Socorro Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, like many school districts, has long struggled to fill vacant positions.
“When you have young teachers graduating from teacher colleges, Socorro is not a place that attracts them,” says Ron Hendrix, superintendent of the small district with just over 1,500 students. “There's no nightlife, there's really nothing that draws them here when they could go to Albuquerque, which is an hour away.”
In recent years, the district regularly began the school year with multiple vacant positions vacant. To combat these vacancies, the district adopted a hiring tool increasingly common among rural districts across the country: a four-day school week. Schools that adopt this non-traditional school week have slightly longer hours over four days, and teachers and students have one day off (usually Friday).
Between 1999 and 2019, the number of districts offering 4-day school weeks increased from 108 to 662. For the 2022-23 school year, the number of 4-day districts had soared to 876 in the US.
In the past, the change to the 4-day school week was often motivated by the desire to save funds, but investigation indicates that the district's savings from the change are minimal. Today, the move to a four-day school schedule is motivated by concerns about staffing, as well as an effort to improve the well-being of students and teachers.
“We are seeing continued policy growth by school districts hoping to use the schedule to attract and retain teachers, which is a shift from the previous, largely financial logic,” says Dr. Emily Morton, researcher at the National Center for Longitudinal Data Analysis in Educational Research at the American Research Institutes.
However, the impact of the time change on these factors, as well as academics, is still being debated and studied.
4 Day School Schedule Highlights
in a 4 day schools study in oklahoma, Morton found that bullying incidents were reduced by 39 percent per student and fighting incidents were reduced by 31 percent per student. “Part of it is mechanical,” Morton says. “There are fewer students there, so of course the incidents you would expect to see would also decrease.”
However, reduced time in school buildings doesn't tell the whole story, as students in 4-day schools are in school only 18 percent less time on average. “So there's something else that's a benefit,” Morton says.
The schedule is also wildly popular with students and parents according to surveys conducted as part of the Rand Corporation. report comparing 4-day to 5-day school weeks.
“The approval ratings for the four-day school week are off the charts,” says Morton, who also co-authored the Rand report. “(Parents and students) really love it and say morale at school is high. Children feel more rested. The school climate is better.”
However, when researchers compare the responses of students from 4-day schools to those from traditional 5-day schools, there is not much evidence of a difference in overall morale. “Parents and students say that's something that's happening, but right now it's hard for us to know exactly how it works and how different it is from a five-day school week,” Morton says.
Concerns about the 4-day school schedule
The Rand report on 4-day school weeks found that while student test scores generally stayed the same or improved in 4-day schools, scores tended to improve at a slower rate than in similar schools with a traditional 5-day schedule. The study examined state standardized tests in grades 3 through 8 in mathematics and English language arts between 2011 and 2019 in Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Alaska and South Dakota.
“Both the 4-day school weeks and our 5-day school week comparison districts stayed the same or increased in their test performance during our period, but the 5-day school week districts grew faster,” says Christopher Joseph Doss, a policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, is a co-author of the report. “Indeed, student performance in math and ELA in our study was affected by the 4-day school week policy because if districts had not adopted the policy, students likely would have earned even better grades.”
The differences between the 4- and 5-day schools were small each year, but they added up over time. “At the end of our 8-year period, these small annual differences added up to a significant difference. “Students were between 0.15 and 0.20 standard deviations behind their counterparts in districts with a five-day school week,” Doss says.
A more recent preprint, meaning it has not been peer-reviewed, co-authored by Morton, too found that the 4-day school schedule had no positive impact on academics.
“The paper arguably provides the best analysis of the impact of four-day school weeks on students' academic achievement to date and finds small, negative impacts of the schedule on students' spring reading test scores.” and their progress over the school year in math and reading,” Morton says.
The negative effects were greatest in cities and suburbs. “The impacts of four-day school weeks in rural areas on school year gains are also negative on average for math and reading, but are comparatively quite small and not statistically significant,” he adds.
Beyond these academic concerns, there are also questions about the viability of the schedule in many districts. “The four-day school week is very popular among smaller, more rural districts,” Doss says. “Many people we interviewed in rural districts have grandparents who can care for children, were able to rearrange their work schedules, or shared childcare with neighboring families. It is unknown whether these arrangements are possible in suburban or urban districts.”
4-day calendar in practice
At Socorro Consolidated Schools, the four-day schedule is working well, Hendrix says. Student graduation rates have increased and vacant positions are more easily filled. Fridays are used for sports and other extracurricular activities, but the school building remains open with supplemental educational offerings for children who have no other child care options. While teachers are not required to work, they are encouraged to offer classes on Fridays based on their passions. For example, a teacher might teach a sewing class for a few weeks.
“My teachers and my students, it seems like the morale and energy level at school is a lot better now because everyone has Fridays off,” he says. Hendrix would even go a step further and would like to see a four-day calendar spread to the entire community among city employees and many businesses. “I think it would be amazing, especially if you have a small or medium-sized city where everyone has worked hard for four days and then you have a long weekend.”
Despite the success and popularity of the four-day schedule at Socorro Consolidated Schools, the district may soon be forced to resume a standard five-day schedule, as New Mexico is one of many states rethink four-day schedule. “Oklahoma passed legislation that prohibits met but allows districts to apply for a waiver to be eligible to use it based on a variety of factors, including test scores,” Morton says. “Missouri and Texas debated banning it this year.”
Hendrix vehemently opposes a proposal in the legislature to eliminate four-day schools in New Mexico and says that if the district is forced to return to a five-day schedule, it will lose about 50 percent of its teachers. “So I'll probably retire,” he says.
