Right now schools across the country are changing their weeks to 4 school days instead of 5. There are more reasons than just an extra day off even though that’s all a student could want. 876 districts across 26 states have started doing 4-day school weeks. “The policy was adopted by 876 school districts across 26 states, according to the Oregon State University Four-Day School Week Policy Team, which is up from 650 districts in 2020.” 4-day school weeks have been more popular with large school districts than the smaller and more rural districts.
The 4-day school week has started being implemented as a result of the teacher shortage that is happening. In the states that have changed to 4-day school weeks, the amount of teacher applications that schools have been receiving has increased by a lot. “One noticeable impact was the teacher shortage. “The number of teacher applications that we’ve received has gone up more than 4-fold,” Herl said. “I think this really needs to lead to a bigger discussion nationwide about, you know, what are we going to do to support the teaching profession.” Teachers love the 4-day school week because they still get paid the same amount and can have a three-day weekend. Although they think this is the best way to fix the shortage of teachers, the best way is to pay them better.
Although 4-day school weeks are a good method to bring in teachers, what about the kids’ education? How does a 4-day school week affect children and how does it affect their learning? The 4-day school week works because they add on 35 extra minutes each day to make up for the absence of the fifth day. Researchers studied kids and adolescents, and what they have found is interesting. “When the researchers studied individual groups of students, though, they noticed small differences. For example, when they looked only at children who had scored highest on their pre-kindergarten assessments of letter sounds, letter names and early math skills, they learned that kids who went to kindergarten four days a week scored a little lower on third-grade tests than those who had gone to kindergarten five days a week.” Though researchers saw this small difference, they concluded that a 4-day week doesn’t have detrimental effects on the children.
That was the studies they did on kindergarteners, how about adolescents? How did a 4-day school week affect them? Were the effects good or bad? Well, researchers found that the 4-day week had a more positive effect. “Oklahoma high schools saw less fighting and bullying among students after switching from a five-day-a-week schedule to a four-day schedule, this study finds. Fighting declined by 0.79 incidents per 100 students and bullying dropped by 0.65 incidents per 100 students.” For adolescents, there weren’t any noticeable changes in test scores or their attendance. The only noticeable effect was that the bullying decreased. So it had more of a positive effect than a negative effect.
Are 4-day school weeks a bad thing? I don’t think so. It depends on the number of hours kids spend learning in their school week rather than the amount of days. It doesn’t seem to have detrimental effects on children or adolescents. Most parents are satisfied and happy with the change to 4-day school weeks and the research shows that the effects on children aren’t big. So I don’t think they’re a bad thing but others might disagree. How do you feel about changing to a 4-day school week?
