TY  - JOUR
AB  - Four-day school weeks (FDSWs) have expanded rapidly in Texas in recent years. Districts cite teacher retention and recruitment as the primary motivation, though little is known about the impacts of FDSWs in this context. We study the effects of FDSW adoption on students and teachers in Texas using a staggered differences-in-differences design with a propensity score matched control group. We find that adopting a FDSW leads to positive effects on teacher retention. Teachers in districts that adopt FDSWs are 2.1 percentage points more likely to remain in that district the following year, driven by a decrease in moving to other districts rather than leaving teaching all together. Additionally, adopting a FDSW leads to recruiting higher quality teachers, as measured by having higher value-added scores, more years of experience, and being more likely to hold a Master’s degree. In terms of students, we do not find evidence of negative effects on standardized test scores in either math or reading. However, we find heterogeneity in these effects both by policy design and district quality. We find negative effects on student achievement for districts that had the fewest instructional minutes after adoption and for those that had low accountability scores prior to adoption, which we use to proxy for district quality. These results indicate that while the adoption of a FDSW can lead to modest gains in teacher retention, the context in which the policy is adopted and how districts choose to structure the four-day week are important for effects on student achievement.
AU  - Lohner, Gabrielle
AU  - Weng, Justine
PY  - 2026
ST  - The Effects of Four-Day School Weeks in Texas
TI  - The Effects of Four-Day School Weeks in Texas
UR  - http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1623
ER  -