The promise of a three-day weekend every week has become a popular tool Colorado school districts are using to lure teachers to their schools and try to keep them there. In the face of strapped budgets and limits on educator salaries, most of the state’s districts have switched to a four-day school week — taking on longer hours each of those four days to make up for cutting out one full day.
But one less day in school each week has taken a toll on learning and has proven lackluster in retaining teachers, according to a report released Tuesday by the Keystone Policy Center.
“There’s an irony that the reason for why you go from five to four (days), at least the reason most people say, is so you can recruit and retain better teachers, which you would think would have an impact on student achievement,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director for the Keystone Policy Center. “But it doesn’t seem to be resulting in higher student achievement, and when you look at the recruitment and retention data, it doesn’t have an impact on the retention either. I’m not sure what the compelling reason is.”
The report has some Colorado superintendents pushing back against claims that shorter weeks are bad for kids. During the 2016-17 school year, Colorado tallied 82 four-day districts, charter schools and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (groups of school districts that share resources). Six years later, 119 of 185 districts, charter schools and BOCES had adopted four-day weeks, according to the report.
At 27J Schools in Brighton, former superintendent Chris Fiedler said a switch to a Tuesday-Friday schedule in 2018 has reduced the burden on instructors even as student graduation rates have continued to inch upward.
“This myth that we’re going to school less time is just wrong,” said Fiedler, who retired earlier this year after 12 years as the district’s superintendent. “So it’s a longer school day. We’re attending the same number of hours we did before. Teachers actually have more planning time.”
The 21-page Keystone report, titled “Doing Less with Less,” points out ways students in districts with four-day weeks are trailing their peers in districts on traditional five-day weeks. It also acknowledges the difficult reality of staffing classrooms, which often pits the priority of educating students in the ways that help them most against what it takes to draw educators to districts that rank low in compensation.
The move toward four-day weeks has largely come from a sense of desperation as many districts have been unable to meet the competitive salaries of neighboring districts and had to find other incentives to attract teachers.
The four-day week option — which emerged in the 1980s when a new state law gave public schools more flexibility over their calendars — is most widely used among small rural districts. While the majority of Colorado districts operate on a four-day week schedule, those districts only account for about 14% of the state’s public school kids since most of them are small and in rural areas.
In recent years, the four-day week has gained more traction among larger districts in more populated parts of the state, including Pueblo and Brighton.
No district approaches the move to a four-day week lightly, said Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova, who was previously superintendent of Denver Public Schools, the largest district in the state.
“Everybody really cares about their kids,” Córdova said, “and I think they’re really feeling like they’re borrowing from Peter to pay Paul in how they’re coming up with solutions.”
“We’re all in this state complicit”
Among more remote districts on four-day weeks is Mancos School District RE-6 east of Cortez in southwestern Colorado. The rural district — which last year educated 521 students in preschool through 12th grade — transitioned to a four-day week in 2016 under the weight of financial pressures. The district’s teacher compensation is about 20% below a bigger district 20 miles to the east and a New Mexico district 20 miles south, Superintendent Todd Cordrey said.
He says student performance depends on more than just the number of days class is in session per week.
“The issue of whether a school system is a four-day system or a five-day system is really not a key factor to the academic performance of the system or the culture of the system,” said Cordrey, who has been superintendent since 2021 and previously led schools that were active five days. “There are many more important factors that contribute to student success as well as the culture of a school district.”
Those include class size, economic factors, special needs of students, screen time and instructional practices, he said.
Other school districts like Eagle County School District have continued on with a five-day school week even as four nearby districts have shifted to a four-day schedule. Superintendent Philip Qualman, who is quoted in the Keystone Policy Center report, said the district has remained competitive with salaries — a starting teacher in his district earns about $50,500 a year — and his community has not pushed for a four-day school week.
He also wants kids “to reach their peak potential” — an aspiration that Qualman said is already challenged by Colorado requiring a minimum of 160 school days for districts, compared to a minimum of 180 days in other states. Colorado districts are falling behind in how much class time they can provide students, he said.
“Compound that over a 13-year public education experience, that’s a lot of disadvantage that our kids are experiencing,” Qualman told The Colorado Sun. “So districts that are doing four-day, I understand that they’re meeting the hour requirement just like five-day districts are, but I think that there’s only so much content that you can expect students to learn in a day and to try to jam it all into fewer days, I think practically it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
But he doesn’t fault any superintendents or school boards for pivoting to a four-day week. Rather, Qualman puts the onus on state education funding — which lags behind other states — and on the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, which is a constitutional amendment that limits how much the government can collect in tax revenues.
