The 4-day school week, seen by some leaders as a powerful teacher recruitment tool, could cause as much learning loss as the pandemic—but over a protracted period of time, some education experts are now warning. One study showed that students in 4-day districts fell behind a little bit further every year, say Rand Corporation policy researchers Christopher Joseph Doss and Andrea Phillips in their latest analysis.
“Though these changes were small, they accumulated,” Doss and Phillips contend. “We estimate that after eight years, the damage to student achievement will be about equal to that caused, according to some estimates, by the pandemic.”
Eleventh-graders scored lower in math in high schools that switched to a 4-day school week, a separate 2022 study by the University of Oregon study confirmed. The math gap was even wider in non-rural schools and researchers found that 4-day weeks were also linked to higher rates of chronic absenteeism and reductions in on-time graduation.
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“These bigger cuts seem to be happening in non-rural areas that haven’t thought through all the details of implementation—they may be moving to four-day school weeks for short-term reasons, like cost savings,” said Paul Thompson, lead author on the study and a professor in the university’s College of Liberal Arts. “That’s different from what we’re seeing in rural areas, where it’s really a lifestyle choice for these schools, and they’ve thought a lot about how they should structure their schedule.”
The number of schools on a four-day schedule had grown to over 1,600 by 2019, compared to just 257 in 1999 and more district leaders are now making the switch—most often in rural communities in Missouri, Texas and other states west of the Mississippi River, the RAND report points out.
Making Crosby ISD “a top destination for educators” was a key reason the Houston-area district joined the wave of Texas school systems that have decided to shorten their school week beginning in 2023-24, Superintendent Paula Patterson said in an announcement.
“Our move will attract even more exceptional teachers for our students, leading to high-quality academic outcomes,” Patterson explained. “We also believe this move will increase our recruitment of bus drivers, who are vital in getting our students to and from school safely and on time.”
Flaws in the 4-day school week?
Test scores have risen in districts that switched to a 4-day school week but they did not improve as much as comparable 5-day districts, the RAND researchers found. They also found an increase in morale among administrators, teachers, students, and parents in districts with shorter school weeks. Teachers, for instance, reported feeling less burnout and having more time for lesson planning while some even said they had delayed retirement.
But leaders only enjoy a recruiting advantage when neighboring districts maintain a 5-day schedule and even then it may be a short-term advantage. For example, a 5-day district that, despite paying higher salaries, loses teachers to a nearby 4-day district could also shorten their school week.
“Teachers have a strong preference for working close to home, so when all surrounding districts operate on the same schedule, the four-day week ceases to be an attractive perk in making long-term employment decisions,” the researchers said. “More generally, the four-day school week is being used to sidestep deeper underlying issues that are enduring, complicated, and difficult to fix.”
Spending is at the forefront of those underlying issues. One fewer school a day week helps administrators cut costs on transportation, food service and hourly workers—all of which can be bigger burdens on smaller and rural districts—and funnel some of those savings back into full-time teachers and classrooms. “While the four-day week might temporarily attract talent,” RAND’s researchers concluded, “it does not address the longer-term teacher shortages caused by factors such as high stress and relatively low pay that is not keeping up with inflation or other college-educated or advanced degree professions.”
