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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

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 :-/

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 :-/