Actually, there is no educational reason that children or students in general are in school five days a week. That schedule only exists because the primary function of the public educational system is to act as a baby sitting service to free up more time of the parents as productive workers. The article briefly mentions this coving the option of parents paying for a sitting service on the fifth day without directly calling out the deeper cynical functions that the schooling system provides.
The group most affected by this, outside of the children, is the current and future amount of teachers who are leaving the profession for other careers or not applying in the first place. The article covers one of the major reason that the educational system is being gutted which is the abysmal pay relative to the hiring requirements and job stresses. The other reason is that teachers are not allowed a safe and supportive place to teach secular STEM topics like it should be. Instead their working conditions have been destroyed because both conservative and progressive voting blocks have been successful in pushing their nonsensical ideological beliefs to the detriment of the next generation. I have a few friends and acquaintances who are either professors or lower level teachers, and all of them would choose different professions if they had to start over today because of the current hostile working environment.
