I've never assigned homework that takes hours.
I'm not saying this statement applies to you, but I've found through experience and talking with teachers that it's common to underestimate how long it will take to do an assignment.
Charter Schools like the ones in Waiting for Superman are a joke and a half. A public school is designed to educate everyone, a charter school gets to pick and choose. Usually a charter school will flat out deny a child because of a disability, which is highly unfair to special needs students or 2E students. They can also deny a child if the parents aren't going to offer support. The teachers in charter schools are also not the happiest people in the world because their working conditions are ridiculous. I'd sooner leave teaching than work in a charter school. However, no matter where I go I'm treated as the problem.
Wow. Sweeping Statement Alert.
AFAIK, charter schools have exactly one way to pick students: lotteries. They're publicly funded and have to take all comers. If they don't have enough spots, they have to use lotteries to choose students.
Where are you getting your data about the horror of working at charter schools? Citations please (peer-reviewed, ideally).
Around here, we have "parent participation" PUBLIC (not charter) schools. In those schools, the parents are required to commit a lot of time to the school or pay the school if they don't.
Reasonable people can disagree about this subject, and I like to see new perspectives that present reasoned arguments and force me to think in a new way. I've learned a lot here in that regard.
IMO, however, sweeping statements that segue a discussion into pitting charter schools against public schools don't help. Neither does wallowing in feelings of offense.
This is just my opinionated opinion.
Back to the OP: I've observed a misconception in the education world that more homework = rigor (more likely in private schools? Not sure) and that academics are important enough to squeeze out other subjects like art, music, PE and even, in some schools, recess (more likely in public schools? Not sure). We've had numerous discussions on this forum around the idea that compliance is a big theme in many schools.
Personally, I feel that the high-stakes-test driven atmosphere that pervades the United States is forcing schooling to resemble training for multiple choice tests more than education in the classical sense of the term. I can see that kids would be dissatisfied with this (possibly without even knowing what was bugging them and why), and that it could stress them out and make them antsy after school.
There's no denying that the vast majority of public schools focus primarily on the non-gifted, so we could be biased with respect to how we see the answers to the OP's question. NCLB forces this (as well as the testing mania) but it was already a problem before NCLB came along. NCLB formalized things, I suppose.
