Dive Brief:
- Four-day school weeks have “significant negative effects” on students’ math and reading performance, according to a new multi-state analysis of the schedule’s impact on student achievement over 11 years published in the Economics of Education Review.
- Overall, the study found that four-day school weeks significantly hurt students’ fall-to-spring test score achievement in math by a 0.05 standard deviation and in reading by a 0.06 standard deviation.
- The shortened week’s negative impact is greater for non-rural schools, according to the study. For instance, the fall-to-spring test score achievement in rural schools with four-day weeks dipped by just 0.01 standard deviations in math and 0.04 standard deviations in reading, but non-rural schools saw twice the decline with test scores dropping by 0.08 standard deviations in math and 0.09 standard deviations in reading.
Dive Insight:
Previous research has found “ambiguous impacts” on student performance from four-day school weeks, the Economics of Education Review study said. And though a more recent study in Missouri reported that the model had a neutral impact on academic achievement, this latest research lends credence to policymakers’ concerns about the shortened schedule, which has grown in popularity in recent years.
Between the 2008-09 and 2018-19 school years, the study analyzed data from NWEA’s student test scores, school- and district-level demographic data from the National Center on Education Statistics, and school-level data on four-day weeks from a national database. Within that period, the number of districts with four-day school weeks jumped from 231 to 665 nationwide. The study closely looked at districts in six states including Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.
As of the 2022-23 school year, about 2,100 schools across 900 districts have adopted four-day school weeks, Paul Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the new study, recently told K-12 Dive.
When four-day school weeks first gained traction, districts rationalized the model as a way to save money in operational costs. But as more studies concluded that the model doesn’t save districts much, the latest wave began to view a switch to shorter weeks as a way to improve teacher recruitment and retention.
