Planet Money - Cutting school... by 20%

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Right now, a lot of school districts across the country are making a pretty giant change to the way public education usually works. Facing teacher shortages and struggling to fill vacant spots, they are finding a new recruitment tool: the four-day school week.Those districts are saying to teachers, "You can have three-day weekends all the time, and we won't cut your pay." As of this fall, around 900 school districts – that's about 7% of all districts in the U.S. – now have school weeks that are just four days long.And this isn't the first time a bunch of schools have scaled back to four days, so there is a lot of data to lean on to figure out how well it works. In this episode, teachers love the four-day school week, and it turns out even parents love it, too. But is it good for students?This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Molly Messick and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. A few years ago, the Warren County R3 school district in Warrington, Missouri, was having this big problem. They kept losing teachers. Every school year we'd lose about, you know, 50 or so teachers. Which was 20 percent of the teaching staff. And so that was really a problem, to be losing that many. This is the school's superintendent. Which was 20% of the teaching staff. This is the school's superintendent. Greg Klingensmith's school district has about 3,000 students, which is medium-sized.

It's not really rural, but not suburban either. There's a pre-K, three elementary schools, one middle school, one high school. And they didn't have a problem recruiting teachers. They had a problem keeping them. And so we would always have first-year teachers, you know, that would come out to us for a year and then two, maybe, then they'd leave. They'd leave for higher pay because the starting salary in Greg's district is $36,931 a year. But in the next district over, which is bigger, more suburban, the starting pay is like $10,000 more than that. And so, you know, we just couldn't compete. We had really nothing to offer our staff except low pay. So let's just, we'll have a bake sale.

Bake sale. Yeah, bake sale wasn't going to do it. So Greg and the school board decided to try a couple different things to try to solve their teacher retention problem. Like they asked voters to raise taxes so that they could pay teachers more. They wanted to get about a million dollars more per year. And because voter turnout is so low, they didn't need that many people to say yes on a tax increase. They only needed like a thousand people. Doesn't sound very much. We should be able to do this just with our own staff almost. But we just didn't get the turnout. Do you think that like teachers voted against the tax?

I mean, probably so, yeah. Oof. Okay, so he asked for a tax increase again the next year, and that earned Greg Klingensmith a little reputation around Warren County. Yeah, oh, yeah. They've got all sorts of jokes about me, you know, so, you know, they like to tease me as Dr. Kling on my money. Kling on my money or something like that, which is fun. All in good spirits. Nobody's being mean.

Voters again said, no thank you, no tax. One thing we value here is low taxes. And so, you know, they kind of stuck to their values on that one. Does it make you a little sad? Like, what else are we going to do? Yeah, your heart breaks whenever you're asked something for your teachers that you know are working really, really hard and deserve every penny of it. And people tell you no. Your heart breaks for that.

But it is what it is. And so you just, okay, what can we do? What do we have as an option? And time became our bargaining chip instead of money. Time instead of money. To try to retain teachers, the district decided to let teachers work less. They decided to cut out an entire day of school every week.

Now, every Monday in Gregg's school district, there is no school. So teachers, they can be doing whatever they want. Whatever they want. And they get to keep their same salary. They just get three-day weekends all the time now. And this is not just a Warren County thing. 30% of Missouri school districts have gone down to four-day school weeks.

In Oregon, it's 40% of the districts. In Colorado, it's 67% of districts that are now just four days. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And I'm Mary Childs. There are entire clusters in Missouri, Texas, Montana, where every district anywhere near you only offers four days of instruction. There is no other option. Which, like, how does that even work? Where do the kids go? What do they do all day? Today on the show, the three main reasons schools

switch to four-day school weeks, how it affects students, and how you can reject a tax increase but still wind up paying. OK, so there is this growing trend right now of school districts moving to four day school weeks, like 900 districts, which is about 7 percent of districts in the U.S. are now just four days long. And the ones who are switching to four days right now, a lot of them have a very similar story to Greg Klingensmith's district in Missouri. Take China Spring, Texas, near Waco. They also were having a problem retaining teachers. Voters wouldn't let them raise taxes, and they dropped the Friday school day. Yeah, and to understand how a four-day school week even works, we asked a true expert. Oh, hi, I'm Kennedy Montgomery, and I'm nine. You're nine. And what grade are you in? Fourth grade. Kennedy Montgomery is a big Texas Rangers fan, loves pink,

