Posted on 05/07/2023 9:32:19 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
MINERAL WELLS, Texas — Desperate to fill open positions amid a statewide teacher shortage, school officials in this rural North Texas city of about 15,000 chose to follow the lead of neighboring districts by converting to a four-day school week at the start of the current student year.
“We decided if we can’t beat them, join them,” Superintendent John Kuhn said.
As the school year nears a close next month, Kuhn proclaimed the four-day week “a really good success,” which, among other positives, produced a surge of qualified teacher applicants that helped the district fill its vacancies. The seven-member school board has unanimously authorized the four-day schedule for the new school year that starts in August.
Nationwide, the number of four-day schools has increased by 600% over the past two decades, now numbering more than 1,600 in 24 states, according to research published in 2021. The schedule is most popular in small, rural districts. In Colorado, which has the largest percentage, 124 of the state’s 178 districts (70%) follow a four-day schedule.
Many four-day schools report higher test scores, fewer discipline problems and strong support from parents, teachers and staff. But amid the success stories, the idea is facing headwinds as emerging research points to academic declines and other problems.
School districts that go from five days to four typically make up at least some of the missing hours by adding time to the other days or extending the school year. But four-day schedules average only 148 school days per year, resulting in less time in school than the national average of 180 days per year for five-day schools.
Several states have imposed restrictions or bans on four-day schools. In Oklahoma, for example, a 2019 law requires school districts to seek waivers for four-day schools. Lawmakers in Missouri and Texas are pushing legislation to block the practice.
In another part of North Texas, the suburban Mesquite Independent School District, just east of Dallas, three months ago pulled back from what had seemed to be almost certain implementation of a four-day school week, after a comprehensive study raised fears of academic setbacks among fragile student populations.
The six-state analysis, published last summer by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, found lower student achievement in four-day schools, with larger negative effects among Hispanic students, as well as in those in towns and the suburbs, as compared to rural areas.
Reviewing the relatively new findings at a board meeting in February, Mesquite officials dropped the four-day concept out of fear it would result in harmful consequences for students, 61% of whom are Hispanic.
“I took it off the table as the administration recommendation,” Superintendent Angel Rivera told Stateline. “I’m not going to experiment on kids.” Lawmakers push back
Over the past several years, school districts in many states have rushed to embrace the four-day school week in hopes of easing a variety of problems, from staff vacancies to budget pressures, including those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the analysis published by the Annenberg Institute.
In some states, lawmakers are pushing back.
In Missouri, where more than 160 school districts (out of 518) will follow four-day schedules next year, a Senate-passed education bill carries an amendment by Democratic state Sen. Doug Beck that would prohibit four-day school weeks in cities with more than 30,000 residents, unless approved by district voters.
Beck, whose district includes the St. Louis area, said he believes Missouri should mandate five-day school weeks, calling the reduced schedule “a bad idea” and “a push to the bottom.”
In Texas, state Sen. Donna Campbell, Republican vice chair of the Senate Education Committee, also is pushing a bill that would require five-day weeks.
Campbell said in a statement that her bill has “spurred a robust public discussion regarding the relationship between students’ instructional time and academic achievement. In the future, I would like to see Texas collect data on student achievement comparing the various school week models.”
At a committee hearing on her bill, Campbell said the four-day schedule “has unintentionally caused hardships on working families and does not seem to improve student outcomes.” Research also suggests “that it seems to have some negative effects on children,” she said.
But school district officials who testified during the hearing were unanimous in their opposition to the bill, saying it would override local decision-making.
“We know what works for us,” said Paula Patterson, superintendent of the Houston-area Crosby Independent School District, which serves more than 6,000 students. When Crosby switches to a four-day schedule next fall, it will be the largest Texas district to do so.
“Four days with an exceptional teacher is much more effective and productive than five days with a less effective teacher.” Recent research
Scholarly research on four-day school weeks has been slow to emerge, leaving school districts to rely heavily on anecdotal conclusions.
“All of the research we have today is almost exclusively from the last three to four years,” said Emily Morton of Portland, Oregon-based NWEA, a nonprofit educational research organization formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association. Morton was one of the authors of the study published by the Annenberg Institute.
In addition to that analysis, there have been at least seven other major studies, including a 2021 study by the RAND Corporation and an Oregon analysis led by Paul Thompson, another coauthor of the analysis published by the Annenberg Institute. Thompson’s Oregon study found that 11th graders on a four-day schedule performed worse on math tests than five-day students.
