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More Schools Go To 4-Day Week To Cut Costs

Posted by Soulskill on from the education-has-a-poor-compression-ratio dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "As schools return to session in South Dakota, more than one-fourth of students in the state will only be in class from Monday through Thursday as budget constraints lead school districts to hack off a day from the school week. Larry Johnke, superintendant of the Irene-Wakonda school district, says the change will save his schools more than $50,000 per year. In order to make up for the missing day, schools will add 30 minutes to each of the other four days and shorten the daily lunch break. 'In this financial crisis, we wanted to maintain our core content and vocational program, so we were forced to do this,' says Johnke. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance, but many of the 120 districts that have the shortened schedule nationwide say they've seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. Others say that not only did they fail to save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren't in class enough and didn't have enough contact with teachers."

20 of 614 comments (clear)

  1. Wow... by vikisonline · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To save $50,000 a year, they make an already bad education system worse. The future implications of that are..... I mean that much money for an entire school in one year is not that much. It's like having one less teacher. I'd for one prefer larger classes over this.

    1. Re:Wow... by dam.capsule.org · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Big finance people are already taking all the money, now they are also (indirectly) cutting down on education. Poor and uneducated people, rich and knowledgeable lords, well come back 500 years ago.

      --
      What sig ?
    2. Re:Wow... by dreamt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not only that, but how much extra will it cost parents who need to pay for care for younger children who would otherwise be in school. We know some parents like to treat schools as babysitters, but in any case, now they will really need one. Guess they maybe shouldn't have complained about a slight tax increase to pay for their kids education.

    3. Re:Wow... by chrb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.

      The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?

    4. Re:Wow... by Eraesr · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm as amazed about that amount of money as you are. $50,000 in a single year isn't all that much. It seems like they're trying to kill a fly with a tank here.

    5. Re:Wow... by lpp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.

      Actually, with regard to shortened holidays, research indicates that continued academic effort (reading in the linked case) positively impacts academic performance in the subsequent semester. Granted in this case the study was performed on students who continued to read during summer vacation and checked their performance when they came back, which is different from concentrated classroom study. Furthermore, according to the wiki there is a measured "summer learning loss" attributed to summer holidays where students do not perform any notable academic tasks, suggesting that the inverse would hold true as well, that real academic tasks throughout the long summer holiday might help stave off the worst effects of this "learning loss".

      When looking at a 4 day school week, I don't think the loss of one day would in itself negative impact education. Obviously cutting it much further would probably tend to have negative consequences. I think keeping the kids in class longer hours during those 4 days will actually have a more negative effect, especially among younger students who don't tend to have the mental stamina for longer sessions of concentrated focus. The problem is I think they added the hours into the remaining days in order to be able say they are still covering the entire curriculum, but the focus problem may come into play and the kids won't be able to pick up the material as readily as before. Tacking on extra weeks at the end of the year would simply bring the financial problem back into play. What kids need are a regular steady diet of learning time, not huge gobs with vast periods of time between.

    6. Re:Wow... by vlm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not

      /.ers think back upon your own past. I never let school get in the way of my education. I could trivially sit down and blast 12 hours straight of learning programming or systems administration or ham radio or building electronics stuff or reading a Really good book. But there was no freaking way I could do that 5 or 7 days in a row.

      I would hazard a guess that at least /.er personality kids would excel at longer hours, fewer days.

      I would extend that assumption, that even "intellectually challenged" kids had no problem turnin wrenches on their car for 12 hours, or going fishing for 12 hours, or whatever else those kids did they seemed to do it for extended durations, but not every day of the week.

      Thinking back on ancient history, the ancients pretty much worked "until it was done" but on days with no work they F-ed off a lot. Not much nose to the grindstone every day of the year, at least with the ancients. Either you worked like a dog all day, or it was religious worship/celebration/festival day and you goofed off all day. If there is any genetic metabolic component to that, we should have the same preference.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    7. Re:Wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Huh. My mom retired as a teacher after 35 year and never came close to making that kind of money. And she taught summer school every year to make ends meet. Doesn't sound like your description.

      In fact her retirement package from the state was so poor that she went back to work.

    8. Re:Wow... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not only that, but how much extra will it cost parents who need to pay for care for younger children who would otherwise be in school. We know some parents like to treat schools as babysitters, but in any case, now they will really need one. Guess they maybe shouldn't have complained about a slight tax increase to pay for their kids education.

