The Four-Day School Week

Although the four-day school week originated in 1936, it was not widely implemented until 1973 when there was a need to conserve energy and reduce operating costs. This study investigated how achievement tests scores of schools with a four-day school week compared with schools with a traditional five-day school week. The study focused on student performance in Colorado where 62 school districts operated a four-day school week. The results of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) were utilized to examine student performance in reading, writing, and mathematics in grades 3 through 10. While the mean test scores for five-day week schools exceeded those of four-day week schools in 11 of the 12 test comparisons, the differences were slight, with only one area revealing a statistically significant difference. This study concludes that decisions to change to the four-day week should be for reasons other than student academic performance.

Stability of School-Building Accountability Scores and Gains

A number of states have school-building accountability systems that rely on comparisons of achievement from one year to the next. Improvement of the performance of schools is judged by changes in the achievement of successive groups of students. Year-to-year changes in scores for successive groups of students have a great deal of volatility. The uncertainty in the scores is the result of measurement and sampling error and nonpersistent factors that affect scores in one year but not the next. The level of uncertainty was investigated using fourth grade reading results for schools in Colorado for four years of administration of the Colorado Student Assessment Program. It was found that the year-to-year changes are quite unstable, resulting in a near zero correlation of the school gains from years one to two with those from years three to four. Some suggestions for minimizing volatility in change indices for schools are provided.