Cutting school... by 20%

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Right now, a lot of school districts across the country are making a pretty giant change to the way public education usually works. Facing teacher shortages and struggling to fill vacant spots, they are finding a new recruitment tool: the four-day school week.

Those districts are saying to teachers, "You can have three-day weekends all the time, and we won't cut your pay." As of this fall, around 900 school districts – that's about 7% of all districts in the U.S. – now have school weeks that are just four days long.

And this isn't the first time a bunch of schools have scaled back to four days, so there is a lot of data to lean on to figure out how well it works. In this episode, teachers love the four-day school week, and it turns out even parents love it, too. But is it good for students?

This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Molly Messick and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR sponsor Barclay's corporate and investment bank powering sustainable growth in a changing world powering
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0:15.3	This is planet money from NPR
0:20.5	A few years ago the Warren County R3 school district in Warren, Tim Missouri was having this big problem
0:27.7	They kept losing teachers every school year we'd lose
0:32.5	About you know 50 or so teachers, which was 20% of the teaching staff and so that was really a problem
0:40.1	If you losing that many this is the school's superintendent Greg clinging Smith
0:44.9	It's like three words clinging and Smith so clinging Smith
0:49.1	Greg clinging Smith school district has about 3,000 students, which is medium sized
0:54.6	It's not really rural, but not suburban either. There's a pre-K three elementary schools one middle school one high school
1:02.2	And they didn't have a problem recruiting teachers. They had a problem keeping them and so we would always have first-year teachers
1:10.1	You know, they would come out to us for a year and then to maybe then they they leave they'd leave for higher pay
1:17.2	Because the starting salary in Greg's district is
1:20.2	$36,931 a year, but in the next district over which is bigger more suburban the starting pay is like
1:29.1	$10,000 more than that and so you know, we just couldn't compete and we had really nothing to offer our staff
1:36.3	Except low pay. So let's just we'll have a big sale
1:40.1	Big sale
1:41.8	Yeah, big sell wasn't gonna do it so Greg and the school board decided to try a couple different things to
1:49.1	Try to solve their teacher retention problem like they asked voters to raise taxes so that they could pay teachers more
1:56.1	They wanted to get about a million dollars more per year and because voter turnout is so low
2:01.3	They didn't need that many people to say yes on a tax increase. They only needed like a thousand people
2:06.9	It doesn't sound very much. We should be able to do this just with our own staff almost
	...

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