A new analysis from NWEA, an assessment company, suggests that these children are experiencing learning disruptions even now. 

While kindergarten achievement levels in math and reading largely held steady during and since the pandemic, by first and second grade, students are performing below pre-pandemic averages, according to an of NWEA’s Map Growth assessment data from spring 2017 to spring 2025. In math, at least, first and second graders have shown slow, incremental progress. Gaps in reading achievement, however, seem stubbornly stalled. 

The performance dips in first and second grade are similar to those seen in older grades, said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA, who co-led the research. 

“The general pattern of stagnation and lack of recovery in reading is very similar in first and second grade as grades three to eight,” Kuhfeld said, adding that a slow recovery in math is also observed in the later grades. “It’s very parallel across, basically, all the grades except for kindergarten.”

So what’s happening to students as they matriculate from kindergarten to first grade to cause a performance drop?

“That’s the big mystery of the results,” Kuhfeld said.

She was willing to speculate about the cause, leaning on anecdotal evidence from kindergarten teachers and elementary school leaders. 

Chronic absenteeism rates in kindergarten, which are often higher than in any other grade before high school, may mean some students aren’t getting adequate instructional time, Kuhfeld offered, ultimately standing in the way of them grasping the foundational reading and math skills typically acquired in kindergarten.

And many kindergarten teachers have reported that students are showing up with more nascent social and emotional skills than their peers in prior years. They have less experience with important life skills such as sharing, cooperating and self-regulating. 

“Teachers are spending more time having to teach how to behave in a kindergarten classroom — that would normally be the purview of preschool teachers,” Kuhfeld said. “This time spent on behavioral management and behavioral regulation, cumulatively, could be affecting achievement.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Fort Worth, Texas, where students’ MAP Growth assessment results generally align with what NWEA has found nationally, principal Andrea Johnson said both factors could be at play. 

“We’re seeing kids who, if they don’t reach immediate success, we see them dysregulate,” said Johnson, whose school serves students in pre-K through first grade. “They struggle.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Texas, kindergarten and first grade performance in math and reading on NWEA’s Map Growth assessment generally mirror national trends. (Courtesy of Andrea Johnson)

She believes that may be a latent impact of the pandemic on these younger students. Many of them had extra time at home with parents and caregivers, when early care and education programs were closed. 

“They’re used to someone being close and someone solving their problems for them,” Johnson said. “We talk a lot about productive struggle. You’ve gotta let them do it. Give them that mentality, where they’ve gotta connect to that struggle.”

She has definitely seen high rates of absenteeism among students in pre-K and kindergarten, she added. 

“I think they think, ‘pre-K and kinder, they don’t really matter that much,’” Johnson said, adding that she often finds herself trying to communicate to families how crucial those years are for future learning and development.

Most measures of post-pandemic recovery have examined the impacts on students in later grades, making NWEA’s analysis a rare snapshot of students in grades K-2. 

Curriculum Associates, a curriculum and assessment provider, has also evaluated math and reading performance among students in the early grades, finding some similarities and key differences from NWEA’s results. 

NWEA’s Map Growth assessment and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Inform assessment are both widely used in U.S. schools, reaching a combined 19 million K-8 students. Both measure student achievement in math and reading, but they differ in approach.

Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, pointed out that these two assessments have distinct designs and methodologies — and that they are administered to different samples — which may account for variations in findings.

“From the big picture, we’re seeing the same thing,” Huff said. “Students today who were not in school — some were babies — when the pandemic hit are not performing at the same level as their pre-pandemic peers in either reading or math.”

But in a published in July 2025, Curriculum Associates actually found that students in kindergarten are seeing achievement level drops in both math and reading, and that declining math performance in the early grades is “more drastic” than in reading. 

At a high level, she said, both sets of findings send a similar message, which is that America’s children are not seeing the type of recovery needed to reach pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

“It opens up the question of what is happening,” Huff said. “We can no longer, in my opinion, say that that disrupted learning in 2020 and 2021 is the sole or primary cause of what we’re seeing. There is a larger, systemic issue — or issues — that are impacting this.”

It turns out, of course, that I am far from alone. 

Participation in tutoring grew by five percentage points (from 19% to 24%) between 2024 and 2025, according to the newly released 2nd Edition of The State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents, from 50CAN and Edge Research. In the notoriously slow-moving U.S. education system, this is a sea-change. In urban areas, the rates are still higher, with nearly one-third of parents reporting that their child attends tutoring. 

Tutoring has long been the primary academic response of wealthy families across the United States when their children need additional support. Yet, the survey found that this too is shifting. While tutoring among high-income families increased one point from 28% to 29%, among low-income families there was a  five-point increase, cutting the access gap between low- and high-income families substantially. Indeed, at this point, you’d be hard pressed to go into any school, public or private, and not find children who attend academic tutoring outside of school. Tutoring is becoming the go-to tool for parents at all income levels and across all demographic groups. 

What would it take to make tutoring truly universal? The main barrier is expense, with 30% of parents whose children are not in tutoring saying that it’s too expensive. Cost is likely also the reason that students in private school participate in tutoring at much higher rates than their peers in public schools. A second barrier to tutoring is access. For the students getting the worst grades, 26%of parents also said that tutoring is not available in their community. 

My daughter is fortunate: I have the means to pay for tutoring, and I live in a suburban community with numerous tutoring centers. Like me, D.C. Public Schools principal Katreena Shelby had turned to private math tutoring when her daughter needed help. After seeing how quickly her daughter got back on track, she started wondering if she could get this same kind of help for her public middle school students. “I had the means to pay for my daughter to get tutoring,” Shelby told me. “Yet I wasn’t prioritizing the budget I had control over to get my students this same kind of support.” Shelby is one of thousands of principals who, in the wake of the pandemic, embraced tutoring. 

Spending two years researching the emergence of this new wave of high-impact tutoring for my book The Future of Tutoring, I’ve seen firsthand how students, teachers, school leaders and parents alike get excited when they are able to provide personalized support to struggling students. Tutoring is endlessly flexible; successful tutoring has taken place for early literacy in kindergarten, fourth-grade math skills, middle grades reading, ninth-grade Algebra I, required high school exit exams and more. Public schools have found ways to provide the very service that so many parents seek outside of school — a trusted adult who regularly meets with a small group of children, understands the progress they need to make and builds a relationship with them to not only help them learn but help them want to learn. 

While the initial groundswell of high-impact tutoring fueled by federal COVID dollars has dissipated, there are states and districts continuing to provide publicly-funded tutoring. Cities like Nashville and the District of Columbia are staying the course with tutoring programs that launched in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, while other cities like Philadelphia are trying to get new tutoring efforts off the ground now. 

Louisiana has led the way for states, with state budget investments of $30 million annually to support tutoring for students below grade-level that is now required by legislation. Massachusetts is in the first year of implementing for struggling students in grades K-3, funded by a $25 million annual state budget allocation. Ohio’s state Senate passed at the end of 2025, which, if enacted, will require high-impact tutoring for students performing below grade-level in math. 

The good news from the State of Educational Opportunity survey is that a majority of parents strongly favor public funding that provides access to free tutoring for K-12 students who fall below grade level. In fact, of the nine policy proposals that parents were asked about in the survey, public funding for tutoring ranked first with 86% of parents supporting the idea. 

Tutoring is equally popular on both sides of the aisle, the survey reveals, and that popularity holds in every single state across the country. From a low of 79% support in Vermont to a high of 92% support in D.C., it’s clear that parents across the country want every child who needs help to receive that help, paid for by public dollars. 

