A four-day school week as a solution to the teacher shortage?
Not a good idea according to recent research.
Education in the Netherlands is in crisis. More and more students are not achieving the required reference levels in reading and arithmetic. Many students leave education as functional illiterates (they can’t read a medical leaflet or an official letter from the municipality) and/or are barely numerate (they can’t calculate what the discount on something in the store entails or what their smartphone with subscription actually costs). In short, we are experiencing an educational disaster. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
There are also a lot of reasons given as to why all this is the case. Consider the use of unproven effective teaching methods or proven ineffective methods, poorly trained or even unqualified people in the classroom, an overcrowded, ever-expanding curriculum, unmotivated or easily distracted students, and so on. One can argue about this, but – surprise – I won’t do that here either.
What can’no’t be disputed is that there is a shortage of teachers. As a result, classes become larger, lessons are cancelled and teachers become overworked, with all the unpleasant consequences that entail. A frequently heard solution is a school week of four instead of five days but with the same number of teaching hours. So four longer school days. That sounds attractive. It happens in business too. Instead of a five-day working week where someone works more than seven hours a day (36 hours), a four-day working week of nine hours a day. Some people and companies swear by this, so why not in education?
Unfortunately… Emily Morton, Paul N. Thompson and Megan Kuhlfeld very recently published an insightful article about this. They examined the effects of a four-day school week on learning performance and progress in reading and arithmetic/maths per semester. To this end, she collected data from standardized tests in six American states from urban and rural schools. Thanks to an astonishingly high response rate of 95%, they collected more than six million scores from fall and spring tests in math/math and reading from approximately one million students (grade 1 to second grade) from more than 1,700 schools in 619 school districts. They then compared schools with a four-day and a five-day school week where the number of teaching hours was the same.
Morton and colleagues conducted this study because, like in the Netherlands, schools in the United States (US) are increasingly implementing four-day school weeks without any data on their impact on learning. In the US, states, districts and schools make policy decisions about the four-day school week “with ambiguous information about its effect on student achievement,” the researchers said. Because previous research did not provide a consensus on the effects of a four-day school week. The average effects found are not significant in most studies. In other words: according to a summary of the results, it doesn’t matter for student performance whether you have a four- or five-day school week.
That is why the three researchers delved deeper into the data. Using a so-called difference-in-differences approach (where you not only look at basic test results, but also at the differences in learning across semesters and school years), they wanted to investigate the effects of four-day school weeks on student performance and their progress within the school year.
They not only found significant negative effects of a four-day school week on academic performance at the end of the school year, but also a negative effect on the ‘normal gains’ in math/math and reading per semester. Progress in reading and arithmetic/maths per semester also lagged behind the four-day school week compared to the five-day week. This was especially true for students in city schools and girls.
For policymakers, schools and parents, this study supports their concerns about the effects of four-day school weeks on student achievement and growth. In other words, for learning the following applies: 4 X 1.25 ≠ 5.
Morton, E., Thompson, P. N., & Kuhfeld, M. (2024). A multi-state, student-level analysis of the effects of the four-day school week on student achievement and growth. Economics of Education Review , 100 , 102524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102524
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