published as 'Is four less than five? Effects of four-day school weeks on student achievement in Oregon' in: Journal of Public Economics, 2021, 193, 104308
Due to increased financial pressures following the Great Recession, a growing number of school districts have switched from a traditional five-day school week to a four-day week schedule. While these shorter school weeks potentially help reduce costs, this study considers the implications these school schedules have on student achievement. This study uses a difference-in-differences analysis using a panel data set of student-level test scores to examine the effects of the adoption of these four-day school weeks on student achievement in the State of Oregon from 2007-2015.
I find that these school schedules have detrimental impacts on student achievement, with declines of between 0.044 and 0.053 standard deviations in math scores and declines of 0.033 and 0.038 standard deviations in reading scores. The results suggest that four-day school weeks are more detrimental for the math and reading achievement of boys and the reading achievement of low-income students. Earlier school start times and lost instructional time of nearly three and a half hours a week appear to be the primary mechanisms underlying these achievement losses.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.