4-day school weeks are growing in popularity, despite a lack of data on the effects
Northeast of the capital city of Des Moines in central Iowa, the 400-student Collins-Maxwell Community School District is one of many across the state shifting to a four-day school week.
Like many rural K-12 schools, the district has struggled to find teachers, and it sees the four-day week as a useful recruiting tool. It also wants to curb student absences, which tend to spike on Mondays and Fridays.
The district maintained its traditional five-day calendar in August and September. But from now on, with scattered exceptions, the middle school and high school in the Collins-Maxwell district will be closed on Mondays. To meet Iowa’s minimum number of instructional hours, the district will lengthen the other days during four-day weeks.
Superintendent Marc Snavely said he watched nearby schools transition to shorter weeks and was intrigued by the reports he got from his counterparts in other districts. Snavely hopes the shorter week will boost teacher morale, reduce burnout, and make the rural district more competitive with nearby districts that are larger and can offer teachers better pay.
“Ultimately, the ‘why’ behind the four-day school week came down to staff recruitment and retention,” Snavely said in an interview. “We felt being a small school district, the four-day week would allow us to better compete.”
He added that surrounding schools with four-day weeks said they experienced fewer discipline problems and improved attendance. And rural school districts across the country tout the four-day work week as a way to stretch tight school budgets amid K-12 funding uncertainties at the federal and state levels.
But despite the reports of higher attendance and calmer classrooms, education researchers say the evidence tells a more complicated story.
Emily Morton, lead researcher for the Northwest Evaluation Association, which creates standardized testing for K-12 schools, cautioned that the promised benefits have not shown up in the data. Moreover, longer school days can harm academic performance, Morton said.
But such concerns might not matter as four-day school weeks become more popular nationwide.
“One thing that does show up clearly is that there is an extremely high approval rating for these policies,” Morton said. “Parents and students overwhelmingly want to stay on a four-day week once they have it.”
A rural trend
There are more than 2,100 schools in 26 states using four-day weeks, according to researchers at Oregon State University. In Iowa, the number of districts on a four-day schedule has grown from six in 2023-24 to more than two dozen in 2025. In Colorado, two-thirds of districts are on the altered schedule.
But so far, it’s almost entirely a rural phenomenon.
© iStock - NiseriN
“To my knowledge, there’s not a single urban district using a four-day week,” Morton said. “What a four-day week looks like in a rural community is very different from what people in suburban or urban areas imagine.”
Dr. Shanon Taylor, an education professor at the University of Nevada, Reno who studies school scheduling, said districts typically adopt the model for economic and staffing reasons, not academic ones. Rural districts often save money on transportation, utilities and building operations, she said, and the promise of permanent three-day weekends helps recruitment efforts.
However, the burden of accommodating this transition may fall heavily on parents who work five days a week, and especially on the parents of younger students who must find a child care alternative on the selected day off.
“The research is still mixed,” Taylor said. “We don’t yet have decisive evidence showing academic benefits or drawbacks.”
In June, researchers at the University of Oregon published a review of 11 studies on four-day school weeks, which included data on academic achievement, attendance, discipline and criminal activity. The impact of a four-day week varied based on grade level on location, the Oregon researchers found, but overall “there was no evidence of large positive effects.”
They also noted that “maintaining activities that foster healthy youth development on the fifth day is important for minimizing other negative impacts.”
State vs. local clashes
In some states, the policy has sparked conflict between state and local officials.
“There’s a lot of tension between state leaders and rural districts over whether the four-day week is something the state should allow,” said Morton. “In Oklahoma, when the state tried to take it away, districts simply shifted to ‘virtual Fridays’ — and instruction mostly didn’t happen.”
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, found through a public records request that more than 100 Oklahoma districts had at least one school where students had at least two full weeks’ worth of “virtual days” in the 2022-23 school year. More than 60 districts had at least one school that went online for three weeks or more. During many of those days, there was minimal live instruction.
In response, Oklahoma this year enacted a law that restricts public schools’ ability to shift to virtual learning. The measure limits districts to two days of virtual instruction each school year, and only allows them under certain circumstances, such as a state of emergency declared by the governor.
Missouri enacted a law in 2024 requiring that certain big city, charter and county districts obtain voter approval before adopting or continuing a four-day week. The Independence School District, a 14,000-student suburban system on the edge of Kansas City that switched to the shorter week in 2023-24, has since sued the state, alleging the law unconstitutionally targets certain districts based on arbitrary criteria such as county size.
Last year, a New Mexico mandate for districts to adopt calendars with more school days was halted in court. And Arkansas legislators considered a bill that would allow for range of instructional times from 160 to 190 days, which would be contingent on a school’s rating. A large number of rural districts there have moved to four-day schedules.
Meanwhile, uncertainty over the costs and benefits of the approach are likely to persist.
Morton, the education assessment researcher, said that small rural districts might not be equipped to determine whether a four-day week produces benefits until further studies are conducted across the country.
“Even if your test scores stay flat, nearby districts might be rising, so your ‘flat’ could actually be a negative effect,” she said. “States need to equip districts with what national research shows, because local data will never be able to answer these questions alone.”
