Seems unlikely, eh? The Case against Homework, a book by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish explores the myth of importance of homework towards your child’s educational outcomes. I remember being piled with homework after school and threatened with completing it before going out to play so as to “stay ahead of my classmates”. I bet they were told the same in a classic game of pitting one kid against the other and watching them slowly rot away in the rat race. But does homework have any other external effect apart from harming an individual’s outlook toward life (as if that isn’t dire enough)?

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing mentions the effect of No Child Left Behind on neighborhoods and property prices:

No Child Left Behind and standardized testing not only turns your child into a slave to her test-scores, but they can even affect your property values: a school with low test-scores brings down the neighborhood property values. That means that whatever your approach to your kids, the chances are that the other parents in your neighborhood are busting their asses to get their kids great test scores, drilling them, sending them to tutors, helping them with assignments that they were meant to complete themselves. If you don’t do the same, your kids will suffer by comparison [emphases mine].

So it isn’t enough just getting in but also more important to keep fighting hard by keeping at it and how? By doing homework that in all probability is not going to make much difference in your education anyway. But it is like the rolling juggernaut that no one wishes to jump off in fear of being crushed under.