“It is suffocating public services, and K-12 is one of the most vital of those services,” he said. “As long as we allow that strangulation to occur, we’re all in this state complicit in the state of our education to the extent that we are short-changing our kids in the amount of time that they get to learn content and to be competitive in a global economy.”
How much does time in school matter vs. how that time is spent?
Córdova said she wishes students in all districts — both those on four-day and five-day routines — could access more learning, particularly as students continue trying to overcome learning deficits from the pandemic and as rates of chronic absenteeism have remained high.
“No matter how many days the school year is,” Córdova said, “really making sure we get kids to be in school each and every day is super important.”
So is quality time learning outside school hours, she added.
Many four-day Colorado districts offer programming on the days they don’t hold classes through their own schools or with help from community partners, but student participation across those activities is mixed, the report notes.
What is clear is that districts that hold classes five days a week outperform those that stick to four-day weeks, according to state data cited in the report.
For instance, a greater percentage of districts on five-day schedules were rated highly on what is known as Colorado’s District Performance Framework — a tool used to grade how well districts are performing. Additionally, a higher percentage of students in five-day districts demonstrated proficiency in math and English language arts on state standardized tests called Colorado Measures of Academic Success.
And when analyzing growth — the amount of academic progress students make over time — the report stated that evidence shows kids in five-day districts are making greater gains toward state academic standards than kids in four-day districts, though they still have a lot of work to do to master those standards.
A national study released last year by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University found that four-day weeks “significantly decrease students’ math and reading gains,” particularly in districts in more populated areas.
But debates continue to swirl about whether other components of a child’s education — such as how instructional time is used — are more important than how much time students spend in school.
Cordrey, of Mancos School District, said the four-day week has allowed his district to introduce 21 professional development days for teachers, carving out more time for them to prepare lessons and improve instructional practices.
The four-day week, he told The Sun, “has zero negative consequences” for students, staff and his community.
“The lightbulb moment for students is something that happens in an instant,” Cordrey said. “It doesn’t happen over sustained time being in a seat. So it’s more about the practice than it is about the time. The more we can learn about brain development for children and adolescents, the more we’ll be able to increase student learning and that is really the focus for school district to improve academics, is to continue to learn more about how we can spark students’ learning through our instructional practices and through their environments.”
Schoales, of the Keystone Policy Center, wonders how students can advance in subjects like math and reading if they’re not in school.
Research and experiences from pandemic learning indicate that “kids being in school matters,” Schoales said. “Even with technology, it still matters quite a bit. All things being equal, the research tells us that the more you’re in school, the more you learn.”
The report also found that districts running four-day weeks have generally still struggled with teacher turnover. The average teacher turnover rate of four-day districts hovered above the average teacher turnover rate of five-day districts from 2018-19 through 2022-23. During the 2022-23 school year, for instance, five-day districts experienced a teacher turnover rate of about 20% while four-day districts saw a slightly higher percentage of turnover.
Brighton’s 27J Schools, however, saw minimal teacher churn between 2018 and 2023 with a 14.6% turnover rate, even as the district held the lowest median teacher salary in the metro area.
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The metro district, which last year educated more than 23,100 students in preschool through high school, made national headlines in 2018 when it became the country’s largest school district to convert to a four-day instruction week.
The district converted to a four-day week after failing six times to get a mill levy override approved by voters. The property tax increase would have given the district the ability to increase teacher salaries, the report states.
Fiedler, the former Brighton superintendent, said the district took the leap to attract top-tier teachers. The greatest impact on both student achievement and teacher success boils down to the simple idea of believing in one another, he said.
Teachers must believe in the impact they can make and believe in their students, he said, while students must also believe in their teachers.
“The teachers believe they can really make a difference in improving student outcomes, and if they believe that they move mountains and they have great results from kids,” Fiedler told The Sun.
The report recommends the state education department convene a panel of experts and people who are part of districts that have four-day instruction and ask them to inform state officials and policymakers on ways to make sure students have the support they need to stay on track.
Cordrey, of Mancos School District, counters that decisions around school calendars are best left to individual districts and don’t need input from the state.
“Let’s let local educators make local decisions about the educational process,” he said. “The closer you are to the issue, the more effective solution you’re going to come up with.”