An old (2006) article on the 4-day week can be found, here:

http://www.ednews.org/articles/1158/1/An-Unknown-School-Reform-The-Four-Day-Week/Page1.html

One of the things that makes me suspicious is that some very good arguments for such an idea are NOT being made. It's like Sherlock Holmes's "dog, that did not bark, in the night time." Well, why didn't he bark, and why doesn't Dr Lewis explain how the extended day can save BOND money?

Say (for convenience of math, not because the figure is accurate) the High School has 20 chemistry laboratory classrooms with work stations for 20 students each. So for each period of the day, 400 high school kids can do chemistry. (We're taking about the kind with sodium and boron not hormones and pheromones...) With a five period day the MOST, the maximum number, of chemistry students that can physically sit down to a lab workstation is 2000. But the school has 2200 hundred kids, and they district expects 2800 any day now. So, what to do? Well, if the school could somehow run SEVEN periods a day, 400 kids times 7 is 2800 kids at lab workstations. We don't need no more stinkin' classrooms - we just need more hours in the day.

Now, that seems to me to be a very obvious benefit of the longer day. Why doesn't the superintendent make it?

Well, first, of course, he wants (in my opinion) to pass a bond and build the bigger building anyhow. He'd much rather leave behind the big Taj Mahal monument to his own ego than solve the problem at lower cost.

Second, he could extend periods and hours without making ALL kids do ten hours a day, in a four day week. He could implement "shifts" in which half the kids(and their chemistry teachers) start, (in this example) science classes at 7:30 or so and get out of school at 15:30, (taking other classes after, of course) while another shift starts at say 9:30 and goes until 17:30. Overlapping 8 hour days, five days a week. The chemistry teachers of course would have to double as math teachers or some other subject, and class size waivers to allow 25 or so students per class in lecture/recitation classrooms (not limited by lab space) would also be necessary. But getting more hours use out of the limited labs does NOT take more hours from each kid or each teacher. Except in Larry Lewis's Lancaster.

Third, Larry Lewis just doesn't like to do math. The example I citied with 20 classes of 20 times five verus times seven? That sort of thing confuses Dr Larry Lewis, PhD. He just isn't very good at math, as far as I can tell. And so he tries hard not to make mathematical arguments in his presentations. Or, at least, he hasn't since 2005 when he and I had our first, and last, face-to-face meeting in his office and I quizzed him about one of his powerpoint slides ...

Fourth, I believe Dr Lewis doesn't (or didn't) think it was necessary. The board, the parents, and the TEA all trust him, he thought. All he has to do is present a notion, and they'll all leap to embrace and endorse it. Why bother running the numbers?

So, that's my guess, (and it's ONLY a guess) about that. But what I'm trying to say is that the ten hour days isn't ridiculous. We might want to look at it seriously. For selected campuses, sometime next year.

This year, this late in the year ... what a sad joke.