The findings, Morton said, are largely “a story of trade-offs,” showing an overall small to medium “negative effect” on achievement, though close to zero in rural districts, along with positives such as downturns in fighting and bullying.
Morton acknowledged, however, that the shortened week has been a morale booster in many districts, reducing time pressures, adding to family togetherness and softening academic stress. School district leaders say the reduced schedule has curtailed or eradicated vacancies and eased the workload on staff.
“The folks who do this schedule, they love it,” Morton said. “The communities are really positive about it.”
Though some schools have chosen Monday as the off-day, Friday is the new Saturday in most districts. However, many schools remain open on the expanded weekend for optional extra instruction or catch-up days for teachers.
Nine months a year?
Just another way society is trying to push a 4-day work week on employers !!
K-12 education does not work with a 4 day week. Kids don’t have the attention span to go for more than 7:30-3:00
For starters, check ANY data you can find on your state; our kids are dumber than EVER before!
Secondly, it might NOT be a bad thing to keep them out of the ‘Indoctrination Centers’ for an extra day each week. ;)
This may eventually break the back of the teachers unions.
That 1/5 drop in pay is gonna hurt.
Bingo
“Four days with an exceptional teacher is much more effective and productive than five days with a less effective teacher.” (Sorry, can’t figure out how to put the quote in italics)
No Sherlock! Whatever gave you that idea! The problem is that the odds of one getting an exceptional teacher are low, while these same school districts are not going to fire the less effective teachers so it will now be four days with a crap teacher.
I personally believe that an Associate's Degree or even a teacher's credential certificate is good enough to be a teacher.
Also, classes should be an hour, and there should be 30 minute breaks between classes so kids can socialize and grab a snack or something.
Most parents treat public school as a babysitter, so yes...I guess this would upset them.
I can't speak for China, but in Japan, the school situation is very much different than here.
On the one hand, Japanese children go to school six days a week, with Saturday being a half-day, and they don't have a summer vacation, but there are chunks of vacation time throughout the school year (April-March) that add up to schooling about ten months total.
On the other hand, Japanese schooling is not nearly as academically difficult as one would expect. The proof of this is that most Japanese students who want to get ahead go to after-school schools called juku, often going on into the evening with very difficult instruction, preparing students for the exams necessary to get into top universities and high schools. Moreover, Japanese students who want to learn music go at it as a very high level, often spending three hours a day practicing their musical instrument, in addition to all the other schooling.
I say pay teachers depending on the results their students have on progressively designed standardized test scores each month...
Good!
Nothing wrong with 4 x 10hr days. It's awesome! I've gotten to enjoy it.
GMTA! You nailed it. Mom and Dad are going to need 4 day work weeks to stay home and babysit the kids. Of course, they’re going to need to get the same pay they are getting now.
Ask any homeschooling family about the amount of time required to educate a child. They don’t think in days. They think in hours per day. When I homeschooled my children, we were finished with school in time to listen to Rush (noon).
We schooled at least five days per week. The reason was more new material could be covered per week, which meant more material learned per year. We quickly found that such metrics as reading and doing math at grade-level was meaningless. Those measures are for the incompetent.
Morons with Ed degrees do not think about the most effective and efficient ways for children to learn. They do not have focus. They present tons of needless and nonproductive garbage in what they teach. Real information, if even addressed, is lost in their woke and politically correct clutter. They compound that with group projects, make-work homework and assignments that require hours to complete only to learn something that should take minutes.
There is no group of people in America that is unable to think and perform than government school teachers and administrators.
The dirty little secret of education is that a reasonably intelligent child with a reasonably motivated female mother and male father (and it's stupid that we have to add those adjectives) is going to become educated in a four-day school, a five-day school, a six-day school, an asynchronous online school, a home school, or just sitting at the library reading books. Whether or not they become intellectual depends on their inborn level of brain power.
If the parents are not motivated, or are not there (depending on the reason why they are not there), only a self-motivated child is going to become educated, regardless of the method made available.
To misquote Chairman Mao, let a hundred designs of school bloom, let a hundred methods of education contend. In short, let schooling become the educational equivalent of any other free-market private retail competition, and see what happens to students within a generation. Keep the 19-century industrialized everyone-in-a-desk model of indoctrinational schooling, and watch stupidity continue to abound.
Yep.
Another expense for working parents who rely on after school programs or daycare for when their children aren’t in school. Either that or an increase in latch-key kids.
No you watch; the 4 day school week will be followed by a demand for a 20% increase in pay
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