In 2024, the New Mexico Public Education Department (PED) passed a state-wide rule that would require students to attend school for a minimum of 180 days each year, effectively eliminating the four-day school week. Questa was one of 57 districts that sued PED to overturn this rule, which was struck down by a judge in February of this year.
“We stayed at a four-day week mainly because it makes sense for our community,” said John Maldonado, superintendent of the Questa Independent School District, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
Stan Rounds is the executive director of the New Mexico Superintendents Association. He said the heart of the lawsuit is the school districts’ ability to determine their schedules locally, rather than accepting a top-down mandate from the state.
“Every district is slightly different than every other district,” Rounds told the Daily Yonder. “That’s a strength. If you build towards that, you get better community support and better student impact. And that’s best determined locally when you know your community.”
According to school board member Michael Cordova, the extra day off gives parents and students an opportunity to schedule medical appointments and family time without pulling kids out of school. It also gives older students a chance to get a job or help their parents with family responsibilities. And, he says it gives students and teachers some much-needed time to decompress.
According to Rounds, the schedule is especially popular with rural communities, where students and teachers often have to travel long distances to get to school. The first New Mexico school district to go to a four-day week was Cimarron, in 1972, a district in rural Colfax County on the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Students in Cimarron sometimes spend up to two hours each way on the bus, Rounds explained.
“They made the decision to have longer days, four days a week, rather than put students on buses for that fifth day because it wasn’t practical for the students,” Rounds said.
By the 2023-2024 school year, nearly half of the state’s 89 school districts and a handful of independent charter schools followed that schedule.
For a small district like Questa Independent Schools, going back to a five-day school week would have meant increasing the budget by around $35,000-40,000, according to Maldonado. And while some of that money would be reimbursed by the state, it would still leave the district scrambling, according to Cordova.
“There is that fear that if it does get forced down our gullets, we don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “It’s nice to have these ideas, but a lot of times they’re pushed through without realizing the repercussions it’s going to have on the local districts, especially small districts that don’t really see a lot of money coming in.”
Inconclusive Outcomes
This issue was brought to the forefront of New Mexico politics by a 2023 law that required New Mexico school districts to increase the minimum number of educational hours to 1140 each year. Under Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s direction, the PED created a rule interpreting the law as requiring a 180-school-day minimum, which was successfully challenged in a lawsuit.
In the most recent legislative session, a bill that clarified the right of districts to determine their schedule locally was passed unanimously, but was vetoed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.
Grisham explained her support for the 180-day rule in her 2024 State of the State address.
“We’ve seen in New Mexico, and from states across the country, that more quality instruction makes a difference,” she said. “We’ve seen the proven effectiveness of more time in class. It’s time to do the right thing for our kids.”
New Mexico is regularly at the bottom of nationwide education rankings. Grisham and her supporters argue that increasing the number of school days can provide a much-needed boost to the state’s education system. But the growing body of research on the topic paints a more complicated picture.
Researchers at the University of Oregon identified 133 studies about the four-day school week in districts around the country, including 11 studies about student educational outcomes. They found that the schedule is gaining popularity, with more than 2100 schools in 850 districts adopting the four-day school week. The majority of these schools are in rural districts, though an increasing number of urban districts are shortening their school weeks as well.
But when it comes to assessing how the four-day school week affects students’ educational outcomes, the results are inconclusive. In part, this is because researchers frequently failed to report “key contextual considerations” like race and ethnicity, economic background, and what students did on the fifth day, which are all important for comparing results across districts.
But even the best-executed studies, according to the University of Oregon reviewers, had contradictory results. In some cases, reading and math scores improved for students on a four-day schedule, while in other cases, student scores went down. Data for other benchmarks, like 5-year graduation rates and student absenteeism, were also mixed.
Overall, researchers wrote “findings from a systematic review of 11 studies on student outcomes show little evidence for positive outcomes from a four-day school week.”
But is there evidence that a four-day school week meaningfully lowers student outcomes? Dr. Paul Thomas is a professor of Economics and part of the Four-Day School Week Policy team at the University of Oregon. His research indicates that the number of educational hours, rather than the number of days per week that students are in school, is the most important determining factor.
New Mexico’s new rule requiring 1,140 educational hours for all students makes it the state with the most required instructional hours aside from Maryland, regardless of the minimum number of school days, according to a 50-state comparison compiled by the Education Commission of the States in 2023.
The New Mexico Superintendents Association supported the increase of instructional hours, but helped orchestrate the lawsuit against the New Mexico PED over the 180-day rule.
“We think clock time is clock time,” Rounds said. “And we also believe that what you do with the hours is just as important as the quantity of hours that you’re doing. And that looks different in different places.”
Rounds is skeptical that a five-day school week can solve some of the state’s most pressing problems, including high rates of chronic absenteeism.
“A student who has an attendance problem with a four-day week is not likely to fix that because you give them a five-day week,” Rounds said. “To me, it’s easier to win by attracting them into a really great four-day experience and then giving them an opportunity to have the other part of their life that they value.”
He also worries that a required switch back to a five-day schedule would make it even more difficult for rural districts to recruit and retain talented teachers, who are attracted to those posts, in part due to the benefits of a three-day weekend.
Noelle Ellerson Ng is the chief advocacy and governance officer with the nation-wide School Superintendents Association (AASA). She says that there is more to the conversation than just which school schedule is most pedagogically advantageous.
“In many instances, we’re not making decisions to go to a four-day school week because it’s academically the most rigorous, but because school district leaders are trying to match the realities of their operating world, which could be their budget constraints or not having enough teachers,” she said.
Given these realities, Ellerson Ng emphasized the importance of letting local districts determine their own paths.
“When it comes down to decisions about calendar and scheduling, those are decisions that are best left to the local superintendent and school board,” she said. “We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Ellerson Ng also expressed concern about the future of educational data collection and analysis, which are critical to understanding and answering pedagogical questions like the pros and cons of a four-day school week.
After budget cuts and mass layoffs at the Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, which has conducted nationwide education research since 1867, was left with only three employees.
“You can’t disaggregate data if it’s not collected, and you can’t collect data if NCES is gutted. I think it’s really important to call a spade a spade,” she said. “We are absolutely concerned about shying away from collecting data so we can shine a bright light on what is and isn’t working in education, which could include a discussion around a four-day school week.”
This story first appeared in the Daily Montanan. Read the original here.