soccer. Oh yes, I love soccer. She really does not like squash and zucchini. No. She's very funny. squash and zucchini. She's very funny. Yes, I'm very funny. And she is a proud straight-A student. I'd never fall behind. Oh, they like that. Kennedy loves school, but on Fridays she doesn't go to school anymore. Instead, she gets dropped off at a church. It is fun really because i think it's fun because my favorite part is when we go to the library and watch a movie oh you get to watch a movie yes every friday i usually go there twice and sometimes we don't finish the movie but last time we did watch two movies so it's like really definitely not like school no it, it's way different. Is it more kind of like daycare? I guess you could say that. Yeah, it's daycare.

There are Barbies and blocks, free play, arts and craft. You watch movies. And of course, this camp church daycare thing is not free. It's hard financially because it's like $45 a Friday for me to go. Yeah, $45 every Friday. It's just to keep your kid alive. And that I am grateful for. That's Kennedy's mom, Jessica Montgomery. And she says it's not unreasonably priced. It was an unexpected expense. It's $180 more every month. She's a single parent, and she says now things are just tighter.

I don't have that fun money that, hey, let's go to the arcade and, you know, blow $20 for 40 minutes. And those type of things we've had to step back from. And I've already told my daughter, your Christmas will be smaller. I'm sorry. You're still going to get cool stuff, which I realize is silly. But okay. Think about what happens when a district moves to four days. The community basically gets like 20% less education for their community with their tax dollars. So the taxes are the same. Everyone just gets less out of it now. And I mean, this is a kind of tax, guys, on everyone. And it's definitely a tax on parents.

Right. Jessica, the mom, she is now paying $1,260 a year extra in this Friday child care. If the tax hike had gone through, homeowners like Jessica would take a house worth $200,000 would have paid less than $60 extra a year to pay teachers more. And by the way, districts can make the decision to switch to four days because states generally say as long as kids are in school a certain amount, like 175 days out of the year or at least 1100 hours, we're good. And most districts exceed the minimums so they can drop a day. Yeah, Jessica was pretty against this when her district was first proposing it. I was very anti four day school week. The teachers were like grasping their pearls,

kind of like shocked, like how could you be against us? You know, we love your children and we deserve this. We're, you know, grading papers late into the night. This would really, really help us in our personal lives, like scheduling doctor's appointments on Fridays and, you know, taking care of our own children. Yeah, valid points from the teachers. Totally. And Jessica thinks this too. But for her, this was just like a huge overhaul of how the public education system has always worked. But two months into no Friday school, she says it's not so bad. Now that I have secure child care, I am neutral. She's neutral on this. And there is a study that shows most parents strongly support the four-day school week once it's been implemented.

Although there is less support among parents of elementary age kids and kids who receive special education. But for Jessica, it's still too soon to tell. I cannot say it's positive and I cannot say it's negative because I don't have the long-term research for myself with, you know, my experience with my own child, whether this is a good or a bad thing for my child. But we actually do kind of know whether this is good or bad for kids. There is decent research on the four-day school week because this isn't the first time the four-day school week has taken off. So I had never heard of a four-day school week until I moved out here to Oregon. This is Paul Thompson. He's a professor at Oregon State University. I teach economics, mostly public economics, and do a lot in education policy. Paul is one of the leading researchers on the four-day school week, and he says there have been three waves of schools dropping a day. The first real wave popped up in the 70s and 80s.

And back then, he says, it wasn't about teacher retention at all. Really small, really rural districts were saying, we need to change to four days to fit our community. Attendance was bad. Parents wanted their kids helping on the farm. Kids were spending hours on the school bus getting to and from school every day. And kids were missing a lot of school for things like sports even. So this is like football games where, you know, you're traveling like three or four hours to an opposing school. And so you're missing essentially almost the whole school day. For these super small rural

schools that were trying to deal with attendance problems, Paul says it actually made sense to make the switch. That motivation seems to be kind of an inherently good one because, well, you already have students missing a lot of time in front of the teacher. Let's move all of those activities on to a day off and then say these other four school days we're going to protect. The next big wave of schools dropping to four days started in the early 2000s and peaked during the Great Recession. And this time, the motivation was not rural community life stuff at all. It was money.

