Alternative school schedules

The biggest change over time is in the number of Americans who support a four-day school week with longer school days, up dramatically from 25% in a PDK/Gallup Poll in 2003 to 53% now, a roughly twofold increase.

Perhaps surprisingly, results don’t differ substantially among Americans who have a child younger than 18 living at home. Fifty percent in this group support a four-day school week with longer school days, as do 54% of those without a child at home.

This question has a large gap by age: Among adults younger than 30, 63% favor a four-day school week, compared with 41% of those age 65 and older. In other differences, support is 12 percentage points higher among adults without a college degree than among college graduates, 57% versus 45%; it also slips to 45% among those who identify themselves as conservatives, compared with 55% among liberals and 58% of moderates.

Four-day school weeks have gained popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic; they’re reportedly in place in more than 1,600 schools in approximately 850 school districts, up from 650 districts in 2020 (Gunter et al, n.d.; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2023). Still, that represents only a tiny slice of the roughly 13,000 districts and 99,000 K-12 public schools in the U.S. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).