In a country that seems increasingly pitted against itself, tutoring is one of the last remaining policies that has a chance to pull us back together. Parents in rural, urban, red, blue, east and west America know their child’s future rests on a quality education. What we learn from this new survey is that more than three-quarters of parents in every state want this for every child, not only their own. It is time that policymakers take up this charge from their voters and make 2026 the year that tutoring becomes a permanent part of the American educational experience. 

When Lexia more than 200 kindergarten teachers  working with early learners last fall, we wanted to understand what they were seeing in their classrooms. The responses offer both a clear-eyed look at the challenges and a sense of optimism about the path ahead.

Nearly three-quarters of the educators we surveyed said today’s kindergarteners are behind in early literacy skills compared with students five years ago. Among those who described their students as behind, most pointed to phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words, as the biggest gap. Others mentioned that children struggle to recognize letters or even to write their own names.

Equally striking were findings around attention and confidence. Almost 90% of teacher participants reported that children’s attention spans during reading-related activities are shorter than before, and more than half said their students are less confident when asked to participate in those activities, to sound out a word, for example, or share during storytime.

But what stood out most wasn’t just the academic data. Eight in 10 educators said their students are less socially and emotionally ready for kindergarten than past cohorts. They arrive less practiced in sharing, self-regulation and cooperation. For many, this is their first experience in a group learning environment.

We often talk about “learning loss” as if it can be measured solely in test scores. But what educators are describing in these classrooms is a quieter, more complex legacy of the pandemic, one shaped by isolation, uneven access to early learning, and disruptions in routine.

When young children miss out on opportunities to play with peers or listen to stories in groups, they lose more than vocabulary. They lose practice in waiting their turn, following a sequence and engaging with other minds. These are the invisible threads that tie social-emotional development to literacy.

And yet, as sobering as these findings are, they also represent a moment of opportunity. Teachers are watching these 5- and 6-year-old children adapt, often quickly. Many describe their students as curious, empathetic and eager to learn, just in need of scaffolds that reflect their unique experiences.

When asked what would most help this generation of learners, educators were nearly unanimous: more family and home engagement in reading.

It’s a reminder that literacy doesn’t start at school; it starts in homes, in the daily rhythm of conversation and storytelling. During the pandemic, many parents of young children were juggling work, stress and uncertainty. Reading aloud may have taken a back seat. Now, as these families reconnect with schools, there’s a chance to rebuild those habits, not as homework, but as bonding.

Districts can help by making family literacy simple and inviting: Send home books. Offer short video tips for parents on how to ask open-ended questions after reading a story. Use communication platforms that make it easy to celebrate small moments, a child recognizing their first letter, a family sharing a favorite bedtime story.

The message should be that literacy is not just a school task; it’s a shared joy.

The survey also asked educators which school-based interventions can most help support today’s kindergarteners. Their top choice: personalized instruction that meets diverse needs.

No two pandemic experiences were the same. Some children spent their early years surrounded by adults who read to them daily; others spent long days in front of screens or in households where stress limited conversation. Adaptive digital tools and skilled teacher guidance allow instruction to begin at the right place for each child.

Schools can build on this by:

• Using data-driven tools to pinpoint skill gaps in phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension
• Structuring small-group interventions that target those gaps with playful, multisensory practice
• Embedding social-emotional learning into literacy instruction, helping students persist through frustration and take pride in progress
• Offering teachers professional development focused on understanding and responding to the unique needs of post-pandemic learners

These are not radical shifts; they are refinements. But collectively, they represent a new literacy ecosystem — one that treats emotional readiness, family partnership and differentiated instruction as equally essential.

Every generation of educators faces a defining challenge. For this one, it is helping the COVID cohort reclaim what was lost and discover what they can become. The educators in our survey didn’t express despair; they expressed determination. They see that this group of kindergarteners has resilience, empathy and curiosity born of their circumstances. What they need now is consistent support, connection and time.

If we meet this moment with patience and creativity, these children could grow into some of the most adaptable learners our schools have ever seen. It’s not about what was missed, it’s about what’s possible next.

Jennifer Allen has wanted to be a teacher since high school. She admired her social studies and English teachers especially. After four years studying elementary education at Delta State University and a full-time teaching position in a local district her senior year, she felt she had cleared all the important hurdles to becoming a certified teacher in Mississippi.

But then came PRAXIS, a series of tests that nearly every teacher in Mississippi must take to become a certified teacher.

“It made me second guess a career that I fell in love with,” she said. “Much of what I learned over the four years of college is not in the practice material.”

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She’s not alone. In roughly half of public and private universities with education programs, do not pass at least one section of the PRAXIS exam on their first try.

Some students even opted for more classes at school to bypass having to take the test, which would mean an additional $1,200 for Allen.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,892 Mississippi test takers walked away after flunking on the first attempt of the most commonly taken PRAXIS Elementary Education exam , leaving fewer teachers to fill a growing list of teacher vacancies in critical shortage areas.

The Board of Education implemented a waiver during the pandemic to allow students to be certified without taking the PRAXIS, but that waiver ended in December 2021. Students graduating as late as December 2023 took advantage of the waiver.

Now university education departments, school district officials and teachers are struggling to re-adjust to a more rigid path to teacher licensure.

“It’s outrageous that effective educators are dismissed by the profession for not passing PRAXIS,” said Clayton Barksdale, a former public school principal in Greenville and executive director of the West Mississippi Education Consortium. “Many prove their impact while on emergency licenses, only to be fired then immediately rehired as a long-term substitute – doing the same work for a fraction of the pay, with no benefits or retirement.”

“We must do better.”

Shortage areas

Didriquez Smith has taken the PRAXIS content test three times and spent nearly a thousand dollars. He coaches football at Clarksdale High School and teaches physical education on an emergency license.

He failed just one of the three tests in his past two attempts: Foundations of Reading, which covers reading comprehension and teaching reading.

The Praxis exam has several parts. The content knowledge test covers the subject aspiring teachers want to teach, like biology or elementary English. The Principles of Learning test covers how teachers should prepare lesson plans and approach classroom instruction for different subjects. Students who don’t have at least a 3.0 GPA must also take an Academic Skills for Educators test, which is also called PRAXIS Core.

Per try, the elementary education exam costs $209, and the PRAXIS core test $90. Some of the content tests such as art instruction cost $130.

Smith had to travel nearly 300 miles to Birmingham to take his third attempt at the test because the test wasn’t offered closer at the end of the school year. He is currently saving up enough money to take it again.

He loves his job, particularly informing his community about the importance of healthy habits.

He hopes he can continue to keep students healthy and active at school. In the Mississippi Delta, .

However, if he can’t pass each required PRAXIS test in the next year, he may be out of a job. As much as his boss in the principal’s office may want to keep him in his role, state regulations penalize schools in their annual accountability scores if they have faculty teaching without a license. Schools can also lose accreditation.

Since childhood, Skylar Ball had planned on becoming a kindergarten teacher. She followed her mother into education, even attending the same alma mater of Blue Mountain Christian University.

“Teaching elementary school is like Disney World,” she said. “Elementary students, you can do so much with them. You can make an early impact.”

However, one and a half years after graduation, she remains an assistant teacher, making several thousand less a month than she budgeted for while she saves enough money to take the PRAXIS exam for the third time.

She was two questions shy of passing on her latest attempt.

“I was so blessed to educate 20 amazing kindergartners last school year under an emergency license … I am currently a paraprofessional in an amazing district, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset about not being able to lead a classroom of my own,” Ball said.

