4 day school week movement.. gaining traction in conservative areas

Why would this benefit parents assuming most of them are working five days a week. Who's watching the kids then?

 

Parents everywhere groaning about having to find a babysitter for Friday.

 

Step 1) 4 day school week
Step 2) 4 day work week
Step 3) Profit!

 

People will support this more if you do it on Monday. I'd love a reason to not have Monday's problems sitting on my desk.

 

Not just teachers. Bus drivers, custodial staff, etc. huge personnel shortages in the behind the scenes folks that keep things running.

 

That's fine as long as you promise not to start complaining about Tuesday's problems.

 

No guarantees man.

 

The school districts will offer education day care on Fridays for students with no where to go. They will undercut the price of normal day care, claim to provide high quality tutors, pay teachers a stipen to work on Friday and make money off of it.

 

It would be much simpler for the politicians to give the teachers a decent pay raise than this bullshit.

 

I was a teacher. I did my research on this, and I am convinced that the smart administrators who understand the factors and the variables at play in the education world would move to this model.

The truth is: good teachers drive good education. All the research shows this. It is the #1 factor. Attracting good teachers and having professional development opportunities for teachers to become better teachers are essential to providing a good education. Also, there is not a bottomless pot of money to pay teachers, so money/funding/budgeting is a constraining factor.

What administrators should do is move to the 4 day model long term to improve the quality of their teachers. If there was only one school in the state of Florida doing this that school would see teacher applications go through the roof. When the applicant pool is better the school gets better. And you are able to do that without spending any more money.

You will have to fight the parents who hate anything different than the way they did it. Nonetheless, people still have issues with what to do with the kids after school 5 days per week. The longer 4 day schedule that keep kids in school past 4:00 pm would help solve that problem, and shift the issue to Fridays.

Where this has been implemented there has been high buy in once the system was fully implemented.

When you realize the day is extended by 1.5 hours per day for 4 days, and that makes up for the lost 5th day…it doesn’t become so far-fetched. And then teachers use the 5th day to do their lesson planning, grading, and even to tutor students outside of class. It is a good model. You attract good teachers by making them happy, and this helps tremendously with work-life balance, which in turn makes teachers happier.

 

we already have adults who only want to work 4 days a week, why not kids?

 

4 day work week, 3 month vacation, where do I sign up?

 

I mean, I’m not opposed…

 

Somebody’s got a case of the Tuesdays.

 

You want your kids sitting on your desk on Mondays?

 

If four days is a great idea, then why not two days a week? Teach a couple of sixteen hour days and take a long weekend.

Adding hours to the school day is probably not a good idea. The students' ability to learn (like anyone else's) diminishes beyond a certain number of hours. What then? Provide megaphones so teachers can keep kids awake with an amplified voice? Also, part of the benefit of school is providing the same structure (a 5-day school week) that they might be expected to continue in their work life after school. Turning them loose an extra day of the week without adult supervision around the house may be asking for trouble.

I would much rather see school districts convert administrative staff into classroom staff so that every teacher has their own teaching assistant. Use the teaching assistant position to train new teachers for 2-3 years before they get their own classroom. For additional teaching assistants, hire people in their 60's with life experience. Provide financial incentive for high school teachers to go back to school in the summers and get a degree in the subject that they teach (or related to their subject, like STEM-related classes for math and science teachers). Most teachers just have a degree in education. This especially hurts math and science education in high school.

The teaching assistant could help with grading papers and other things that take up a teacher's time, and thereby improve their work-life balance.

 

Teachers at the secondary level have more than " a degree in education." There are specific content area requirements at the university level and here in Florida part of the certification process is a subject area exam. Personally, I have a poli sci degree from UF and a masters in social studies education.