What’s to blame for our country’s flagging education system? Is it:

A) Mediocre teaching?

B) Federal policies, such as No Child Left Behind, which increase the amount of time children spend taking tests, instead of learning?

C) Harried parents who juggle two jobs to keep food on the table instead of helping children do homework?

D) An out of date curriculum?

E) Burned-out students who face three or four hours a night of homework?

According to a 2006 poll conducted by the Associated Press and America Online, it is not answer E, even though New York City students at elite public and private schools might disagree.

The poll, in which 1,085 American parents were interviewed, found that 57% felt their children had the right amount of homework, 23% felt there was too little, and 19% felt there was too much.

According to the country’s leading expert in the field of homework, Professor Harris Cooper, author of “The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents” (Corwin Press), this is good news. “For every parent who thinks their child is getting too much, there’s a parent who thinks their child is getting too little,” Mr. Cooper said.

The poll also found that on average, American children have roughly as much homework each night as the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association recommend in their 10 minutes per grade guideline.

But Mr. Cooper says he receives plenty of phone calls from parents complaining that their children are spending far too much time doing homework. “Most of the phone calls I receive are from parents who are economically well off,” he said. “They are high achievers themselves and their children attend private schools.”

City students have become accustomed to such a workload. “I have at least three hours of homework each night, if not four,” a 16 year old student at Horace Mann said. “I get home at about 6:30 after practice, then I eat dinner and take a shower. Four hours of homework later, I’m fried.”

Horace Mann students aren’t the only ones facing such pressure — Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told me recently that he thinks New York City public high school students should be doing three or four hours a night of homework.

It’s concerning that private schools and elite public schools in New York keep doling out hours upon hours of work, especially when Mr. Cooper’s studies have conclusively found that there is a positive correlation between homework and test results — but only up to a certain point.

“A little amount of homework may help elementary school students build study habits,” Mr. Cooper said. “Homework for junior high students appears to reach the point of diminishing returns after about 90 minutes a night. For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and three hours of homework a night, after which returns diminish.”

Mr. Cooper added, “Opinions cannot tell us whether homework works. Only research can.”

Educators and parent-activists are on solid ground when they point out that middle school students who work 90 minutes a night on homework do just as well as students who work three hours. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that there is little or no relationship between homework and achievement for elementary school students. Researchers serve our children well by reminding teachers that the most beneficial homework is practice related — math drills or vocabulary.

But these same advocates undermine their own arguments when they point to international comparisons that show countries with the highest scoring students, such as Japan, receive little homework, while countries with very low scores, such as South Africa, have teachers who assign a great deal of homework.

“The international comparisons can be very misleading because the different countries vary on so many different dimensions,” Mr. Cooper said. “It wouldn’t be surprising to find that the countries who give the most homework also have the shortest school day, the fewest number of school days per year, and the least well-trained teachers.”

In Japan for example, children have a summer break that is 40 days long, and two 10-day vacations throughout the year. Compare that to South African students, who will have vacation this year betwee March 24th and April 10th, June 23rd to July 15th, September 22nd to September 30th, and December 1st to January 8th — not to mention the fact that the average student to teacher ratio in South Africa is 40 to 1, while in Japan it’s 21 to 1. Is the amount of homework that South African students receive relevant?

To correctly answer the multiple choice question posed at the beginning of the column, according to Mr. Cooper, we would need to spend multiples of what our country has committed to educating our children.

“What we need is a comprehensive approach that commits resources equal to the problem,” Mr. Cooper said. “We’re not spending nearly enough to solve the problem. I don’t want to take the responsibility off the educators. But right now, we lack the information that would tell us the best way to educate kids. We need to invest in the profession of teaching. We need to invest in the development and critical testing of new and innovative approaches to curriculum. We need to reduce the gap in funding and resources between schools that serve the rich and schools that serve the poor.”

sarasberman@aol.com