Cutting school... by 20%

减少学业……20%

Planet Money

商务

2023-10-26

23 分钟
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Right now, a lot of school districts across the country are making a pretty giant change to the way public education usually works. Facing teacher shortages and struggling to fill vacant spots, they are finding a new recruitment tool: the four-day school week. Those districts are saying to teachers, "You can have three-day weekends all the time, and we won't cut your pay." As of this fall, around 900 school districts – that's about 7% of all districts in the U.S. – now have school weeks that are just four days long. And this isn't the first time a bunch of schools have scaled back to four days, so there is a lot of data to lean on to figure out how well it works. In this episode, teachers love the four-day school week, and it turns out even parents love it, too. But is it good for students? This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Molly Messick and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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  • This is planet money from NPR.

  • A few years ago, the Warren county three Reals school District in Warrenton, Missouri, was having this big problem.

  • They kept losing teachers.

  • Every school year we'd lose about, you know, 50 or so teachers, which was.

  • 20% of the teaching staff.

  • And so that was really a problem to be losing that many.

  • This is the school's superintendent, Greg Klingensmith.

  • It's like three words.

  • Klingensmith.

  • So, Klingensmith.

  • Greg Klingensmith School District has about 3000 students, which is medium sized.

  • It's not really rural, but not suburban either.

  • There's a pre k, three elementary schools, one middle school, one high school.

  • And they didn't have a problem recruiting teachers.

  • They had a problem keeping them.

  • And so we would always have first year teachers that would come out to us for a year.

  • And then two, maybe then they leave.

  • They'd leave for higher pay because the starting salary in Greg's district is $36,931 a year.

  • But in the next district over, which is bigger, more suburban, the starting pay is like $10,000 more than that.

  • And so we just couldn't compete.