The Four-Day School Week: Impact on Student Achievement

1. The Four-Day School Week: Impact on Student Achievement Paul M. Hewitt George S. Denny University of Arkansas

2. Conventional Wisdom Says: • Longer Day is better. • Longer Year is better. • More time on a task will increase learning. • Less time off for vacations will eliminate learning loss.

3. The Four-Day Calendar • Students attend four days per week but a longer day so total annual minutes are the same as five-day calendar. • Predominately rural. Not a major National Impact. • Few students attend rural school districts (See next slide) • First known four-day calendar was in South Dakota in 1931. • Scheduled academics for four days and extra-curricular activities on the fifth day.

4. Where Do Students Go to School? • 2001 Data (But it hasn’t changed much.) • 48,100,000 Students K-12 in U.S. • 16,992 School Districts • Almost 25% of all students attend in the 100 largest school districts. (0.6% of all school districts) • Think about how this drives education policy making!!!!! • 24.2% of school districts have less than 300 students and educate 1% of the population. • 60.9% of school districts have less than 1,500 students and educate on 10% of the population. • http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/10760/How_School_Districts_Size_Up.html

5. My Research Bias. • No bias going into this! None at all!!! • Don’t really care what the results showed.

6. Main reason for going to a four-day week? Money! • Early 70’s Unity Elementary in Maine saved $13,000 in operating costs in the first five months. (Currently 1490 students) • 1973 Oil Embargo forced districts to cut costs. • Closing down one day a week can save up to 20% in utilities and transportation. • Cimarron, New Mexico started four–day in 1973 to save money. They have been on the schedule since then.

7. The Only One Who Likes Change is a Wet Baby! • Initial proposal met with resistance. • Baby sitting/ child care. • Loss of days of school. • Teachers opposed longer day (and change in general). • Teachers complained they couldn’t cover the material. • Change phenomenon was similar to going to a Multi-Track YRE Calendar. • Hated it. Loved it.

8. Motivators • Cost savings. • Improved Attendance, Discipline and Participation. • Popularity. • Highly popular with students, parents, teachers. • 95% of teachers like it. • Felt they covered more and students were more focused. • 95-96% of parents like it. • One newly elected board was recalled. • Few instances of districts abandoning it.

9. Academic Performance • Studies are lacking. • 1984 Study in Colorado using ITBS. N’s of 62 & 45. Students were taught on 5-day for two years and then on 4-day for two years. No significant change in performance. • Webster County in 2002 to 2005 again compared student on CTBS who switched from 5 to 4-day. The students showed improvement, but the district had already been on an upward trend. • Merryville, LA. (2003) ACT scores went for 18.7 to 20.0. • All studies were very small. However, none showed that four-day week was not at least equal to five-day. • Recent South Dakota newspaper article (May 4, 2010) said that 16 districts on 4-day had seem a drop of .5 percentage points in math and 2.1 percentage points when compared to rest of the state (statistical treatment was probably invalid.) • Colorado 2009: “Both groups of districts perform similarly… Students show very similar results…. As reflected by Colorado Growth Model.”

10. Study Methodology. • Colorado • 178 school districts • 62 are on four-day week. (34% of the districts) • Only 2.7% of the states enrollment. • Matched 4 and 5 day schools on enrollment size and FRL%. • Total students represented in the study was 27,842. • Enrollments were positively skewed so we transformed the enrollment variable by adding 50, then taking the natural logarithm. This made the enrollments nearly normal. • Distribution of FRL% satisfied a test for normality so no adjustments were needed. • Not every district had a match and those were excluded leaving 45 school districts.

11. Variables Tested • Colorado has a combined measure of a percentage all students proficient or advanced overall on their Criterion-referenced exam. • Given the small size of many districts it was difficult to break down accurately for math and ELA scores but most recent Colorado results allowed it. Because of small size we had to exclude a few districts. • Used three paired sample t tests to look at means for elementary, middle, and high school. Sought a .05 level of significance.

14. * p < .05

16. Conclusions • There is no statistically significant difference between student performance on Four and Five-Day weeks. • Mean scores are higher for students on Five Day week at all levels with the difference greatest at the elementary levels. This indicates need for further study. • The four-day week is not any better than the five-day week but it appears not to be significantly worse (statistically).

17. Reflections – Further Study • The four-day week implementation varies greatly. Some close down totally, others use the fifth day for enrichment. How do these variations impact student performance? • What are the time on task differences between 4 and 5 day weeks? Do teachers really utilize time more efficiently? • Get individual student data and build a virtual district and match it up to get a more in-depth look at ELA and Math as well as sub-population variations. Would require access to individual student data. • Other ideas? Suggestions?