      Dude, you so nailed it. My school district decided that teachers needed more time during the week for training, so they changed the school schedule. Now class lets out at 3:15, except for Tuesdays when it lets out at 2:00. I can't tell you how happy I am to have to leave work early in the middle of the week.

      I know teachers aren't babysitters, but in a very tangible way the school systems themselves are. The law says parents have to take their kids there at set times every weekday, and that leads to things like employers scheduling shifts around school hours. I know lots of couples who arrange their work schedules so that one parent drops their kid off on the way to work, then the other parent picks the kid up on their way home. So now that everyone's calendar is designed around this government-imposed schedule, they change it on a whim and then get pissy when parents complain about the new inconvenience?

      Want to really cut costs? Fire half the administrators. The Dept. of Education says average per-pupil spending is over $10,000, and average class size is 20 pupils. If you can't run a school for $200,000 per classroom - while giving teachers the good salaries they've earned - then you're incompetent and shouldn't be running it.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    9. Re:Wow... by Nadaka · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They tried that with me. I had a chronic medical condition and was officially disabled and unable to attend school regularly. So even though I did all the homework and aced every test, I got failed in a clear violation with the law regarding disabled students. When I was 16, they told me that even if I had perfect attendance from then out, I would not graduate high school until I was 21. I was also not allowed to take a GED until I turned 18. We were not able to sue to allow me to graduate because they threatened to arrest everyone for truancy and child neglect.

      Your idea is fucking retarded.

    10. Re:Wow... by nbauman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?

      Good questions. The first thing that visitors notice in those schools is that teachers are highly respected.

      The Republicans right now are demonizing teachers, with calls for the end of unions, calls for pay cuts, high-stakes testing where they blame teachers for the results and fire the lower 10% (like Jack Welch at GE), vouchers, charter schools and privatization.

      Finland has strong unions, so unions aren't the problem. There's strong evidence (NAEP scores) that charter schools are slightly worse overall than public schools. There's no country in the world with a successful universal privatized education system. Michelle Rhee, the conservative school reform darling, got caught cheating. High stakes testing leads to widespread cheating.

    11. Re:Wow... by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 3, Informative

      If your numbers are from the early 90s you need to recheck them.

      Budget cuts in the mid and late 90s and mid to late '00s destroyed schedules like that. In many districts COLAs of 1-3% were all the raise teachers got. Now its even worse, my sister took a 20% cut in '10 to avoid the district having to lay off 25% of staff.

      I've worked in public, private school administration and state educational agencies since 1997, my wife is a 7-12 teacher with experience at contract negotiations in the PacNW, sister is a 9-12 science teacher, brother in law is a history teacher. I've been through 3 Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. Your numbers and example don't hold water.

  2. 4 days weeks is stupid by sxpert · · Score: 4, Informative

    we've had that in france for a while. it has been discovered that pupils end up extremely tired at the end of each day, and the whole thing is totally inefficient. in fact, we're having talks of going to a US style week, with morning classes and afternoon outdoor activities and stuff... also, switching to a 4 days week to save money is the most ludicrous and stupid thing I've heard. ah, no, I've heard worse. closing a school in a mountain village, and forcing parents to drive their kids 1 hour away every morning and back

  3. Fall of a nation by tp1024 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Isn't it funny how the leaders of a fallen nation always claim they didn't see it coming? How they keep claiming to the very last day, that theirs is a strong nation that will never fall?

    You know what? They don't even lie.

  4. Re:In the end, it doesn't matter. by Bigby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's a lot of truth to what you are saying. Our education woes have nothing to do with time. It has to do with the culture. When will it become "cool" to ace a math test? When will the science fair be bigger than a football game? It looks like Glee made Glee Club more popular...now come out with some similar show to help in the core subjects...

  5. Re:Parents by chrb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From TFA: "Two different Boys and Girls Club sites and a church are offering affordable child care and tutoring, respectively, on Mondays for between $10 and $15."

    The district has 300 students - 300 x $10 (or $15) x 36 weeks = $108000 to $162000.

    So you are right, the cost of childcare is far more than the cost of the extra $50k to run the school for a day. However, the article also states that locals are unwilling to pay the extra cost in taxes: "We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools. What else can you really do?".

  6. Re:In the end, it doesn't matter. by gfxguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But the problem has little to do with money or four day weeks... if they implemented four day weeks correctly, especially for middle school and above, you'd get the same amount of total classroom time and be able to have more focus because you don't need those first 5 or 10 minutes of class to get back "up to speed."

