Shorter school week? Not so fast
Grant Addison
Video Embed
Faced with the prospect of increasing teacher shortages and ever-present costs, hundreds of public school districts across the country have begun to utilize a radical new education strategy: Moving to a four-day school week.
As CBS News reports, “900 school districts in the United States currently use a four-day weekly academic schedule. That number rose from 650 districts in 2020 to 876 districts, across 26 states, in 2023. While smaller, rural districts have been more likely to favor the schedule, larger districts are now shortening their school weeks in an effort to recruit and retain teachers.”
MASSACHUSETTS DENIES CATHOLICS THE RIGHT TO ADOPT
This idea makes good sense, in theory. Cutting down the school week by 20% should go a long way to reducing academic costs. A shorter work week would presumably aid districts in recruiting prospective teachers, especially in the smaller, poorer, and more rural zip codes that typically struggle with attracting new educators. Some districts report that they have even seen such success: “In Chico, Texas, where the public school district also announced a shift to four-day academic schedules this year, officials said positions that used to receive five applications were suddenly receiving more than 20,” CBS News Texas reported this spring.
Yet, in schooling, the realities of reform are always much messier than they appear on paper. For one thing, the cost savings from moving to a shorter weekly schedule are vastly less than one might expect. Far from a 1-to-1 exchange, some studies have shown that the savings of reducing the school week are closer to 2-5%, rather than 20%. The physical school building and all its concomitant costs don’t magically dissipate simply because the students are no longer forced to show up there on Mondays. Sure, you might not have to run as many lights from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. one day a week, but that doesn’t mean the costs of maintaining school buses, academic and extracurricular facilities, or any number of things operate any differently. And it most certainly does not mean that administration or teacher salary contracts are (or will ever be) altered to reflect a “shorter work week.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
That school children go to school Monday-Friday, from morning to afternoon, five days a week, roughly 36 weeks a year is as central to the idea of American schooling as it is to the legal contracts and policy regime by which the system operates. Public schools are the most crucial childcare system in America, and that is not changing any time soon. The ability for parents to drop their children off at a (relatively) safe place for 180 days during the year while they go off to work is arguably the single most effective feature of American public schools. It’s sure as hell not the education they’re providing.
There is no inherent reason students should go to class roughly five hours a day, five days a week; just look at the average schedule at colleges and universities. Large, innovative changes to our floundering public education system are necessary, and experiments should be welcomed. This includes those 900 districts tinkering with the traditional school-week structure. While that number may sound like a lot, it represents only a fraction of our more than 13,000 total districts. And should that number ever get high enough to threaten the overall status quo, reformers are going to have a nasty fight on their hands.