She struggled with the Elementary Education exam, a PRAXIS test with in the state. Although she was aiming to become a kindergarten English teacher, her test covered kindergarten through sixth grade instruction as well as science, math, art, English, and social studies, among other subjects.

, the nonprofit found that Mississippi’s Elementary Education content test has a subpar job measuring whether would-be teachers have the knowledge and skills needed for a career in their classrooms.

“Does this test tell districts if they are prepared to lead an elementary school classroom in this content area? It does not,” said Hannah Putman, managing director of research at the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The university’s role

Universities in Mississippi play an important role in filling teacher vacancies with fresh talent. Pass rates on PRAXIS exams vary among universities with Alcorn State University posting the lowest first-time pass rates, according to the most recent data from 2022-2023 school year. Mississippi Valley State University posted that none of its students took two of the three main PRAXIS exams for the same year.

has a smaller sample size of teachers as a majority gained licensure under the  COVID waiver.

Mississippi College posted the best results with over 93% of students passing the pedagogy section test and 100% of students passing both the content test and the Foundations of Reading test. Over 90% of University of Southern Mississippi students passed their three PRAXIS exams.

Timolin Howard, a Mississippi Valley State graduate, doesn’t regret enrolling in the school’s masters in teaching program. She believes instructors have given her the tools to succeed in the classroom.

After finding out her test scores were insufficient for licensure, she had a stroke. She also says she received mixed messaging from the state licensure board regarding cut-off scores.

“I found that, while I was well-prepared for real-world teaching, I wasn’t fully prepared for the demands of the certification exams,” she said.

She said she can manage students, build lesson plans and come up with classroom activities that help students master common core competencies. But Howard realized she had gaps in her foundational knowledge when it came to studying for the PRAXIS exams. She reached out to her school for help.

The university cancelled a workshop taught on campus, which was preparing students for the Foundations of Reading exam. It wasn’t the first a PRAXIS preparation workshop was cancelled, Howard said.

“It left me feeling overwhelmed as I tried to catch up, and it significantly impacted my confidence, academic performance and health,” she said.

This year, her Delta school district released her from her contract because she lacked the right licensure.

Mississippi Valley State University’s education department did not respond to comment despite repeated attempts to reach representatives.

Grow Your Own

For eight years, Adrienne Hudson has led the nonprofit organization RISE, which helps recruit and retain new teachers in Mississippi Delta school districts.

Hudson had already been informally mentoring and tutoring teachers who struggled with the PRAXIS exam and other technical aspects of licensure in her Clarksdale school. She founded RISE to help more.

Hudson takes pride in the start of performance-based licensure in her district. Letting teachers become certified teachers through improving test scores in state-tested subjects will help schools retain talented teachers, said Hudson of the new path to teacher certification.

“Some of the responsibilities are on the university and some are the systems that require the test to be the measuring stick for becoming a teacher,” she said. “We have students getting dean’s list, who can’t pass the test.”

More would-be teachers are going back to school later in life than ever before. Fewer teachers are entering the traditional route, which involves majoring in education as an undergraduate as opposed to the alternate route through a masters. In the , 27% of students getting an education degree went the alternate route in , 45% did.

Tony Latiker, dean of Jackson State University’s school of education, saw a similar trend. He theorizes the reason so many students are going the alternative route is because of the many requirements that await undergraduates at the end of their four years. Alternative route students have fewer testing requirements to meet.

One solution he has found is to have traditional route students take exams closer to when they finish coursework that corresponds. For example, he encourages students to take the Foundations of Reading exam after they complete their early literacy courses, which are offered in some form at all Mississippi universities with an education program.

Jackson State also offers an elective that prepares students for the PRAXIS tests and other technical requirements of licensure. Professors and visiting instructors also host workshops on campus.

“We really should be questioning the exams,” Latiker told Mississippi Today. “I’m not against the exams and testing, but I’m against them being the high stakes tests they are. It should be a part of a more holistic process, incorporating district personnel and university faculty input in classrooms, assessing pre-service teachers and interns at the end of lessons, to see if they’re actually effective.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

The 12 members, who were recently handpicked by controversial Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also debated overturning decades of established practice around hepatitis B shots for newborns, though they ultimately tabled that vote.

The other two shots in play were the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) combination vaccine, also known as MMRV, and this year’s COVID 19 booster. 

By the end of the week, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also known as ACIP, voted to no longer recommend the MMRV combination vaccine for kids under 4 years old, rendering it largely inaccessible for that age group. 

The committee also voted to shift the COVID 19 booster recommendation to “shared clinical decision making” for all people over 6 months old — regardless of age or risk level — meaning that before getting the shot, individuals will need to talk through the pros and cons with a health care provider, which includes pharmacists. 

Through this departure, the committee largely preserved access and insurance coverage, while also raising doubts about the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, at times citing debunked theories.

“There is just widespread confusion about, ‘What should I do as a parent? Who should I listen to?’” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine advocacy organization , formerly called SAFE Communities Coalition. 

“American parents and American providers don’t actually know what the best recommendations are anymore,” he added, “and so that is going to lead to more hesitancy, because there’s uncertainty about what the right thing to do is, and that’s going to lead to declining immunization rates.”

Before the ACIP meeting, MMRV and hepatitis B vaccine recommendations were based on decades of established practices supported by science, which experts described as “settled,” so it was unclear why they were being relitigated, according to numerous medical professionals, including those who spoke during the meetings as well as those interviewed by The 74.

The point of these conversations is, “to raise doubt, to confuse people,” said Paul Offit, the director of the and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit was instrumental in the creation of the rotavirus vaccine and previously served as an ACIP member. 

“The degree to which the public is confused about vaccines is the degree to which they will be less likely to get them,” he said, “and that is RFK Jr’s goal: to make vaccines less available, less affordable and more feared.”

The meetings themselves appeared to be marked by moments of pronounced confusion for the new committee members, some of whom asked for clarification around what they were voting on multiple times.

At least some of this was likely due to their unusual level of inexperience, which committee Chair Martin Kulldorff even noted as he opened day two on Friday.

“We are rookies,” Kulldorff “With one exception, this was either our first ACIP meeting or our second.”

Typically, committee members are highly qualified medical professionals who are vetted for months to years before serving. In an unprecedented upheaval earlier in June, Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 existing advisory members via a Wall Street Journal — after promising he would leave the committee’s recommendations intact. 

Almost immediately he brought on eight new members, a number of whom have espoused anti-vaccine rhetoric and other scientific misinformation. One of them eventually stepped down and Kennedy then added an additional five members leading up to last week’s sessions.

Measles, mumps, rubella and varicella

The MMR vaccine was in the United States in 1971, followed by the MMRV vaccine in 2005. Two doses of the combined shot were preferred until 2008, when monitoring studies showed an increased risk of febrile seizures — convulsions in a young child caused by a fever — following the first dose. 

While these seizures are short-lived, resolve themselves and are not associated with any long-term negative outcomes, “they’re hard to watch,” said Offit.

So by 2009, the CDC released updated recommendations, in place up until Thursday’s vote, which advocate for separating MMR and varicella for the first dose at age 12-47 months and administrating the combined shot for the second dose at age 4-6 years old. These vaccines are among those required for school entry in all 50 states, though numerous states have recently introduced legislation to loosen mandates, and exemptions are on the rise.

The vast majority of parents (85%) opted to follow that recommendation for separating the shots, with 15% still choosing the combination vaccine for the first dose, often to avoid multiple jabs of an infant.

