Do Four-Day School Weeks Improve Teacher Recruitment and Retention?

Morton and DeArmond (2026) examine whether four-day school weeks improve teacher recruitment and retention. They synthesize recent evidence from Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Oregon, including causal difference-in-differences studies comparing staffing outcomes under four- and five-day schedules. They find little consistent evidence that four-day weeks improve staffing. Estimated retention effects generally range from a 3.0-percentage-point decrease to a 1.2-percentage-point increase, with most statistically insignificant. Recruitment effects are similarly modest: Arkansas saw a 5.4-percentage-point increase in new hires with advanced degrees, but no improvement in experience or value-added. Overall, four-day weeks appear unlikely to substantially alleviate teacher staffing challenges.

Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist

Four-day school weeks raise a broader policy question about whether changes in working conditions can meaningfully address persistent teacher shortages and turnover, particularly when school systems face limited resources and intense competition for qualified educators. The issue is especially timely because four-day schedules have expanded rapidly while districts increasingly cite staffing concerns as justification. Morton has published extensively on four-day school weeks, and this article usefully extends that literature from student and financial outcomes to the teacher labor market. The multi-state evidence improves generalizability, although differences among states remain important. The underlying studies’ difference-in-differences designs provide relatively strong causal evidence, making the findings considerably more informative than simple multivariate associations. The article is forthcoming in Education Finance and Policy, an established peer-reviewed journal specializing in education policy and economics.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Morton, E., & DeArmond, M. (2026). Are four-day school weeks delivering on teacher retention and recruitment? Education Finance and Policy. Advance online publication. https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/doi/10.1162/EDFP.a.475/137907/Are-Four-Day-School-Weeks-Delivering-on-Teacher

Central Research Question

The central question is whether four-day school weeks improve teacher recruitment and retention. Four-day schedules have become increasingly common, particularly among small and rural school districts. Although districts historically adopted them primarily to reduce costs or improve student attendance, teacher staffing has become an increasingly prominent justification. School leaders contend that an additional non-school day may improve work-life balance, reduce commuting burdens, and make teaching positions more attractive without requiring large salary increases.

The question has substantial policy significance because rural districts often face particularly difficult teacher labor markets. They experience relatively high turnover and can have difficulty attracting qualified applicants after teachers leave. A four-day week could therefore function as a nonmonetary employment benefit that compensates for lower salaries, geographic isolation, long commutes, or other disadvantages. The article evaluates whether empirical evidence supports this proposition, focusing principally on whether four-day schedules increase retention, reduce teacher exits or moves between districts, and improve the recruitment or qualifications of newly hired teachers.

Previous Literature

Earlier research on four-day school weeks concentrated much more heavily on students and school finances than on teacher labor markets. Morton (2021) and Thompson (2021a), for example, find that eliminating one school day produces relatively modest financial savings. Reductions in transportation, food service, and operating expenses typically amount to only 1–2 percent of total district expenditures. Studies by Kilburn et al. (2021), Morton (2023), and Thompson (2021b) generally find little evidence of improvements in student attendance, while Morton, Thompson, and Kuhfeld (2024) report null or negative achievement effects of approximately −0.02 to −0.09 standard deviations.

The teacher labor-market literature provides a strong reason to examine staffing outcomes separately. Ingersoll and Tran (2023) document substantial teacher turnover in rural schools, particularly those serving larger proportions of economically disadvantaged students. Cowan et al. (2016), Jacob (2007), and McVey and Trinidad (2019) describe difficulties schools encounter in filling vacancies with qualified teachers. Research by Ronfeldt, Loeb, and Wyckoff (2013) further demonstrates that teacher turnover can adversely affect student achievement.

The most direct precursor is Kilburn et al. (2021), a RAND Corporation mixed-methods study of four-day school weeks. Administrators interviewed for that study frequently believed the schedule improved recruitment by making their districts more attractive employers. Teachers also described the schedule as a desirable employment benefit that provided additional time for family responsibilities, second jobs, grading, professional development, and appointments. Nevertheless, most teachers reported that the schedule was not decisive in determining where they worked or whether they remained in teaching.

Data

Rather than introducing a single new dataset, the article synthesizes emerging empirical evidence from multiple studies of four-day school weeks. The retention evidence encompasses Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Oregon. Recruitment evidence is available for Arkansas, Colorado, and Missouri. The underlying studies use state administrative records and other staffing information to measure teacher employment transitions, recruitment, qualifications, and characteristics of new hires.

Retention outcomes include whether teachers remain in their schools or districts, move to another district, or exit the state teaching workforce. Recruitment measures include the proportion of new teachers holding advanced degrees, teacher experience, value-added measures, the proportion of teachers newly hired into districts, the origins of new hires, the proportion of vacancies filled by qualified applicants, and the use of shortage credentials.

This multi-state evidence base is valuable because four-day school weeks differ considerably across jurisdictions. Some states have long histories with shortened schedules, whereas many districts in Arkansas and Missouri adopted them around or after the COVID-19 pandemic. District motivations, labor markets, salaries, rurality, and the prevalence of neighboring four-day districts also differ, complicating direct comparisons but providing evidence across substantially different institutional environments.

