Do Four-Day School Weeks Help Schools Retain Teachers?

Ainsworth, Liu, and Penner (2026) asked whether adopting a four-day school week changes teacher turnover in the short and long term. They analyzed administrative records for all public school employees in Oregon from 2006–2007 through 2023–2024, using a difference-in-differences research design to estimate the policy’s causal effects. They found that schools adopting a four-day week experienced a 2.0 percentage point increase in teacher turnover. This included a 0.7 percentage point increase in teachers moving to another district and a 1.3 percentage point increase in teachers leaving Oregon’s public education workforce. The increases persisted for many years after adoption.

Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist

Teacher recruitment and retention have become central policy challenges as school systems confront persistent staffing shortages and rising turnover. Four-day school weeks have attracted growing attention as a non-salary strategy to improve working conditions, making rigorous evaluations increasingly important. Ainsworth, Liu, and Penner have contributed extensively to research on educator labor markets and education policy, and this study builds on an expanding literature examining four-day school schedules. Published in Education Finance and Policy, one of the leading journals in education policy research, the article uses a comprehensive statewide administrative dataset and a strong difference-in-differences causal inference design. These methods support credible estimates, while Oregon’s long history with four-day schedules provides evidence that is informative for many states now considering similar policies, particularly rural jurisdictions.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Ainsworth, A. J., Liu, Y., & Penner, E. K. (2026). Less is more? The causal effect of four-day school weeks on teacher turnover. Education Finance and Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1162/EDFP_a_00461

Central Research Question

Teacher shortages and high turnover have become persistent challenges across the United States, particularly in rural districts where attracting and retaining qualified educators is especially difficult. As districts search for alternatives to salary increases that may be financially unattainable, four-day school weeks have become increasingly common. Although prior research has extensively examined their effects on student achievement and other educational outcomes, far less evidence has addressed whether they actually improve teacher retention. This question has become increasingly important because many recent adopters have explicitly justified the policy as a strategy to recruit and retain teachers.

The central research question examined by Ainsworth, Liu, and Penner is whether adopting a four-day school week causally affects teacher turnover. Rather than simply asking whether teachers prefer shorter workweeks, the authors investigate whether districts that adopt four-day schedules experience measurable changes in teacher mobility and attrition. They also examine whether these effects differ over time, whether they persist years after adoption, whether they vary across teacher and school characteristics, and whether the effects differ between districts that adopted the policy before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous Literature

The authors place their study within two complementary research traditions. The first examines teacher labor markets and the determinants of teacher retention. Decades of research have demonstrated that teacher salaries, working conditions, school leadership, professional support, and workplace culture all influence whether educators remain in their positions. Numerous causal studies have shown that higher salaries and targeted financial incentives reduce teacher turnover, although improving working conditions has also received growing attention as a potentially effective policy strategy.

The second body of literature examines four-day school weeks. Early research primarily evaluated student outcomes, including academic achievement, attendance, juvenile crime, and family labor supply. More recently, researchers have turned their attention to educators because many districts now promote four-day schedules as a recruitment and retention tool. However, the existing evidence remains mixed. Studies conducted in Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and other states have reported increases, decreases, or no measurable effects on teacher turnover. Differences across states, adoption periods, teacher subgroups, and definitions of turnover have complicated efforts to draw general conclusions.

The authors argue that Oregon provides an especially valuable setting for addressing these uncertainties. The state has one of the nation’s longest histories of four-day school week adoption and contains both early adopters motivated primarily by cost savings and more recent adopters motivated by teacher recruitment. This longer policy history allows the authors to evaluate both immediate and long-term effects while extending previous research substantially beyond the short observation periods available in many earlier studies.

Data

The study uses comprehensive administrative records maintained by the Oregon Department of Education covering every public school employee in the state. The dataset spans school years 2006–2007 through 2023–2024 and includes more than one hundred schools that adopted four-day schedules during the study period. Because the data include all public school employees statewide, the authors avoid many of the sampling limitations found in survey-based research.

The administrative records identify whether teachers remained in their current schools, transferred to different districts, or exited Oregon’s public education workforce entirely. The dataset also contains information describing teacher characteristics, school characteristics, district characteristics, school calendars, and employment histories. The long observation period allows the researchers to follow teachers for many years before and after policy adoption while capturing multiple waves of four-day school week implementation.

