If they don’t, they get punished or publicly shamed by teachers who post homework charts in class.
JUSTICE FITZGERALD: Are you saying that there’s no benefit at all to homework?
SADIE WARREN: None proven, Justice Fitzgerald. And that does raise the question, if kids aren’t being paid to do the work, and there’s no proof that the work benefits them, then whom does it benefit? The real estate industry, which enjoys higher home values in neighborhoods with homework-heavy schools? The pharmaceutical industry, which has seen prescriptions for ADHD and anxiety drugs rise at the exact same rate as homework has risen? With so many hours of unpaid work for the benefit of others, then, we believe that homework is itself a violation of child labor laws.
(I check the clock: eleven minutes left.)
SADIE WARREN: Also, if you look to common law principles to support our claim, you’ll find that in 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada granted one family the right to refuse homework for their son.
(Justice Fitzgerald makes a note on a pad.)
JUSTICE COHEN: The examples you cite in your brief, of endless worksheets and online exercises, do seem like a poor use of children’s time. But surely not all homework is as mind numbing as that.
SADIE WARREN: It’s true that some teachers are more creative and challenge their students to think. But they don’t have time. They’re too busy rushing to complete the standards. And they’re under the same pressure kids are to boost test scores.
(Eight minutes.)
SADIE WARREN: I also hope you’ll consider the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. In 1954 this Court found that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal. But there’s another inequality that hasn’t been addressed, and that’s the socioeconomic inequality. During the school day, students sit together, they play together, they learn together. But then they go home—some to an empty home because both parents work, others to a home full of advantages like college-educated moms and dads, technology, and tutors. By giving homework, then, the schools are forcing students back into a condition of separate, unequal, and therefore unconstitutional education.
JUSTICE ROSENBURG: Shouldn’t all kids be doing their homework alone?
JUSTICE FITZGERALD: I did.
JUSTICE DEFAZIO: I did.
JUSTICE RENFRO: I did.
JUSTICE SUERTE: I did.
CHIEF JUSTICE REYNOLDS: Had help.
JUSTICE COHEN: Mom was a teacher. Had help.
JUSTICE RAUCH: Mom and Dad were lawyers. No help.
(The justices all lean forward to look at Justice Williams, but he just rolls his eyes. The court clock turns white: two minutes left.)
JUSTICE RENFRO: So, to be fair to the less fortunate, then, we should abolish homework and expand the school day?
(Sadie freezes. The whole courtroom goes silent. All the kids start to panic.)
SADIE WARREN: No.
JUSTICE RENFRO: And why not?
(The light on the clock turns red: one minute. Sadie looks at me. It’s really