Schools needed to cut costs wherever they could. And they were kind of like, if we drop one whole day of school every week, just think how much money we could save. They just thought they were going to make a lot of save a lot of money off of like not turning the lights on on Friday and not having the cafeteria workers there on Friday, things like that. Yeah, not not having the school open, not paying, you know, janitors. Also school buses. Busing is a big expense, especially in really spread out rural districts. The routes that they're running are really large,

which means that if you're not operating busing, there's potentially large savings on gas and, you know, the amount of time you're paying a bus driver. Paul says for a small district, cutting out busing for a day every week could save like $100,000. And some of the districts that switched for budget saving reasons, they've been operating on this four-day schedule for like 15 years now. So we can actually see how much this has saved them in total. They did not save much money. They did not save money? No. We like we know this. We know they did not save money.

We know they did not save very much money at all. I've done some research on this nationally. School districts saved about one to two percent of their expenditures. So this is pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things. The reason that schools didn't save much money by switching to four days was because teachers were still getting paid the same amount. Teacher contracts didn't change at all. So districts still had to pay teachers their full five-day school week salary, even though they were only teaching four days now. And this brings us to right now, to the third wave of the four-day school week. And this time, a lot of districts have very clearly said,

we are definitely not doing this to save money because we now know that you don't actually save that much money. They say this is about attracting and retaining teachers because there's a national teacher shortage. And this wave is much bigger than the previous two waves. And it's also drawing in bigger school districts. Yeah, it's not just tiny districts with 100 students or medium-ish districts with 3,000 students. It is large, like genuinely large suburban districts with 14,000 students, 20,000 students. This is a lot of students.

And Paul says a lot of districts are dropping a school day without really knowing how well it works. Districts are relying on kind of this anecdotal evidence to make these decisions. They say applications are up four times what they normally are for teaching vacancies. And using that as kind of suggestive evidence like, oh, this was great for our district. So researchers are playing catch up. Right now we have no basis for saying, is this effective for teacher retention? Yeah, because even though a four-day work week is a perk, maybe teachers will ultimately want to go to a five-day district if it pays them more, right? So all of this, like, it's totally working stuff is all very anecdotal right now. But Paul says

it hasn't stopped people from deciding they all really like the four-day school week. There are all these studies that show that teachers really love it. Apparently, a lot of parents really like being able to, like like sleep in and not rush to get their kids out the door or they like that their kids can work on their new day off. And then I mean, a lot of students love it too. Obviously, right, they would like to be in school as little as possible. But from you know, an objective, you know, tangible benefit, the benefits are really coming to the adults in this situation. This might be good for the adults in the room, maybe not so good for the students.

Yeah, what about the students? If everyone likes a shorter school week, but it's not good for students, should we keep doing it? That's after the break. Okay, so teachers and parents and students like the four day school week, but is it good for students? Because I mean, there are so many things that happen at school, right? Kids are, you know, supervised by adults, of course. Kids are fed at school. Kids get into trouble at school sometimes. And then, of course, kids learn at school. And when you lose a whole school day every week, some of the things that would normally happen at school spill out.

They start happening other places. Like take meals. Paul Thompson, our four-day school week economist, he looked into what kids are eating on their new day off and found all of the things you would expect. Eating less breakfast, drinking more sugary beverages. Paul also looked at what kids are doing on their new day off, and it's also not super great. Paul says that in Oregon, juvenile crime went up 12 percent in places with a lot of four-day school week districts. These other economists in Colorado looked into the same thing and found that juvenile crime went up 20 percent. Yep. So communities that have higher enrollment on a four-day school week schedule,

these are places where we see kind of upticks in the prevalence of juvenile crime, mostly property crime, you know, during that off day. During the off day specifically? Yes. So there's increases kind of throughout the week, but, you know, higher uptick during that day off and happening in places that aren't at school. Right. Unsupervised teenagers on their new free day off. Some of them are going to go find trouble. And then there's the big, big finding, the student achievement finding.

