Now that is a complete load of bureaucratic hogwash right there. I promise you that Marlin ISD didn't switch to a 4-day week to improve attendance and improve "bell to bell" learning.
Moving to a 4-day work week was 100% a money-saving measure at the expense of students, nothing more. Keeping the school closed an extra day each week saves on all the classified hourly staff like cafeteria staff, custodians, bus drivers, etc. as well as utilities.
And for remote rural districts like Marlin it lets them keep teacher salaries lower because it is easier to attract teachers commuting in from outside the area if they only have to drive in to Marlin 4 days a week instead of 5 and get a 3-day weekend every week. Otherwise they would have to raise salaries higher to keep pace with surrounding suburban districts that pay more.
4-day school weeks actually make attendance WORSE, because each day of school a student misses is actually 25% more instructional time missed than on a 5-day week.
This topic has actually been studied extensively and 4-day school weeks have been shown to harm student achievement. Especially in poor and underprivileged districts where home-time is likely to be less educationally productive. From Education Week:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/4-day ... ks/2021/10
The tradeoff for those benefits, though, shows in learning. Several years after adopting a four-day schedule, the researchers found, those districts saw slower rates of student progress than similarly situated districts that retained a five-day schedule.
Also....
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-point ... hool-week/
But now seven newer studies generally find negative results – some tiny and some more substantial. One 2021 study in Oregon, for example, calculated that the four-day week shaved off one-sixth of the usual gains that a fifth grader makes in math, equal to about five to six weeks of school. Over many years, those losses can add up for students.
The most recent of the seven studies, a preliminary paper posted on the website of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in August 2022, is a large multi-state analysis and it found four-day weeks harmed some students more than others.
Researchers at NWEA, led by Morton, and at Oregon State University began by analyzing the test scores of 12,000 students at 35 schools that had adopted four-day weeks in six states: Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Like the more recent crop of studies, they found that four-day weeks weren’t great for academic achievement on average. The test scores of four-day students in grades three through eight grew slightly less during the school year compared to hundreds of thousands of students in those six states who continued to go to school five days a week. (City students were excluded from the analysis because no city schools had adopted four-day weeks. Only rural, small town and suburban students were included.)
The switch seemed to hurt reading achievement more than math achievement. That was surprising. Reading is easier to do at home while math is a subject that students primarily learn and practice in school. During pandemic school closures and remote learning, for example, math achievement generally suffered more than reading.
As a teacher I'd be happy to work a 4-day work week for purely selfish reasons. But I don't pretend it will improve student performance especially at high-poverty schools like Marlin. The evidence points in the opposite direction, especially for high-poverty districts.
