For education leaders, particularly in hard-to-staff rural districts, shortening the school week has become a key selling point for staffing. But new research suggests that four-day schedules may do less than leaders hope to attract top talent.
“Advertisements make it super, super, super clear when you’re applying for one of these four-day-school-week districts that it has a four-day school week—all caps, 20 exclamation points,” said Georgia State University Economist Cade Lawson.
But when it comes to the teachers themselves, he said, “it seems like a very slight incentive. I just don’t see anything to suggest that it really pushes any teacher over that margin of moving districts entirely.”
Schedule changes can slightly lower teacher turnover, but they don’t lead to hiring or keeping more educated or experienced teachers, according to the largest longitudinal study of school schedules and staffing to date.
Like many states, Texas has seen a significant increase in districts adopting four-day school weeks since the pandemic. Only eight districts had four-day weeks in 2019-20; at least 195 districts, representing more than 165,000 students (nearly 10% of students in the state), adopted some form of a truncated schedule by the 2025-26 school year.
For the study, released in the Annenberg Institute’s December study series, Lawson and his colleagues analyzed 17 years of year-over-year data on the job changes of every Texas teacher working since 2006, tracking differences in teacher turnover and recruitment as districts moved to shortened schedules.
Turnover fell about 2.7 percentage points in districts that moved to four-day weeks, but Lawson said teacher retention remained a problem, with more than 1 in 5 teachers leaving each year in those districts both before and after the schedule changes. The study also found that it did not attract an especially skillful set of teachers—there was no significant improvement in the education or experience levels of teachers working in districts with adjusted weeks.
More than 900 districts in 26 states now use some form of truncated school week. While the share of districts nationwide adjusting their weeks continues to climb, evidence supporting the policy has been lackluster. Studies have found lower student achievement in districts with four-day weeks, particularly when the policy reduces instructional time overall.
Similarly, prior studies of four-day week policies in Colorado, Oregon, and Missouri found they had no effects or negative effects on teacher retention. One study in Arkansas showed small improvements in teacher retention.
“The early reasoning [for shortened school weeks] was all financial savings, and there wasn’t much of that. Now it’s [teacher] retention,” Lawson said. “It seems like the rationale has kind of evolved over time, as the evidence has come out to not support the prior rationale.”
Four-day weeks don’t always mean less work for teachers
In part, districts’ schedule changes may not make a large difference on teacher recruitment and retention because they may not change teachers’ workloads significantly. The study found many four-day districts still required teachers to come in on the fifth day for professional development or other activities.
More than 97% of Texas districts using adjusted schedules are in rural areas, and the study found districts that shortened schedules became more likely to recruit teachers from other districts rather than to target new talent, private school teachers, or out-of-state teachers. The study did not find that schedule changes helped rural districts bring more teachers from urban areas, a longstanding hiring issue for rural districts.
Heightened competition for rural teachers in particular may explain why four-day weeks tend to clump together geographically, in a kind of market race, Lawson said. “If you see maps and [school week schedule change] pops up in one place, then suddenly all the surrounding districts are adopting it as well.”
As a result, over time, regional changes in school weeks may reduce the schedule’s attractiveness as a way to recruit teachers from other districts.