Oh, right. Like the whole point of school learning. Right. Yes. There have been some big studies on this, and they find that when students get fewer hours of math instruction and fewer hours of English language arts instruction, they often do a little worse in those subjects. So nationally, we see declines in standardized testing achievements for math and reading. Like in this one study across 12 states, Paul found small reductions in math and reading test scores in third through eighth grade.

And now all of these things, all of these effects we're seeing, kids eating worse, more crime, less student achievement, Paul says these are all costs. It might not be a new property tax, but he says society could still end up paying. Reductions in achievement lead to lower productivity, which should also translate into lower earnings for those workers, right? You know, higher obesity rates, you know, higher health care costs down the line, which, you know, leads to higher taxes. Okay, but there is a surprising little twist here. Student achievement does not always have to take a hit in four-day school week districts. When districts drop that fifth day of school, they will usually tack on extra instruction

time to the end of the four remaining school days to meet state requirements. But Paul says they're often adding like 30 minutes. Paul found that when schools add a little bit more than that, when they tack on at least an hour, hour and a half, then there is no negative impact on student achievement. Those ones that have maintained kind of high levels of instructional time close to what they were under a five-day school week, we see no difference in achievement among four- and five-day school week students. And so that kind of gives us, you know, some policy recommendations we can give to school districts, like you need to lengthen your other four days even longer. Right. That's one way you can do it. And the magic number he found is 31. 31 hours of instruction per week. If you maintain that, he says, there's no achievement loss. The exception to that is really small rural districts. There, Paul has actually found no change in student achievement for high schoolers, regardless of instruction time.

But he says that's mainly because student attendance in rural areas was low before. And remember the superintendent in Missouri, Greg Klingensmith? His school district switched to four days almost five years ago. And his school district did see lower test scores after they made the switch. Although this does include the pandemic years when a lot of schools saw lower test scores. But either way, Greg doesn't put a ton of weight on that. There's just a lot more to school than a test given one time a year. So I'm really, the test scores are what they are.

The school week in Greg's district is now 28 and a half hours long, but he doesn't see his district adding more instruction time to get to that magic 31-hour school week, even with student achievement taking a hit. You do have trade-offs, and that's exactly the trade-off that we made was, well, we know that this could potentially impact one thing or another, but our goal is to have the best teachers in front of our kids. That's, whatever it takes to get to that is kind of what we're going to do. Even if there's lower student achievement?

It's not drastically lower. And our top students are still doing well. We've had kids go to Ivy League schools. So it's really been working fine. It might sound kind of weird to be so like chill and casual about student achievement losses, but I want you to put yourself in the shoes of just like any old district that doesn't have enough teachers. They do not have great options. They can either put unqualified teachers in a classroom, like say a PE teacher covering geometry when they're not supposed to teach

geometry, or they can increase class sizes. Both of those things are bad for student achievement. So the four-day school week, which can also be bad for student achievement, is just one more option. And the reality is that schools make decisions that can negatively impact student achievement all the time. But Paul says there's something happening already that is starting to undercut the four-day school week as a recruitment tool. It's spreading really fast. You know, so we get these contagion effects, you know, around. Contagion effects? That sounds so... That's right. That's, you know, that's what it's been called, you know, where, you know, we kind of get this spread that happens.

So one district does it, then a neighboring district does it too because they feel like they need to compete. And then suddenly every school in the area is just four days. And when that happens, Paul says schools lose their competitive advantage. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, if we only have four-day school weeks, right, teachers aren't choosing where to work based on the school schedule. They're choosing over what monetary benefits schools are offering, right? And so we're back into that environment we were in a five-day school week setting, but now we're just all four-day school weeks instead. Yeah. When every district around is four days, teachers will just choose to work at schools that pay the most, right? So districts might be right back where they started, trying to appeal to teachers based on salary.

This episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Molly Messick and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Special thanks to Corey Turner. Coming up next time on Planet Money, what better place to learn about economics than a buffet? You have some prawns. You have welts.

You have lobster claws. You have some clams. I've never even heard of a Cortez clam. It's an all-you-can-eat economics-a-thon in your podcast feed this coming Friday. I'm Mary Childs. And I'm Sarah Gonzalez. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.