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Interesting. I hope the 4-day school week doesn't exacerbate the education / illiteracy crisis that we are already seeing in America. Not sure if less time in s

Interesting. I hope the 4-day school week doesn't exacerbate the education / illiteracy crisis that we are already seeing in America. Not sure if less time in school would help with this, though difficult to comprehend the nuances associated with experiments like this until the data is available.

Syonyk 3y ago
In general, I don't think it's "less time in school" - our local school days are a bit on the long side (for my kids, it's about 7AM to 4PM counting the bus ride), and the year extends further into the summer than a typical school year does. It's just fewer days in school any given week.
- nickvec 3y ago
  Ah, totally makes sense. In that case, I'm all onboard. I'm sure the kids are too. Who wouldn't want 3 days off every week?
burkaman 3y ago
Data is available and the results seem mixed and difficult to interpret so far, here's an article with links to a bunch of studies: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-seven-new-studies-on-the-impact-of-a-four-day-school-week/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-seven-new-studies-o.... It seems like most studies find either no effect on academics or a small negative effect, and sometimes positive social effects like reduced bullying. One point I found interesting: > The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers. This makes sense but obviously would disappear if the four-day week became widespread.
jakupovic 3y ago
Public schools are publicly subsidized day care centers. If people worked less there would be less need for the day care period.
Zandikar 3y ago
Depends on the environment. The simple fact of the matter for many students (In America at least) is that it's not a lack of time in class that's leading to a lack of education. One of if not THE primary function of primary school in America today is to be a place for kids to go while the worker bees go to work now that its no longer socially acceptable for kids to run free.
- quacked 3y ago
  I think most people think school is like pokemon training, where X minutes = Y XP, and more minutes in class = more XP, thus leading to higher-level students. I remember when I was in school we missed a few extra days from snowstorms, so they added several minutes onto the school day to "make up for the missed time". It was so obviously stupid then, but no school administrator listened to me, because what does a high school kid know?
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    Yah, treating time as fungible is a big mistake and people do it all the time.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > I think most people think school is like pokemon training, where X minutes = Y XP, and more minutes in class = more XP, thus leading to higher-level students. To be fair, most people think this is how productivity works in any domain. It's certainly true if your job is to turn a hand crank all day producing widgets and under the assumption that you have equal energy throughout the day (but even accounting for that you still get the effect that more time = more widgets). But that most certainly is not true in the modern world and definitely not with any task that requires creativity. I'm actually more shocked at how many developers believe this considering I think we've all been in plenty of situations where more time debugging creates more bugs and the solution is to walk away, go do something else, and come back later. Maybe the problem is simply momentum and the coefficient of status stubbornness.
  - supertrope 3y ago
wharvle 3y ago
The recent increase in the number of schools going 4-day is mostly a teacher attraction and retention strategy. There’s an ongoing severe teacher shortage, and poor rural districts in states with low average teacher pay are catching the worst of it (for obvious reasons). The alternative is the school district basically collapses from lack of staffing, or else has to come up with a bunch more money. It may or may not harm educational outcomes (I’d guess it tends to, personally) but they’re not doing it because they think it’ll help vs a normal 5-day school week, rather, because the alternatives are (to them) much worse. Expect various other mitigation strategies to creep their way into nicer and nicer school districts, as the crisis worsens. That, or we’re gonna have to increase teacher pay a ton (good luck). I expect private tutoring services to positively boom over the next decade or two, as lower-than-usual SES families turn to them just to get back to the level of education they used to get “for free”.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Weird to frame it as a "teacher shortage" especially when the rest of your [great] comment correctly calls out insufficient pay as the real problem.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Well, yeah, to some extent most (not all) “shortages” are just things becoming more expensive than one wishes to pay. Unfortunately, teacher pay’s being stagnant (plus it took a huge hit, in relative terms, over the pandemic) and working conditions declining have been trends for long enough that a bunch of teachers have left with no plans to return, and the “pipeline” has finally caught on that the career—even if you really, really want to teach kids—kinda sucks a whole bunch now, such that teacher training programs have seen a large drop in enrollment. Higher pay will indeed go a long way toward fixing the problem, but only at a significant lag—this is on track to continue for years even with big pay bumps now. I definitely didn’t mean to, like, blame teachers for this situation, though, so I apologize if I gave that impression. It’s definitely a matter of pay and work conditions. But, it’s gonna take a while to fix even if we throw money at it immediately, and I’m not seeing much of that yet :-/
godelski 3y ago
> doesn't exacerbate the education / illiteracy crisis that we are already seeing in America. My personal belief is that this is due to different factors and that it is quite a complex problem that is worsened by oversimplification. Notably that all measurements are quite fuzzy and there's incentives to advocate the metric that suits ones bias rather than account for the fuzziness of the metrics. I think what's good about the American education system is that we aren't test focused and that we don't have a singular exam that is critical to one's future success. I think this encourages creativity, which is necessary especially in STEM fields and especially as we move into the modern era with AI. I also think test based systems (as you may see in most of Asia like China's Gaokao or Korea's Suneung) put far too much pressure on memorization (lack of generalization) and are especially stressful to children's mental health and takes away from all the soft skills that one learns in schooling (and is especially important). I think it's important we have many opportunities for people to recover from mistakes or environmental situations that these tests do not account for and is likely a bigger problem for western societies and especially American culture. But the big thing is that there's strong evidence that a child under 10 can learn calculus. I'm not saying we need to do that, but certainly we can put more onto our children who are far smarter than we give credit to. But we may need to radically think our education program to perform such feats at scale. I do think there is a danger to solve "no student left behind" through decreasing standards rather than creating more nuanced educational methods and metrics (we see this even in other countries too). There are certainly larger incentive problems too. Such as in the modern world it is actually a rational decision for these children to desire to be "YouTube Stars" rather than say an engineer and that's not resolved by mocking them but being realistic about the risk reward environment we've created and our social devaluation of these jobs. This is a cultural phenomena that the Asian cultures seem to have solved where performing well in school is considered cool, but there are so many cultural aspects at play that this is hard to disentangle and pinpoint what exactly would be the way to create a similar phenomena in the west. Most certainly we need to disregard all parental sentiment of "well I didn't learn this when I was in school" if we are to operate on the premise that our society gets smarter as the world gets smarter because this should instead be seen as an expected result that is desired. But that may have political ramifications that adds to the complexity. > though difficult to comprehend the nuances associated with experiments like this until the data is available. I think, unfortunately, this is one of those many situations where we're never going to have sufficient data until we take a leap of faith. There's far too many issues where if we wait to act on experimental data that we'll wait till the ends of time because performing such experiments are difficult to do and especially in a controlled way. Even more so considering the difficulties in decoupling extraneous variables from the system and finding the key causal ones. In the real world you kinda just have to make that leap at times and be willing to revert if it is a mistake rather than doubling down and also be willing to consider colliding variables being adequate explanations for lack of success rather than the variable that was actively modified. (Fuck, experimentation and evaluation is hard. I really wish this was better recognized. The world is fucking fuzzy and we're fucking dumb) All of this is of course my opinions and I'm explicitly not adding sources to claims because I'm not trying to sound authoritative here but rather thinking aloud to promote discussion on the topic to form better communal consensus and how we as a community can figure out answers to these complex problems. So these are my views and the data I see. (Let's also try to encourage discussion like this where we aren't asserting authoritative conclusions because certainly none of us are authorities in this regard and certainly there are no hard conclusions from existing authorities)

