The Economic Policy Institute has long documented the expanding pay penalty faced by teachers in the K-12 system thanks to decades of underinvestment in public education. But teachers are not the only ones who have been undervalued: Many other school staff--who are essential for providing high-quality, safe, and nurturing learning…

A school's schedule can be as important to education outcomes as its budget or strategic plan. The secret to making the schedule a tool for school improvement is to approach schedule design not as a technical task, centered on making everything fit like Tetris blocks, but as a strategic one. In this book, informed by research and their work with…

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…

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…

This report gives an overview on the start of the school year and its length as well as the timing and length of school holidays. It covers both primary and general secondary education. The information is available for the 37 countries participating in the EU's Erasmus+ programme (27 EU Member States, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland,…

In summer 2024, EdChoice published "The School Starter Checklist," a compendium of regulations on private schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Even a cursory glance at it will show that states take different approaches to regulating private schooling. To determine the regulatory burden that each state (and Washington,…

The purpose of the study was to explore the implementation of a four-day school week policy in a rural district. The research questions driving the study were: (a) How does the transition to a four-day school week affect the well-being of the school district teachers, students, and parents, and (b) how does the four-day school week affect teacher…

This position paper proposes a revisiting of the academic calendar for Ghanaian basic schools, emphasising the need to extend the first-trimester vacation period to better align with sociocultural, economic, and environmental realities. The current first vacation, which runs from late December to early January, overlaps with festive events,…

This report, based on national data, gives an overview on the length of the school year, the start and the end dates, the timing and length of school holidays and the number of school days. It covers both primary and general secondary education and key points are illustrated by comparative figures. The information is available for the 37 countries…

Created in 1994 through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) by the Improving America's Schools Act and expanded through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program was reauthorized in 2015 in Title IV, Part B of the ESEA by…

Motivated by potential financial savings, 4-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States in recent years, reaching public schools in 24 states as of 2019. The consequences of the 4-day school week for students, schools, and communities are largely unknown. This article uses district-level panel data from Oklahoma and a…

Even though many experimental studies have considered nurturing creativity as an essential advantage in implementing STE(A)M (Science, Technology, Engineering, [Arts], and Mathematics) education, there is currently a lack of meta-analysis research on the effect of STE(A)M education on creativity to confirm that STE(A)M education can improve…

Summer learning is a research-based strategy shown to help prevent summer learning loss and support students who may be below grade level to grow before the next school year. Summer learning is also appropriate for all students to accelerate learning. This strategy is particularly important in the summer of 2021 as states, districts, and schools…

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 report, based on national data, gives an overview on the length of the school year, the start and the end dates, the timing and length of school holidays and the number of school days. It covers both primary and general secondary education and key points are illustrated by comparative figures. The information is available for the 38 countries…