To save money and help recruit teachers, many U.S. schools are taking Mondays or Fridays off. We look at research on how the four-day school week affects student test scores, attendance and behavior.
by Denise-Marie Ordway / The Journalist's Resource
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Four-day school week research
We updated this piece on the four-day school week, originally published in June 2018, to include new figures, research and other information on Sept. 6, 2023.
Just over 2,100 schools in 26 states have switched to a four-day school week, often in hopes of recruiting teachers, saving money and boosting student attendance, according to the most recent estimate from the Four-Day School Week policy research team at Oregon State University.
Small, rural schools facing teacher shortages have led the trend, choosing to take Mondays or Fridays off and giving teachers and students a three-day weekend every week. To make up for the lost day of instruction, school officials tack time onto the remaining four days.
In places where schools have made the change, school district leaders have marveled at the resulting spikes in applications from teachers and other job seekers.
“The number of teacher applications that we’ve received have gone up more than 4-fold,” Dale Herl, superintendent of the Independence, Missouri school district, told CBS News last month.
Independence, which serves about 14,000 students outside Kansas City, introduced the new schedule when classes there resumed last month. In all, 30% of Missouri school districts now have a four-day school week, The Kansas City Star reported recently.
Schools nationwide faced teacher shortages long before the COVID-19 pandemic. But vacancies grew as the virus, which has killed 1.1 million Americans to date, spread.
In the spring before the pandemic, a total of 662 public school districts used the schedule – up more than 600% since 1999, Paul Thompson and Emily Morton, leading researchers in this field, write in a 2021 essay for the Brookings Institution. That number climbed to 876 during the 2022-23 academic year, Thompson and Morton told The Journalist’s Resource in email messages.
Brent Maddin, executive director of the Next Education Workforce project at Arizona State University, told The New York Times the pandemic has made many teachers feel more undervalued.
“If we’re serious about recruiting people into the profession, and retaining people in the profession, in addition to things like compensation we need to be focused on the working conditions,” he told the Times.
Scholars are still trying to understand the impact of cutting the school week by one day. Most studies focus on a single state or group of states, so their findings cannot be generalized to all schools on a four-day schedule. The research to date indicates:
The amount of time students spend in class varies from state to state.
Some schools offer less instructional time during a four-day school week than they did during a five-day week.
There’s limited cost savings, considering employee salaries and benefits make up the bulk of school expenses. In a 2021 analysis, Thompson estimates schools save 1% to 2% by shortening the school week by a day.
The impact of the condensed schedule differs depending on a range of factors, including the number of hours schools operate and how they structure their daily schedules. Recent research generally finds small drops in student achievement.
Staff morale improved under a four-day school week.
High school bullying and fighting declined.
“For journalists looking for a definitive answer to [the question] ‘Are four-day school weeks a good or bad thing?’, I would caution that it is still too early to tell,” Thompson, an associate professor of economics who is part of Oregon State’s Four-Day School Week Policy research team, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.
Both he and Morton urged journalists to explain that the amount of time schools dedicate to student learning makes a big difference.
“I think too often the importance of instructional time for the impacts of the policy is missed,” Morton, a researcher at the American Institutes of Research, wrote to JR. “It’s pretty critical to the story that districts with longer days (who are possibly delivering equal or more instructional time to their students than they were on a five-day week) are not seeing the same negative impacts that districts with shorter days are seeing.”
Keep reading to learn more about the research: https://journalistsresource.org/education/four-day-school-week-research/
We’ll update this collection periodically.