The committee’s recent update to the recommendations will mean that choice no longer exists.

While this change itself is “not a huge deal,” Offit said, the arguments brought up by committee members were “intellectually disingenuous” and will only continue to “raise doubt.”

Stacy Buchanan is a pediatric nurse practitioner and a clinical professor who is the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners’ liaison to ACIP

“I really feel like this was brought up to just further confuse caregivers that are already questioning whether or not they want to have their child vaccinated,” said Buchanan. “And in a time where we’re seeing unprecedented numbers of measles in communities, I think that we need to be really clear that the MMR vaccine — whether you’re getting the combined or two separate injections — is really key and needs to be administered routinely based on the schedule.”

In past years, the liaisons like Buchanan, who have on-the-ground clinical experience, would weigh in during the committee’s working group meetings to help evaluate the evidence. That precedent was unexpectedly overturned in late July when the liaisons received an email accusing them of being and no longer permitted to serve. Now they can only be heard during the public comment portion of the meetings.

In a statement released Thursday, the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote, “Today’s meeting of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) promoted false claims and misguided information about vaccines as part of an unprecedented effort to limit access to routine childhood immunizations and sow fear and mistrust in vaccines. Following today’s meeting, instead of emerging with clear guidance about vaccines that we know protect against serious illnesses, families are left with confusion, chaos and false information.”

The AAP also emphasized that they had released their own , which includes unchanged MMRV vaccination recommendations.

Committee members elected for the combination shot for those under 4 to remain covered by Vaccines for Children, which provides vaccines to millions of kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them, despite their recommendation against its use. Some members apparently misunderstood what they had voted on Thursday and reversed their stance the next morning. 

COVID 19 booster

On Friday, the committee voted on four measures surrounding the COVID 19 booster shot. Three passed, and the fourth, which was the most controversial and would have recommended required prescriptions for anyone seeking to get the shot, ended in a tie vote that ultimately failed.

During his presentation, Retsef Levi, put in charge of the working group on COVID, raised a number of concerns around mRNA vaccines that have been widely disputed, including the assertion that they could change the way the body reacts to its own genetic material. Levi is a professor of operations management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and has no formal medical training.

The three provisions that did pass will mean that while the vaccine is not actively recommended for anyone — including those at high risk of infection — those over the age of 6 months can access it as long as they make the decision in conjunction with a health care provider.

Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert, said the committee appears to be using the practice known as “shared clinical decision making,” because it “gets at that medical freedom rhetoric — and provides an option other than ‘no recommendation’ — but is not a good option.”

While this sort of policy sounds like it’s creating greater choice, ultimately evidence shows it leads to struggles for health care providers who haven’t been given clear risk factors, Hughes said. This can be cumbersome, time consuming and lead to patient distrust.

“When you know that it’s an automatic ‘you should get it’ that’s different than ‘I don’t know, it’s kind of murky,’” he added.

The new policy is particularly confusing, said Offit, since last month the Food and Drug Administration only licensed the boosters for those . 

“The good news is, anybody can use it,” Offit said, “even though, according to the FDA, they’d be using it off label. But we don’t recommend it for anybody. Basically, that’s what they’re saying.”

He described this as a “bad choice” which will lead to fewer people being vaccinated and fragmented state-by-state policies.

Earlier this month, the governors of Washington, California and Oregon announced they’d be forming to establish their own vaccine recommendations, which Hawaii quickly joined. A few weeks later, seven northeastern states, including New York and Pennsylvania, formed with a similar goal.

Hepatitis B

The hepatitis B vaccine was first recommended by ACIP in Before that point, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people, including about 20,000 children, were infected with the highly contagious virus each year. 

This was particularly dangerous for infants who have a 90% chance of developing liver cancer or chronic liver disease, if they contract the virus. For 4- and 5-year-olds, that chance remains high at 30-40%.

At one point, the vaccine was only recommended for infants whose mothers tested positive for the virus, since it can be transmitted during birth, but for a number of reasons — including inaccurate test results — this was found to be ineffective. So by 1991, ACIP’s recommendation was expanded to include universal birth doses. Since then, infant infections have dropped by 95%.

According to Offit, the birth dose “has always been a target of anti-vaccine activists,” since the hepatitis B virus can be transmitted sexually. But it can also be transmitted in many other ways, including through surfaces. 

On Thursday, ACIP members were meant to vote on an updated recommendation which would have delayed the initial dose until an infant is one month, a move that would likely lead to a serious reduction in uptake, according to doctors.

Ultimately, after hours of arguments, which included research Offit called “bogus,” the committee ran out of time to vote on the measure Thursday. Friday morning they chose to table it indefinitely. 

Buchanan, the nurse practitioner, expressed concern that the safety of the well-established vaccine was even being reargued in the first place: “The ‘why’ was never there, and that’s so important, because we should not be bringing things to a formal ACIP committee vote without having a science-based rationale for bringing the question forward.”

While Hughes was relieved the vote was punted, Offit was more pessimistic, expressing fears that the committee will eventually try to push the first dose even later than one month.

“And that would be a tragic decision,” he said. “That would mean that there will be children in this country who will get hepatitis B in the first year of life, or in childhood … which will limit their life for no reason.”

More Ohio students are being homeschooled now than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of Ohio students being homeschooled was trending upward pre-pandemic, spiked to about 51,500 students during the COVID-19 pandemic and dipped back down slightly.

But homeschooling recently saw another surge with about 53,000 homeschooled students during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The number of homeschooled students in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce:

• 2023-24: 53,051 students
• 2022-23: 47,468 students
• 2021-22: 47,491 students
• 2020-21: 51,502 students
• 2019-20: 33,328 students
• 2018-19: 32,887 students
• 2017-18: 30,923 students

There were about 3.1 million homeschooled students nationwide in 2021-22 — quite the jump from 2.5 million in spring 2019, according to the.

“Homeschooling was already on a slightly slower upward trajectory, and had been for a number of years,” said Douglas J. Pietersma, research associate at National Home Education Research Institute. “What COVID did, from our perspective, is just infused it.”

He expects the number of homeschooled students to keep growing.

“It’s not going to put public schools out of business or anything like that, but it’s going to be a slow growth that is certainly going to be measurable over time,” Pietersma said.

Remote learning during the pandemic made parents become more aware of what was being taught in schools, said Melanie Elsey, Christian Home Educators of Ohio’s legislative liaison.

“I don’t think that it was a mass exodus from the public or private schools into homeschooling, but for parents who felt like they could accomplish more with one-on-one attention to learning … You can tailor the education to meet the needs of their children,” she said.

Not everyone who switched to homeschooling stayed after the pandemic, Elsey said.

“Some of them put their children back in because it was too much of a commitment,” she said. “So I think it was sort of a time period that parents felt comfortable trying something different to see if they could help their children learn more.”

The modern home education movement sprung out of the 1970s and “skyrocketed” in the 1980s, Pietersma said.

“People were either upset with the quality of education in general,” he said. “Then another group of people, it was more about the content of education.”

Today there are many reasons why a family might opt for homeschooling.

“Obviously, the quality of education is still one of the big issues,” Pietersma said. “Safety issues are a huge thing. People who have had their children in schools where they’ve been bullied or assaulted or had exposure to drugs … given the size of school, it may be not impossible to prevent some of those things.”

The reason for homeschooling varies and it is not always because a family is not satisfied with their local school district, Elsey said.

She homeschooled her children, but did not originally think it was for her family. However, she changed her mind after she enjoyed being home with her children through their preschool years.