Syonyk 3y ago

In general, I don't think it's "less time in school" - our local school days are a bit on the long side (for my kids, it's about 7AM to 4PM counting the bus ride), and the year extends further into the summer than a typical school year does. It's just fewer days in school any given week.

nickvec 3y ago
Ah, totally makes sense. In that case, I'm all onboard. I'm sure the kids are too. Who wouldn't want 3 days off every week?

burkaman 3y ago

Data is available and the results seem mixed and difficult to interpret so far, here's an article with links to a bunch of studies: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-seven-new-studies-on-the-impact-of-a-four-day-school-week/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-seven-new-studies-o.... It seems like most studies find either no effect on academics or a small negative effect, and sometimes positive social effects like reduced bullying. One point I found interesting: > The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers. This makes sense but obviously would disappear if the four-day week became widespread.

jakupovic 3y ago

Public schools are publicly subsidized day care centers. If people worked less there would be less need for the day care period.

Zandikar 3y ago

Depends on the environment. The simple fact of the matter for many students (In America at least) is that it's not a lack of time in class that's leading to a lack of education. One of if not THE primary function of primary school in America today is to be a place for kids to go while the worker bees go to work now that its no longer socially acceptable for kids to run free.

quacked 3y ago
I think most people think school is like pokemon training, where X minutes = Y XP, and more minutes in class = more XP, thus leading to higher-level students. I remember when I was in school we missed a few extra days from snowstorms, so they added several minutes onto the school day to "make up for the missed time". It was so obviously stupid then, but no school administrator listened to me, because what does a high school kid know?
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Yah, treating time as fungible is a big mistake and people do it all the time.
- godelski 3y ago
  > I think most people think school is like pokemon training, where X minutes = Y XP, and more minutes in class = more XP, thus leading to higher-level students. To be fair, most people think this is how productivity works in any domain. It's certainly true if your job is to turn a hand crank all day producing widgets and under the assumption that you have equal energy throughout the day (but even accounting for that you still get the effect that more time = more widgets). But that most certainly is not true in the modern world and definitely not with any task that requires creativity. I'm actually more shocked at how many developers believe this considering I think we've all been in plenty of situations where more time debugging creates more bugs and the solution is to walk away, go do something else, and come back later. Maybe the problem is simply momentum and the coefficient of status stubbornness.
- supertrope 3y ago