    When I was in college, I always felt like my Tue-Thu 1.5 hour classes were more productive than my M-W-F 1 hour classes.

    But even that has little to do with it - there's no silver bullet, no single thing that you can "fix" to suddenly make the educational system in the U.S. dramatically improve, there's just too many things that went wrong...

    • * teachers unions (yes, teachers unions, and no, I don't think teachers ought to work for "slave" labor or not have benefits)
    • * lack of focus... yes, art is important, music is important, but the core classes are MORE important and need more resources.
    • * parents - we've had the government coddling us for so long and eliminating so much personal responsibility that most parents are no longer proactive when it comes to their child's education. Yes, your children should not only know letters and numbers, but be able to read BEFORE kindergarten, but even then parents need to be proactive all the way through at least middle school and at least be available and helpful if their child needs it while in high school. I bet the biggest complaint about the four day week comes from the parents who treat school as free daycare. Say all the bad things you want about homeschooling, home schooled students perform better, on average, than public school students, period.
    • * society - when computer "nerds" are held in disdain and "gansta" rappers are lauded in popular culture, the effects are obvious; when studying hard makes you a tool of "the man," and the kids on the football team that are failing are treated like heroes while the kids on the academic team are bullied, there's a problem. When inner city kids are brought up believing they will be able to escape their surroundings by being a professional athlete (which certainly is possible, however unlikely), by being a "gansta" rapper, or through selling drugs instead of hard work in school, there's a problem. When fashion and cliques are more important than your future, there's a problem. When video games come before homework, there's a problem.

    I could go on - but the bottom line is things have spiralled out of control and there's no way someone's going to step in and "solve" the problem by attacking just one issue.

    I'd also like to point out that what you've stated is somewhat true, but at lower grade levels, American students score comparably to Asian and European countries. By the time we graduate high school, though, the performance falls dramatically. IOW, the potential is there, but our system - including our culture, helps destroy it by the time students become adults. Fourth graders in the U.S. outperform England, Canada, most of Europe, in fact; by grade 8 we drop below those countries... by grade 12 (U.S. public education goes through grade 12, I know it's different in other countries) we are on the bottom of the list.

    --
    Stupid sexy Flanders.
  7. Re:Please roll this out to work by vlm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This may or may not work out for schools but I would love a 3-day weekend every week at my job!

    I'm living the dream... Note that if you work 4 day "weeks" the odds of getting bugged to log in at home on the 5th day of the week darn near approach 50%. So its not really a "4 day week" its more like "4 to 5 days a week, depending on problems"

    Daycare costs of small children drop at least 20%, more if you're creative about which hours and days you work. My coworkers thought I was crazy to take a $2K paycut to switch employers to a 4-day employer... Then I pointed out I was saving something like $7K year on day care cost by creative arrangement of my "working days", and saving at least $1K/year on car fuel and maint, and saving around four hours per week of sitting in my car in a traffic jam... Incredibly good deal.

    The longer day is not exactly oppressive... An extra hour before and after lunch, big deal, unless you're mr. clockwatcher you'll never mentally notice. This also means I miss the worst of "rush hour" traffic so bizarrely enough working two extra hours per day cuts into my free time by LESS than two hour per day, because commute drops from 45+ minutes to about 20 or less. So an "eight hour day" means about 9.5 hours outside the home, and a "ten hour day" means about 10.6 hours outside the home, an added cost of only about one hour "lost", in exchange for an extra day off per week.

    It depends on your job. I program a lot, on long projects, and it takes forever to "get in the groove" and once I'm going I don't want to stop and I hate senseless interruptions. Posting to /. gets me in the mood, I'm gonna refactor a data importer right after this... Anyway longer shifts, and weekend hours, work beautifully for my job. If your job is standing heavy manual labor, then an extra 20% effort per day might kill you, so it depends.

    Sleep and eating patterns take about a week to resolve, after which it feels perfectly normal.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  8. Re:I can see it now... by hattig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What about the parents who used to be able to rely on their kids being in school so they could go out to work? Do they now need to arrange childcare for Fridays too?

    This is just transferring a small cost to the system into a massive cost for society - unless you're in the childcare industry.

  9. Re:I can see it now... by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 4, Informative

    South Dakota teacher salaries are very, very, very low.

    http://teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state

    26,000 is the average.