“We prayed about it and really felt like it was something that was worthwhile,” Elsey said.

Jeannine Ramer has homeschooled her four children — two are now in college and two (ages 17 and 13) are currently being homeschooled.

“Homeschooling has really strengthened our family relationships, my kids are very, very close and supportive of one another, and I think that’s all of the hours spent at home and just really learning together,” said Ramer, who lives in Alliance.

They were not initially planning on homeschooling their children, but Ramer’s sister-in-law homeschooled her children and encouraged them to think about it as their oldest approached preschool age.

They decided to try it for a year or two, but found it worked well for their family.

“We loved it,” Ramer said. “We’ve had the ability to tailor each child’s education to that child.”

A parent does not need to be a licensed teacher in order to homeschool their children, Elsey said.

“It’s amazing how well families do because they have access to resources, really, all over the world, when you can get curriculum from anywhere that meets the needs of your students to learn to pursue their interests,” she said.

Families who decide to homeschool their children enjoy the flexibility, Pietersma said.

“They can tailor the education that they’re providing to their child in so many ways that an institutional school can’t just because of sheer numbers,” he said. “One teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t take the lesson plan and tailor it to each of the 30 students.”

Ramer’s oldest child was interested in printing and design work as a teenager, so they were able to craft his high school education to those areas. Now he is studying industrial and innovative design in college.

“It just allowed us the ability to foster that,” she said. “There was much more flexibility.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

The federal government’s latest guidelines for COVID-19 vaccines make it difficult to know who, exactly, will be able to access shots this fall. While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some of his staff claim anyone will be able to access a shot in consultation with their doctor, medical groups are warning that the new guidance will impact a broad swath of people, including postpartum people and healthy children.

“For children and young adults that I see, there are constraints, and they are significant,” said Dr. Molly O’Shea, a pediatrician in Michigan and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

It might also take several more weeks to know who will be able to receive no-cost COVID-19 vaccines covered by health insurance. That decision partly depends on formal recommendations from a vaccine panel that isn’t scheduled to meet until mid-September. 

Actions by the Food and Drug Administration last week mean that none of the COVID-19 vaccines that are slated to be on the U.S. market this fall will have an emergency use authorization at the height of the pandemic. The removal of this designation means the drug company Pfizer will no longer offer COVID-19 vaccines to very young children, limiting parents’ brand options and potentially impacting supply.

, and , the three main COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, have all shared news releases about what they’ve been approved to offer:

• Moderna, Pfizer or Novavax will offer shots to anyone who is 65 and older, irrespective of medical history.
• Pfizer will offer shots to anyone between the ages of five and 64 if they have at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.
• Moderna will offer shots to anyone between six months and 64 if they have at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.
• Novavax, the only company providing a non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, will offer shots to anyone between 12 and 64 if they have at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.

The vaccine panel known as the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) is expected to make formal recommendations on these FDA-approved vaccines, and those recommendations have historically determined whether insurance providers will cover a vaccine at no cost under insurance.

An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for information and comment from The 19th, but , Kennedy said: “These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors.” Separately, on a document from HHS stating the FDA’s actions do “not affect access to these vaccines for healthy individuals. These vaccines remain available to those who choose them in consultation with their healthcare provider.”

Dr. Marty Makary, FDA commissioner, : “100% of adults in this country can still get the vaccine if they choose. We are not limiting availability to anyone.”

But what that means practically for everyday people who want to access a COVID-19 shot — everything from whether their doctor will prescribe it, or if a pharmacy will be able to administer it, and whether there will be an out-of-pocket cost — is unclear for now. 

How will it impact postpartum people?

Pregnant people are expected to still have access to the vaccine because the CDC continues to list pregnancy as an underlying condition that puts an individual at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19. ( also includes chronic health conditions and immunocompromised conditions.)

But Kennedy, who has repeatedly questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines despite , that the CDC would no longer formally recommend such vaccines , a move that seemed to contradict . 

Lactating and postpartum individuals must have an underlying medical condition to be eligible for one of the FDA’s approved vaccines, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)’s understanding of the announcement. ACOG COVID-19 vaccination to people who are contemplating pregnancy, are pregnant, were recently pregnant or are now lactating.

“We recognize that now, disappointingly, only lactating and postpartum individuals with an underlying condition will be eligible for vaccination. Still, it remains critical that pregnant patients receive the vaccines so that they are able to provide passive immunity from COVID-19 to their infants in those first few months of life before they can be vaccinated,” said ACOG President Steven J. Fleischman in an email.

How will it impact healthy children?

Healthy children will likely still be able to access the COVID vaccine, but the cost for a parent or guardian, as well as availability, will be impacted by these decisions.

Charlotte A. Moser, co-director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said parents who want to get their kids the COVID-19 vaccine should still be able to do so through what is called in consultation with their child’s health care provider, according to the CDC’s current vaccine schedule. But it’s unclear whether this will change when ACIP meets again.

But physicians who prescribe a COVID-19 vaccine outside of the parameters of how the FDA approved them would be OKing use of the shot “off-label” — a designation that means a medical product is being used outside of how the FDA approved it. That raises questions about access and cost. Physicians might not be willing to prescribe off-label because of concerns about liability.

“I think that there will be a substantially smaller number of pediatricians, pharmacies, etc., who will be comfortable taking that risk,” O’Shea said.

Dr. Dial Hewlett, medical director of tuberculosis services at Westchester County Department of Health in New York and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said an off-label prescription might also not be covered by insurance.

“A mother or father can go in with their child and say, ‘I’d like for them to have the vaccine,’ but they may be told, ‘Well we’ll give it, but you’re going to have to pay $200,’” he said.

Depending on the circumstances, pharmacists may also not be able to provide off-label vaccines. Some states tie pharmacist immunization authority to FDA approval,which has the potential to create a hodgepodge of access. that CVS and Walgreens, the country’s largest pharmacy chains, have begun restricting COVID-19 shots in some states to people with a prescription. 

“There may be some variability from state to state, but it’s a big barrier if FDA approval is not there, and the FDA approvals have been pulled back from where they were previously,” Hewlett said.

The FDA announcement is “concerning,” added Moser, who noted that limiting Pfizer’s vaccine will make it more difficult for all children to get a COVID-19 vaccine this year because of anticipated supply limitations.

O’Shea, the pediatrician in Michigan, said her office is currently deciding how many COVID-19 shots to stock, and it’s proving tricky as they weigh the cost vs. demand — the percentage of children under 18 getting the shot .

“Figuring out how much we want to have at any one time, and how we are going to give it to people — this really makes it a lot more complicated,” she said.

What happens next?

Moser said the announcement adds confusion for providers and families, and noted that the unilateral approach by Kennedy so far when it comes to vaccine policy “removes hundreds of voices of clinicians and scientists that were part of the process.” Moser recently served on ACIP and . He has replaced the panel with people who do not have relevant experience.

“That army of voices ensured a process informed by clinical experience and scientific expertise to which the small group making these decisions now cannot possibly compare,” she said in an email.

The revamped ACIP panel is scheduled to meet over two days beginning on September 18. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor who is chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, whether that panel has enough legitimacy to meet, especially amid . 

“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” . “These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”

AAP called Kennedy’s latest COVID guidelines “deeply troubling” and urged COVID vaccine decision-making to remain between medical experts and families. 

Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of AAP, said in a statement that any barrier to COVID-19 vaccination as the nation enters the respiratory virus season creates “a dangerous vulnerability for children and their families.”