The quality of the dataset represents one of the study’s principal strengths. Administrative records minimize measurement error associated with self-reported survey responses and provide complete statewide coverage over an extended period. Because Oregon has extensive experience with four-day school weeks, the data also provide a useful opportunity to evaluate whether observed effects persist long after implementation rather than simply measuring short-term adjustments.

Methods

The authors employ a difference-in-differences research design, one of the strongest quasi-experimental approaches available for evaluating public policies when randomized experiments are not feasible. This causal inference framework compares changes in teacher turnover before and after schools adopt four-day schedules with contemporaneous changes among comparable schools that continue operating traditional five-day schedules.

The analysis estimates average treatment effects while examining event-study dynamics to determine whether effects emerge immediately or evolve over time. The authors also distinguish between teachers transferring to other districts and teachers leaving Oregon’s education workforce altogether. Additional analyses investigate whether policy effects differ according to teacher characteristics, school characteristics, rural status, and the historical period during which schools adopted four-day calendars.

Importantly, the study examines policy impacts over nearly two decades, allowing the researchers to estimate both short-term and long-term effects. The authors further compare schools adopting four-day schedules during the Great Recession with those adopting after the COVID-19 pandemic, recognizing that districts may have implemented identical policies for different reasons during different labor market conditions.

Although observational studies cannot achieve the same level of control as randomized controlled trials, the difference-in-differences design substantially strengthens causal inference relative to conventional multivariate regression approaches. By exploiting policy timing across schools and years, the authors provide considerably stronger evidence regarding causal relationships than simple cross-sectional comparisons.

Findings/Size Effects

The study finds that adopting a four-day school week increased overall teacher turnover by approximately 2.0 percentage points. Rather than improving teacher retention, schools generally experienced higher rates of teachers either transferring elsewhere or leaving Oregon’s public education workforce.

The increase consisted of two distinct components. Teachers were approximately 0.7 percentage points more likely to move to another district and 1.3 percentage points more likely to leave the state’s education workforce entirely. These results indicate that the policy affected both mobility within education and exits from public education.

The timing of adoption proved important. The largest increases occurred among schools that adopted four-day schedules before the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly during the period surrounding the Great Recession. These elevated turnover rates generally persisted for years following adoption, suggesting that the policy’s effects were not merely temporary adjustment costs.

Schools adopting four-day schedules after the pandemic experienced different patterns. Overall turnover did not significantly change because modest reductions in teacher mobility were offset by increases in workforce exits. These findings suggest that districts implementing identical calendar reforms under different labor market conditions may experience different outcomes.

The authors also identify several noteworthy patterns across subgroups. Increased turnover was concentrated among male teachers, teachers holding bachelor’s degrees, and teachers working in rural schools. Although not always statistically significant, younger teachers appeared somewhat more likely to transfer districts, whereas older and more experienced teachers appeared somewhat more likely to leave the workforce. Consequently, four-day schools experienced substantial declines—approximately 15 percentage points—in the proportion of highly experienced teachers with more than fifteen years of experience.

Finally, implementation details mattered. Schools that preserved relatively more instructional days and teacher contract days experienced larger increases in turnover, particularly through increased district-to-district mobility. The authors also observed modest increases in salary gaps between four-day and five-day schools after adoption, suggesting that compensation differences may have contributed to continued teacher departures despite the shorter workweek.

Conclusion

This study provides one of the most comprehensive causal evaluations to date of how four-day school weeks influence teacher turnover. Using statewide administrative data spanning nearly two decades and a rigorous difference-in-differences research design, the authors find little evidence that adopting four-day schedules consistently improves teacher retention. Instead, average turnover increased, with effects persisting well beyond initial implementation among many early adopters.

The findings substantially expand the existing literature by extending observation periods, distinguishing between different forms of turnover, examining multiple adoption waves, and investigating important sources of heterogeneity. The study also demonstrates that policy effectiveness depends on implementation context and labor market conditions rather than simply on the calendar itself.

Although Oregon’s longstanding experience with four-day school weeks makes it an especially informative setting, caution is warranted when generalizing the exact magnitude of the estimated effects to every jurisdiction. Differences in teacher labor markets, salary structures, collective bargaining agreements, and implementation practices may influence outcomes elsewhere. Nevertheless, because many states are now expanding four-day school week adoption, particularly in rural districts facing teacher shortages, the study provides timely and highly relevant evidence that informs an increasingly important national policy discussion.