From Candidate to Classroom: Research-Based Practices for Recruiting and Hiring Highly-Effective Teachers
Category: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
As teacher shortages worsen across the U.S., many school districts have implemented a unique solution to attract and retain effective teachers: switching from the traditional five-day school week to a four-day school week (4DSW). I use 17 years of teacher-level employment data from Texas in a difference-in-differences analysis to examine whether the 4DSW truly affects teacher retention and sorting across districts. I also introduce Google’s PageRank algorithm as a revealed preference measure of school district attractiveness, ranking districts based on how teachers change workplaces over time in a network analysis. I find that the 4DSW decreases turnover by 2.7 percentage points (p.p.). This effect drives a 5.2 percentile increase in the statewide attractiveness rank of adopting districts, from the 39th to the 44th percentile. Districts with a four-day week also see a 5.1 p.p. increase in the share of entering teachers coming from other districts, suggesting substitution away from first-time teachers and those from outside the Texas public school system during hiring. However, the 4DSW causes no change in measures of PageRank that capture attractiveness to teachers in other districts, and has no effect on the experience or education levels of incoming cohorts of teachers.
Keywords
four-day school week, teacher retention, teacher labor market, school district policy
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/h9gf-rs70