“Any parent who wants their child vaccinated should have access to this vaccine,” she said, adding that HHS’ action “not only prevents this option for many families, but adds further confusion and stress for parents trying to make the best choices for their children.”

was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of . .

Eleven of 12 Democratic Senate Finance Committee members called on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign Thursday just before a charged — and at times explosive — committee hearing with the embattled health secretary.

Committee Democrats and two Republicans, both of them physicians, accused Kennedy of peddling misinformation, pressuring officials to rubber stamp policies not based on science and making it harder for Americans to access COVID vaccines. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, called Kennedy a charlatan.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, said he was questioning Kennedy on behalf of “parents and schools and teachers all over the United States of America who deserve so much better than your leadership.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-New Hampshire, accused the secretary of denying parents the right to vaccinate their children against COVID.

“You’re making things up to scare people,” Kennedy loudly interrupted. “And it’s a lie.”

Kennedy defended his running of HHS, which was thrust into turmoil after his decision last week to fire the Senate-confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, issue confusing new COVID vaccine guidelines and cut funding for mRNA vaccine research, among other contentious moves. A number of committee Republicans applauded Kennedy for his work, noting he had reduced spending and shifted the agency’s focus to “promoting prevention first.”

During a moment that appeared to confuse senators, Kennedy said he had fired former CDC head Susan Monarez because he asked her, “Are you a trustworthy person?” and she replied, “No.” Several in response cited Monarez’s claim that that she’d sign off on forthcoming recommendations from a newly installed vaccine committee. Kennedy refuted these claims and repeatedly accused Monarez of lying.

He also appeared to double down on his assertions that childhood vaccines and autism are linked, citing

Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minnesota, attempted to push the secretary on his past statements: “When were you lying, sir? When you told this committee that you were not anti-vax, or when you told Americans that there’s no safe and effective vaccine?”

“Both things are true,” he replied.

Kids are heading back to school this fall as the country experiences some of the lowest childhood vaccine rates and highest levels of public health uncertainty in known memory.

Amid the swirling currents: the defunding of vaccine research and competing messaging around COVID shots for children; a rare federal attempt to influence a West Virginia legal battle over childhood vaccine exemptions; and a dramatic leadership struggle within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that could solidify more power in the hands of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Kennedy is seen by many as the destabilizing figure at the center of the chaos, and 2025-26 will be the first full school year that the longtime vaccine skeptic is in charge of childhood public health. The controversial secretary, who earned a this week from every one of his predecessors going back to the Carter administration, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee later today.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, who heads the Senate health committee and played a pivotal role in Kennedy’s confirmation, has of the CDC amid the turmoil, citing children’s health as his major concern.

On Wednesday, three West Coast governors announced they’d be forming to establish their own vaccine recommendations, protesting those of the CDC, which, they said in a statement, “has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences.”

The governors of California, Oregon and Washington said the alliance will “ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics.” Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his surgeon general announced their intention Wednesday to become , including for schoolchildren.

As the states splintered on vaccines, 1,000 current and former HHS staff released formally calling for Kennedy’s resignation, writing that he “continues to endanger the nation’s health.” The group condemned a series of actions including the of the Senate-confirmed CDC director, Kennedy’s refusal to be briefed by CDC experts on vaccine-preventable diseases and his “misleading claims” about physician and hospital liability for following vaccine guidance that he opposes.

They also denounced the Food and Drug Administration’s recent of emergency use authorization for COVID vaccines, which — alongside the the CDC’s newest recommendations — will likely make it significantly harder for children, especially those under 5 years old, to access the shots. Recently released FDA memos show its vaccine chief overruled staff scientists who, citing high hospitalization rates among young children with COVID, recommended a wide range of age groups continue to get the vaccine, according to .

All of this, partnered with Kennedy’s long history of disseminating scientific misinformation, including the debunked claim that vaccines can cause autism, has led to great confusion for parents just as their kids are returning to school. Kennedy has promised to later this month, which he said would expose “what the environmental toxins are that are causing” autism.

“There is a lot of inaccurate information right now coming from the highest levels of HHS,” said Kawsar Talaat, physician and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose research focuses on vaccines. “I would think that for family members, who don’t necessarily have expertise, it would be hard to know who to trust, and it will certainly contribute to a decline in vaccination rates.”

Indeed, during the 2024-25 school year, immunization rates among kindergarteners across the country decreased for all reported vaccines, according to the latest available . Rates for the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine fell to 92.5% from approximately 95% pre-pandemic. And of states had MMR vaccination rates below the 95% needed for herd immunity, with some, like Idaho at 78.5%, well below it. 

As these numbers were falling, exemptions to mandatory vaccines for school-aged kids were on the rise, increasing to 3.6% nationally, driven by non-medical exemptions and up from in the 2019-20 school  year. Seventeen states — spiking from pre-pandemic — reported exemptions exceeding 5%, threatening herd immunity.

Lynn Nelson is the president of and has seen this uncertainty and hesitancy firsthand.

“We get a lot of families who are confused,” she said, “who may have immunized children until this point and now are having second thoughts about it.”

Increasingly, conflicted parents are bringing messages they’ve heard from HHS or Kennedy himself to their school nurses, wondering why they contradict what they’ve historically been told by their pediatricians.

“It tends to be things like, “Well, it sounds like maybe autism is caused by [vaccines]. We want to wait and see,’” Nelson said. 

But as these parents hold off on immunizing their kids, communities remain at heightened risk for infection and outbreak, she added.

And even if medical providers are able to fight the misinformation and have conversations with parents that ultimately lead them to want to vaccinate, some kids might not be able to access the shots, amid funding cuts to public health vaccination clinics in rural areas. 

Vaccine hesitancy also plays out at the district level, since school system leaders are “just as susceptible to misinformation as anyone else” and they often make the decision on whether or not to enforce the policies requiring most children be vaccinated in order to attend school, Nelson said. 

“It’s a question for most of us probably of when — not if — there’s going to be an outbreak.”

Chaos and pushback at the CDC

An already anxious back-to-school season for mandatory immunizations was intensified by the firing of CDC head Susan Monarez on Aug. 27, and her subsequent refusal to leave the post, following a clash over vaccine policy, according to reporting by  

Monarez’s lawyers her removal was “legally deficient,” and said, “the attack on Dr. Monarez is a warning to every American: Our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within.”

She has since been replaced by who has no medical training and, during the pandemic, posted conspiracy theories on social media and voiced support for unproven treatments — such as ivermectin, according to reporting by Before being appointed as acting head of the CDC, O’Neill served as a HHS deputy to Kennedy.

At least four other powerful agency leaders some with claiming they were asked to participate in an unscientific vaccine recommendation process. 

My resignation letter from CDC.

Dear Dr. Houry,

I am writing to formally resign from my position as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), effective August 28, 2025, close of business.…

— DrDemetre (@dr_demetre)

In response, CDC employees — a “clap out” protest to show support for their departing colleagues. An August investigation by revealed how badly the department has been depleted under Kennedy, with at least 20,500 total HHS workers gone since January, including at least 15% of all CDC staff.

Last week’s high-profile exodus comes after a tumultuous month: On Aug. 20, over 750 employees of the CDC and other health agencies signed a rare , imploring Kennedy to stop spreading misinformation. The authors argued his rhetoric contributed to an attack earlier that month on their headquarters by a gunman who fired more than onto the agency’s main campus and appeared to be, at least in part, motivated by COVID

“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information,” the letter reads. The authors accused Kennedy of sowing public mistrust in the CDC’s workforce; firing critical workers; making false and dangerous claims about mRNA and measles vaccines; and misusing data to falsely claim childhood vaccines are the cause of autism.