Methods

The article is a policy research synthesis rather than an original causal analysis. Its principal methodological contribution is to organize and compare recent studies that estimate the effects of four-day school weeks on teacher labor-market outcomes. Particular attention is given to studies employing difference-in-differences designs, which compare changes in staffing outcomes over time between schools or teachers exposed to four-day schedules and appropriate comparison groups operating on conventional five-day schedules.

This approach is important because descriptive comparisons cannot establish whether four-day weeks themselves influence teacher behavior. Districts adopting four-day schedules may systematically differ from other districts in geography, salaries, enrollment, financial conditions, staffing difficulties, or other characteristics. Difference-in-differences methods attempt to isolate the effect of schedule adoption by examining whether outcomes change differently after adoption relative to changes observed among comparison districts.

The authors also emphasize heterogeneity across studies rather than treating all estimates as directly interchangeable. They consider differences associated with teacher experience, rural status, time since adoption, and movements between four- and five-day districts. This comparative approach reveals whether apparently conflicting findings may result from different populations, settings, or implementation histories.

Findings/Size Effects

The principal finding is that four-day school weeks do not consistently improve teacher retention. Across the studies reviewed, estimated retention effects are generally small and frequently statistically insignificant. Overall estimates range from approximately a 3.0-percentage-point reduction in retention to a 1.2-percentage-point increase.

Arkansas provides some evidence of reduced movement between districts. Camp (2024) estimates that adoption reduces the probability that teachers move to another district by 1.4 percentage points. However, the estimated increase in teacher retention is only 1.2 percentage points and is not statistically significant. That increase would correspond to approximately 20 fewer departures annually across 109 four-day schools, or roughly one additional teacher retained for every five schools.

Evidence from Oregon points in the opposite direction. Ainsworth et al. (2024) estimate a 2.3-percentage-point reduction in teachers staying following adoption. Given baseline turnover rates commonly ranging from approximately 12 to 17 percent, effects of two or three percentage points are potentially meaningful. The Oregon estimate corresponds to approximately 48 additional teachers leaving across 116 adopting schools, beyond roughly 282 teachers who would ordinarily leave annually. Longer-run effects were particularly negative for some early-career, retirement-age, and male teachers.

A Colorado study of one relatively large and urban four-day district estimates a 3.0-percentage-point decline in retention, although that district is atypical of the predominantly small and rural districts using four-day schedules. Missouri and Oklahoma generally produce small or statistically insignificant retention effects. Thompson (2025) nevertheless finds a 0.6-percentage-point reduction in moves specifically to other four-day districts.

Recruitment results are similarly limited. In Arkansas, four-day schedules are associated with a 5.4-percentage-point increase in the proportion of new hires holding a master's degree or higher, approximately 13 percent above the 2022–23 state average. However, there are no detectable improvements in new teachers' prior experience or value-added scores.

Missouri evidence indicates that rural four-day districts may experience about a 4-percentage-point increase in vacancies filled by fully qualified applicants, although the underlying study provides limited methodological and statistical information. A separate Missouri analysis finds essentially zero change in the overall percentage of teachers newly hired into a district. Beneath that aggregate null result, the share arriving from another district increases by 1.1 percentage points, while the share entering Missouri teaching for the first time falls by 1.0 percentage point. This pattern suggests redistribution of existing teachers rather than expansion of teacher supply.

Colorado evidence similarly provides little indication of improved recruitment. Four-day schedules increase the proportion of teachers holding shortage credentials by approximately 0.11 percentage points, with the increase concentrated in non-rural schools. Collectively, the evidence does not demonstrate substantial or consistent improvements in either teacher recruitment or retention.

Conclusion

The evidence reviewed does not support the proposition that four-day school weeks generally solve teacher staffing problems. Teachers may value the additional non-school day, and administrators may perceive the schedule as an effective recruiting tool, but those preferences do not consistently translate into measurable improvements in recruitment or retention. The findings therefore distinguish employee satisfaction with a policy from its effects on actual employment decisions.

The broader evidence also suggests that staffing outcomes depend on factors extending beyond weekly schedules, including salaries, working conditions, commuting distances, local teacher supply, and competition among districts. The authors contrast the limited four-day-week effects with research on more direct staffing interventions. Studies of annual retention bonuses of roughly $5,000–$10,000, for example, have found retention increases of 15 percentage points or more, although much of that evidence comes from urban settings and may not generalize directly to rural districts.

The research base on four-day schedules remains comparatively young. Differences in adoption timing, district characteristics, neighboring policies, salaries, and labor-market conditions may explain some variation across states. Multi-state causal research capable of identifying which conditions moderate policy effects would therefore improve understanding. Based on the evidence currently available, however, four-day school weeks appear to have, at most, modest effects on teacher recruitment and retention and do not consistently alleviate the staffing challenges that increasingly motivate their adoption.