wharvle 3y ago

The recent increase in the number of schools going 4-day is mostly a teacher attraction and retention strategy. There’s an ongoing severe teacher shortage, and poor rural districts in states with low average teacher pay are catching the worst of it (for obvious reasons). The alternative is the school district basically collapses from lack of staffing, or else has to come up with a bunch more money. It may or may not harm educational outcomes (I’d guess it tends to, personally) but they’re not doing it because they think it’ll help vs a normal 5-day school week, rather, because the alternatives are (to them) much worse. Expect various other mitigation strategies to creep their way into nicer and nicer school districts, as the crisis worsens. That, or we’re gonna have to increase teacher pay a ton (good luck). I expect private tutoring services to positively boom over the next decade or two, as lower-than-usual SES families turn to them just to get back to the level of education they used to get “for free”.

ryandrake 3y ago
Weird to frame it as a "teacher shortage" especially when the rest of your [great] comment correctly calls out insufficient pay as the real problem.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Well, yeah, to some extent most (not all) “shortages” are just things becoming more expensive than one wishes to pay. Unfortunately, teacher pay’s being stagnant (plus it took a huge hit, in relative terms, over the pandemic) and working conditions declining have been trends for long enough that a bunch of teachers have left with no plans to return, and the “pipeline” has finally caught on that the career—even if you really, really want to teach kids—kinda sucks a whole bunch now, such that teacher training programs have seen a large drop in enrollment. Higher pay will indeed go a long way toward fixing the problem, but only at a significant lag—this is on track to continue for years even with big pay bumps now. I definitely didn’t mean to, like, blame teachers for this situation, though, so I apologize if I gave that impression. It’s definitely a matter of pay and work conditions. But, it’s gonna take a while to fix even if we throw money at it immediately, and I’m not seeing much of that yet :-/

godelski 3y ago

> doesn't exacerbate the education / illiteracy crisis that we are already seeing in America. My personal belief is that this is due to different factors and that it is quite a complex problem that is worsened by oversimplification. Notably that all measurements are quite fuzzy and there's incentives to advocate the metric that suits ones bias rather than account for the fuzziness of the metrics. I think what's good about the American education system is that we aren't test focused and that we don't have a singular exam that is critical to one's future success. I think this encourages creativity, which is necessary especially in STEM fields and especially as we move into the modern era with AI. I also think test based systems (as you may see in most of Asia like China's Gaokao or Korea's Suneung) put far too much pressure on memorization (lack of generalization) and are especially stressful to children's mental health and takes away from all the soft skills that one learns in schooling (and is especially important). I think it's important we have many opportunities for people to recover from mistakes or environmental situations that these tests do not account for and is likely a bigger problem for western societies and especially American culture. But the big thing is that there's strong evidence that a child under 10 can learn calculus. I'm not saying we need to do that, but certainly we can put more onto our children who are far smarter than we give credit to. But we may need to radically think our education program to perform such feats at scale. I do think there is a danger to solve "no student left behind" through decreasing standards rather than creating more nuanced educational methods and metrics (we see this even in other countries too). There are certainly larger incentive problems too. Such as in the modern world it is actually a rational decision for these children to desire to be "YouTube Stars" rather than say an engineer and that's not resolved by mocking them but being realistic about the risk reward environment we've created and our social devaluation of these jobs. This is a cultural phenomena that the Asian cultures seem to have solved where performing well in school is considered cool, but there are so many cultural aspects at play that this is hard to disentangle and pinpoint what exactly would be the way to create a similar phenomena in the west. Most certainly we need to disregard all parental sentiment of "well I didn't learn this when I was in school" if we are to operate on the premise that our society gets smarter as the world gets smarter because this should instead be seen as an expected result that is desired. But that may have political ramifications that adds to the complexity. > though difficult to comprehend the nuances associated with experiments like this until the data is available. I think, unfortunately, this is one of those many situations where we're never going to have sufficient data until we take a leap of faith. There's far too many issues where if we wait to act on experimental data that we'll wait till the ends of time because performing such experiments are difficult to do and especially in a controlled way. Even more so considering the difficulties in decoupling extraneous variables from the system and finding the key causal ones. In the real world you kinda just have to make that leap at times and be willing to revert if it is a mistake rather than doubling down and also be willing to consider colliding variables being adequate explanations for lack of success rather than the variable that was actively modified. (Fuck, experimentation and evaluation is hard. I really wish this was better recognized. The world is fucking fuzzy and we're fucking dumb) All of this is of course my opinions and I'm explicitly not adding sources to claims because I'm not trying to sound authoritative here but rather thinking aloud to promote discussion on the topic to form better communal consensus and how we as a community can figure out answers to these complex problems. So these are my views and the data I see. (Let's also try to encourage discussion like this where we aren't asserting authoritative conclusions because certainly none of us are authorities in this regard and certainly there are no hard conclusions from existing authorities)