HHS did not respond to requests for comment on the confusion surrounding vaccine policies nor on the allegations that inaccurate information is coming out of the agency, eroding faith in its work.

In response to mounting criticism, Kennedy published an op-ed in this week, arguing he was, “restoring public trust in the CDC,” which had been destroyed by “bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep.”

“We have shown what a focused CDC can achieve,” he wrote, citing and defending his response to the measles outbreak, which he said, “was neither ‘pro-vax’ nor ‘antivax.’”

He identified six areas of focus, including investing in the workforce, that he wrote will “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently signaled its lack of confidence by filing a alongside a number of other health care organizations, arguing Kennedy had violated federal law and made “ unscientific changes to federal vaccine policy” by moving to curb COVID vaccines for young children. The plaintiffs include an immunocompromised mother to two teenage boys who were denied COVID vaccines. 

They’ve also issued their own guidance, the COVID vaccines for all young children. Kennedy responded to this move on X, calling it a “list of corporate-friendly vaccine recommendations” and “perhaps, just a pay-to-play scheme.”

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved updated COVID vaccines, but with new restrictions: they’ll only be available to people 65 and older or younger people with at least one underlying medical condition that increases their risk for severe disease. In a post on Kennedy said the Moderna vaccine had been approved for use in those older than 6 months, Pfizer in those older than 5 years and Novavax in those older than 12 years.

“These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” he wrote, though it’s still not clear who will have the shots

While healthy children and adults without underlying conditions were eligible to receive the vaccine historically, HHS claimed, “Today’s decision does not affect access to these vaccines for healthy individuals.” 

“HHS is not limiting access,” a department spokesperson wrote to The 74. “The COVID vaccine remains available for anyone who chooses it in consultation with their healthcare provider.”

In response to a request for clarification to determine if this means children and healthy adults under 65 can access the vaccine with permission from a doctor, the agency spokesperson just repeated the same language.

All of this back and forth has contributed to confusion for parents, as increase in many areas of the country. Recent by KFF, a nonpartisan, nonprofit health policy organization, found that half (48%) of parents are not sure if federal health agencies are currently recommending that healthy children receive a COVID vaccine this fall or not.

A federal push for vaccine exemptions

While many eyes are on the debate surrounding COVID vaccines, researchers and physicians also remain laser focused on measles, following this year’s outbreak, which infected over across 41 states and killed two unvaccinated children. 

Case numbers this year are already the they’ve been since the disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. Some 92% of reported infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown and 13% have resulted in hospitalization.

Throughout the outbreaks, Kennedy has the severity and has been in his support of the MMR vaccine.

In a recent and highly unusual move for the federal government, Kennedy expressed his support for a philosophical and religious exemption to mandatory vaccines for school-aged kids in West Virginia. 

Up until a recent opened the door for broader exemptions, the state had some of the nation’s strictest childhood vaccination policies and was one of only five that exclusively allowed for medical exemptions. Already around 500 requests for religious and philosophical exemptions have been submitted — and approved — for the 2025-26 school year, according to records obtained by The 74, though those numbers are not yet reflected in the CDC’s data.

According to that data, Georgia and Michigan saw exemptions rise faster than any other state — by 1.2 percentage points year-over-year — driven almost exclusively by non-medical exemptions. They were closely followed by Idaho, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Utah.

In West Virginia, conflict between the governor’s order and current state law has and over how officials should proceed. Beginning on Aug. 21, the federal government publicly weighed in, apparently attempting to tip the scales. 

First, HHS’s Office for Civil Rights sent to all West Virginia health departments participating in the federal which provides vaccines to millions of kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. The communication stated that if they did not comply with the governor’s executive order, they would no longer be eligible to participate in the program. 

Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert, called this move an unheard-of “implied threat.”

“I just think that’s got to be unprecedented for a federal agency — the Office for Civil Rights — to go and pick out a state law and say, ‘You need to comply with that.’ That just boggles my mind,” Hughes said.

“What I worry about is that we’re about to see a push at the federal and the state level encouraging religious exemptions,” he added.

Hours after Kennedy testified before the Finance Committee, the Office for Civil Rights announced they had issued similar letters to all states participating in the Vaccines for Children program stating they “must respect state religious and conscience exemptions from vaccine mandates.”

Earlier, the health secretary had posted on , voicing his support for the West Virginia governor and urging state legislators to comply.

Del Bigtree, CEO of the, an anti-vaccine advocacy group, told The 74, “We’re happy that Robert Kennedy Jr. and HHS are supporting Gov. Morrissey. I think this is a pivotal moment for this conversation in this nation.”

Other states have joined West Virginia in pursuit of such bills, according to Caitlin Gilmet, the communications director for , a pro-vaccine advocacy organization formerly called SAFE Communities Coalition.

“We’re seeing medical freedom bills in a number of states. Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, Florida are all kind of national bellwethers where those parental rights bills are being tested,” she said. 

Kids in those states are particularly vulnerable to “new exemption policies, weak enforcement and then the conditions to create exemption clusters,” she added, which can then lead to outbreaks.

A number of these types of bills contain language or policies that are unclear, leading to more confusion and conflicting guidance. 

Further complicating the issue is Kennedy’s recent firing of all members of the group responsible for making recommendations on the safety, efficacy and clinical need for vaccines to the CDC as well as the cancellation of $500 million in federal grants to mRNA vaccines, the technology used to develop the COVID vaccination. 

In a post on , he claimed the vaccines are ineffective and cause “more risks than benefits,” while “paradoxically… prolong[ing] pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccines” — assertions that are echoed by activists like Bigtree, yet have been widely debunked by researchers and medical professionals.

“It is incredibly misleading, not to mention just false, to say that the vaccines are more harmful than they are beneficial,” said Talaat, the Johns Hopkins professor. “They are incredibly beneficial. They’ve saved millions of lives.”

While COVID vaccines were the first on the market to use mRNA technology, others were in development before the funding cancellation, including ones to fight cancer and bird flu.

“[Bird flu] could be the next pandemic,” Talaat said, “and they canceled the contracts to create mRNA vaccines against this virus.”

“It’s really important,” she added, “that people understand that, unfortunately, this is not a time where we can trust those in the highest positions of power at HHS.”

The author of two college textbooks and five books for non-academic readers, she is equally at home researching and writing about adolescent mental health, sleep disorders, digital technology, homework and narcissism. She was one of the first experts to warn nearly that smartphones could hold negative consequences for our mental health. A decade after the advent of the iPhone, Twenge went viral in 2017 with an that asked, provocatively, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

A professor at San Diego State University, she has collaborated for years with the researcher and author Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book was a mega-bestseller that has helped build momentum for school cellphone bans in a growing number of states — .

And she is one of the few experts in the education and mental health world to have appeared on HBO’s .

Twenge’s 2017 book, , looked at how modern teens are somehow both more connected than previous generations and less prepared for adulthood. In it, she theorized that depression rates among teens are rising because they spend more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping — a problematic combination. 

The dilemmas Twenge identified in 2017 are only getting worse: By 2023, the typical American teen was spending nearly five hours a day using social media, recent research finds, with severe depression rates rising. In , girls who were heavy users of social media were three times as likely to be depressed as non-users.

Her , out Tuesday, offers practical guidelines for parents raising kids in the age of ubiquitous connectivity and sophisticated — some would say addictive — social media.

