In rural school districts across the country, four-day school weeks have proliferated. Currently adopted in 1,600 schools in 600 school districts, 90% of which are rural, four-day school week policies have prospered largely without a robust body of evidence to support their expansion. J. Cameron Anglum presents an overview of four-day school week…

The purpose of this quantitative investigative examination was to look at how the four-day school week impacts teacher retention, specifically in Idaho rural school districts. The research question studied was what is the relationship between the four-day school week and teacher retention in rural school districts? Within the quantitative research…

Efforts to improve education outcomes often involve lengthening the school day or the school year in hopes that spending more time in school will boost student learning. Yet, as Frederick Hess explains, U.S. students spend as much or more total time in school as their peers in other industrialized nations. What matters more than the amount of time…

School leaders Lydia Cochrane and Ayesha Hoda have struggled to meet the increasingly complex needs of the students in their schools. As students' needs increase, schools are asked to do more and more, while continuing to have strong academic results. Cochrane and Hoda believe the current system is untenable and needs to change. With Linda Nathan,…

CCRC recently conducted two major studies to shed light on the feasibility of implementing guided pathways reforms at scale and on the association between implementation and improvements in student outcomes. The first is an evaluation of the AACC Pathways Project, which involved 30 colleges from around the country that were committed to making…

Despite warnings that the school schedule that has been around for more than 100 years is not optimal for serving students' needs, little has changed. The needs of kids and families look very different today than they did 50 years ago. One-size-fits-all prescriptions do not meet the needs of a diverse student population. Rethinking the school…

This article recommends institutional changes to higher education related to time, learning, and risk that would better serve the contemporary student population and increase opportunities for life-long and interdisciplinary learning. To begin, the changing demographic of university students will be outlined, along with suggestions about how…

This article relays the author's experiences and lessons learned after she was selected to serve as the faculty coordinator for first-year student scheduling at her institution. The new assignment to run the first-year scheduling function in the summer was supposed to be a way to do something interesting and engaging in the summer. It turned out…

Challenges to teaching in the post-COVID classroom plagued schools across the globe. This qualitative study followed two middle-school teachers in a charter school located in the Western United States to identify the changes to classroom teaching and their effects on the classroom environment through the first year of teaching after the 2020…

The purpose of this dissertation is to describe the factors that support and hinder reform of career and technical education in Maine. The single case study design examined the experiences of eleven participants connected to a single Career and Technical Education (CTE) Regional School in Maine. Based upon the lived experiences at a single site,…

Four-day school weeks are becoming increasingly common in the U.S., but their effect on achievement is not well-understood. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we conduct the most representative student-level analysis to date of the effects of four-day weeks on student achievement and within-year growth using NWEA MAP Growth data. We…

This study was conducted as a mixed method design to investigate teacher and administrator perceptions of how a later school start impacted the school culture. Many teenagers are sleep deprived, which can affect student attendance/tardiness, achievement, engagement, and behavior/discipline. Teenagers are biologically programmed to go to bed after…

In recent years, rural school district adoption of 4-day school weeks has grown markedly. Despite this rapid growth, scant empirical evidence has documented the factors associated with district adoption and subsequent effects on student, labor, and economic outcomes. We examine the spread of the 4-day school week in rural Missouri, where over 10%…

Shortening the school week is a controversial policy with little empirical investigation. We examine how shortening the school week can affect the time allocation of children and their parents. In South Korea, the government shortened the school week from 5.5 to 5 days gradually from 2006 to 2011. Using time-use data from 2004-2014, we found that,…

The problem is that there is a lack of information regarding the strategies that school leaders use to plan, develop, and implement nontraditional secondary school schedules. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to determine the strategies that secondary administrators use to successfully plan, develop, and implement a school schedule…