Time…The Final Frontier

Time.

It’s one of the most difficult challenges for our K-12 system to master.

Ask them about anytime, anywhere learning and they give you a serious “deer in the headlight” stare.

The traditional system is much more comfortable with the time allotted for learning they’ve been using for, well, at least 180 years now.

Around 2010, our traditional system announced they had something innovative up their sleeves – the four-day school week. Seems like some K-12 leaders saw what some businesses were doing, before, during, and after the pandemic, and wanted to join the band.

This week, The 74 posted an article focusing on the four-day school week and whether it was achieving the outcomes desired or not:

“In recent years, hundreds of school districts across the United States have responded to labor issues and straitened budgets by switching to a four-day weekly schedule. But new research from Missouri suggests that cutting out a day of instruction doesn’t yield the benefits proponents hope to achieve.”

“Circulated as a working paper on Monday, the study offers a statistical analysis of the effects of shifting to a shorter week alongside extensive reflections from educators themselves. Most of those teachers, principals, and superintendents spoke favorably about the change, saying they believed it had helped their school attract and retain teachers in the midst of a tight job market.”

“The numbers tell a different story, however. On average, the 178 Missouri districts that adopted a four-day week since 2010 did not improve at either recruiting new teachers or retaining their veterans. Andrew Camp, a scholar at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute and one of the paper’s authors, said district leaders’ enthusiasm for four-day weeks was likely grounded in the sincere belief that they could be the answer to persistent staffing challenges.”

“’These things spread through word of mouth, they grab hold of people’s imaginations, and we end up with this rapid adoption of four-day school weeks,’ Camp said. ‘But the fact that is was such a small effect – for a lot of these districts, it’s one teacher being retained every three years – was really striking.’”

“The almost negligible results, and officials’ apparent misapprehension about their true magnitude, are particularly salient given both the scale of the four-day phenomenon and the speed with which it has been embraced.”

“Mirroring national trends, the number of districts throughout Missouri operating on a shortened schedule has skyrocketed over the last decade and a half, accounting for one-third of the statewide total last year. Twelve percent of all students, and 13 percent of all teachers, now experience a four-day week (smaller figures proportionally, because they live almost exclusively in rural areas with smaller headcounts).”

“The initial wave of transitions, beginning in the early 2010s, is usually attributed to states’ need to contain education costs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But in the study’s 36 interviews with leaders of Missouri schools and districts, along with several teachers, respondents generally agreed the main effect of the scheduling change was to slow turnover and make schools more attractive places to work.”

“At least one superintendent credited the four-day week – which requires teachers to work longer days when school is in session, effectively holding instructional hours constant – with a surge in job applications and a sizable drop in workforce churn. Several others claimed that a longer weekend was a vital feature in drawing teachers to far-flung communities that cannot afford to offer top salaries.”

“But after examining state administrative data between the 2008-09 and 2023-24 school years, including figure on teachers’ school and district assignments, education levels, and experience, Camp and his co-authors found that four-day districts won only meager advantages. Switching to a truncated schedule results in just 0.6 job exists per 100 teachers, an effect that falls below the bar for statistical significance.”

…

“Notably, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released state data indicating that implementation of four-day weeks was associated with only minor drops in test performance during the 2019-20 school year, though they disappeared in later years.”

“Negative findings do not appear to have dimmed the public’s enthusiasm for the idea. In 2023, a poll from the education policy group EdChoice showed that 60 percent of parents supported the possibility of their children’s school moving to a four-day schedule; just 27 percent of respondents were opposed.”

“Emily Morton, a researcher at the assessment group NWEA who has conducted several studies of the effects of the four-day week, said the Missouri paper was yet more evidence that the policy, whatever its attractiveness to parents and schools, did not offer much measurable upside.”

“’Whether or not the four-day week is a good thing, it doesn’t seem to meet this particular need,’ Morton said. ‘It doesn’t save a lot of money, it doesn’t seem to do good things for students, and we don’t have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. My sense, after studying this for a few years, is that communities just really like it.’”

…

“Camp said the results of his study offer forewarning to the education community. In light of the existing evidence around diminished instruction, he concluded, state and local authorities shouldn’t make cavalier decisions with their instructional time.”

“’This is something that’s a potentially risky gamble, and there don’t seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. So I do think this should make everyone very cautious about adopting the four-day school week.”

Here’s a big problem with our traditional K-12 system. They are unwilling to dive into the deep end, in this case adopting and embracing a “anytime, anywhere” approach to learning, so they dip their toe into the proverbial water and celebrate the four-day week – when there is no evidence that the four-day week does anything positive for adults or, more importantly, kids.

Here’s an idea –

Let an adult learning leader negotiate with a group of 20 young learners about when they would like to learn and when they need time off. Then, begin building learning time built on that negotiation. It works for millions of adults these days. Why wouldn’t it work for millions of kids?

Til tomorrow. SVB