I stopped doing homework to program. I'm not sure I'd advise the same to others, but because of all the extra-curricular activities I did with programming, I feel it was worth it.
Reading some of these comments, I suspect that the amount of homework has gone up, and that is the reason for much of the frustration. Not just that there is busy work, but the sheer quantity of busy work.
My kids are going to a Catholic elementary school, and a parent who transferred to their school from the public school said that the amount of homework is much less in the Catholic school, and her kids actually like school now. Frankly, I find the idea of lots of homework in elementary school bullshit. I don't believe elementary kids really benefit from multiple hours of homework every night, and believe that it could lead to burnout by middle school. My son in 1st grade gets homework, but it seems more to get him comfortable with the idea, rather than to consume 2 more hours that he could spend doing other things, including reading things that personally interest him.
That puts a lot of the complaints here in a different perspective for me. If there is so much homework that it doesn't leave time for Perl hacking, that's a big fail on the part of the school system.