Twenge doesn’t shy away from challenging harried parents to do better. Among her suggestions: No one — parents included — should have electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Likewise, she says, the first handheld device a kid should receive is a “basic phone” that allows calls, texts and not much else.

“It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media,” she said. “That’s just not true.”

Ahead of its publication, Twenge spoke with The 74’s Greg Toppo about her rules, her work with Haidt and her belief that we need stiffer laws that keep young people off social media until they’re old enough to drive.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. It’s a parent’s description of his 10-year-old after she got her first smartphone: “She suddenly wasn’t playing with her younger siblings as much. Novels were promptly cast aside. She wasn’t around to help with dinner anymore. She danced less, laughed less. She was quieter. Our home was quieter.” That’s so heartbreaking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual.

I don’t think it is. Many, many parents describe how their kids are different after they give them a smartphone. And it’s especially heartbreaking when that’s a 10-year-old, but even when it’s a 16-year-old who might otherwise be ready. It’s very noticeable how they change after they get that phone in their pocket.

Were there any particular data points about smartphones and social media that persuaded you they were causing a mental health crisis?

It was a slow process for me, and it wasn’t an immediate conclusion when I first started to see these trends in adolescent mental health. It was first a process of ruling out obvious causes, like the economy, which wasn’t aligned at all, and any other big events that might happen. I would trace it, really, to the big that I work with on teens, where there was just this combination all at once of not just rising depression, but teens spending less time with each other in person and less time sleeping. And then realizing, “Well, wait: What might explain all of those things happening at the same time?” 

And it seemed clear that a good amount of that answer is probably smartphones and social media, particularly after I found a Pew Research Center poll about the ownership of smartphones, that [it] in the U.S. at the end of 2012. And that’s right around the same time all these changes were happening.

I want to dig into a few of your rules. No. 3: “No social media until age 16 or later.” That seems a lot tougher than what most families practice. Why 16? And what do you say to parents who worry about their kids’ social isolation and FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

I have not found that with my kids — that they’ve been socially isolated for not having social media. Most other parents I talked to who have put off social media have also not found that with their kids. Social media is just one mechanism for communicating. There’s so many others. Kids can call each other, they can text each other — they do a lot of texting. They can FaceTime each other, they can get together in person. Usually that ends up tilting toward texting, but it does not have to be social media. It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media. That’s just not true.

And that leads to rule No. 4, where you advocate “basic phones” — your phrase — before smartphones. In a world where even school assignments need Internet access, is that practical for most families?

Yeah, because kids have laptops. And if the family can’t afford to buy them a laptop, almost all schools provide a laptop. So they have Internet access on their laptop even if they don’t have it on their phone. And laptops have come so far down in price too, that if you haven’t bought a laptop recently, or if you use Mac laptops like I do and my kids do now, you might not realize you can get a . So that’s another big thing: Maybe 10 years ago, if a kid doesn’t have Internet access on their phone, then they don’t have Internet access at all. That’s just not true in the current landscape.

Although you do have problems with school laptops.

Oh, yes. I mean, this is a thing! They get Internet access on the laptop, whether it’s a school laptop or a personal one, and then that opens a whole other can of worms. Absolutely true. Laptops are the bane of my existence as a parent, particularly the school laptop, although they’ve gotten a little bit better, at least in my district. 

Actually, that was going to be my next question, this parental controls thing. It sounds like your district is being responsive.

Well, on that issue, they still don’t have a coherent phone policy during the school day. In the high school, it’s especially bad. That’s something I’m hoping will change. It is changing in a lot of schools around the country, thankfully. A lot more schools are doing “no phones during the school day, bell to bell,” which is what needs to happen.

A big message of the book is phone-free schools. And I know you’ve worked with , who has pushed for schools to get rid of phones. A few critics have said that this is a to a complex problem, and that it’s not entirely clear that phones are actually causing the mental health issues that Haidt has become a best-seller writing about. How do you respond to that criticism?

There are a couple of things to unpack there. For one thing, even if you take mental health out of the equation, kids should still not have their phones at school for academic and focus reasons, for the reason of developing social skills by talking to their friends at lunch, for the reason that a bell-to-bell ban is actually easier to enforce than a classroom-by-classroom ban. There are so many reasons for it that don’t even include mental health. 

The second question is [about] the research on phones and social media and mental health: We’ve known for quite a while that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy. Almost every single study finds that. Where you sometimes get more debate is, “O.K., that’s correlation. What about causation?” But in the last 10 years, we’ve gotten a lot more studies, and the studies that ask people to cut back or give up social media for at least three weeks a month or so, almost all of those studies show an improvement in well-being. And I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but that’s actually a little bit shocking, because by definition in those experiments, you’re taking people who are at average use and having them cut back to low. 

That’s actually not where we see the biggest effects in the correlational studies. The heaviest users are much more likely to be depressed than the average or light users. So, you know, you can’t ethically do an experiment that would really answer the exact question: You can’t take 12-year-olds, randomly assign them to spend eight hours a day on social media, and then see what happens. At least I hope not.

In the book, you talk about the 10 rules “creating a firewall for kids against anxiety, attention issues and constant insecurity.” I think most parents would get behind that. But let’s be honest, they’re users of these tools themselves. How do we craft rules around web dependence and social media without being hypocrites?

Parents have to be role models. Parents are also allowed a small amount of what I call “digital hypocrisy.” Because they’re adults, they have jobs, they may be responsible for elderly parents, etc. But that said, parents should think about their technology use as well. They should get their phones and electronic devices out of their bedroom at night. They should also consider doing things like not having social media on their phone. If they want to use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, do it on your laptop. That’s what I do. I mean, I don’t have much social media to begin with. I have X, but I don’t have it on my phone, and that’s very much a purposeful decision. During family dinners, unless there’s a really specific reason for me to have my phone with me, it’s upstairs.

That seems to be an easy one: Phones away at dinner.

Well, you’d think so, but you’ve got to get the whole family on board, and sometimes husbands are not really into that.

I want to skip to Rule No. 8: “Give your kids real-world freedom,” which will probably be met with some resistance. I have a 4-year-old grandson, and when I read your recommendation to let 4-to-7-year-olds go find items a few aisles away in the grocery store, I shouted, “Hell no!”

Why? Why is there, do you think, a resistance to that idea?

I have nightmares about this child being snatched from me at Safeway. I guess I want you to just pull me back from the edge, if you would.

I mean, that is not just unlikely to happen — the chances of that are so infinitesimal it probably shouldn’t even factor into our decision making. There’s one stat in there, and I forget the exact number, but someone calculated that if you wanted your kid to get kidnapped, how many hours — it turned out to be years — would they have to be in your front yard for that to happen? It’s something like 100,000 years. 

O.K., well that helps.

And a four-year-old loves that stuff! They love being grown up. I mean, look, even if you don’t do the grocery store thing, make sure they learn how to tie their own shoes, that they know how to get dressed. I remember when my girls were that age, and it occasionally amazed me when I would be with other moms in various situations and their kids couldn’t dress themselves at that age, and that’s where it starts. 

At pretty much every age, the great thing is that giving kids independence makes it easier for parents. It is easier as a parent if your 4-year-old can dress themselves. It is easier if your teenager makes dinner once a week. It’s good for everybody.

A lot of people might see this freedom rule as somehow contradictory to some of the other rules, in which you talk about adults being “in control.” Can you parse that?

For sure. Jon has said this as well — and I completely agree: We have kids in the real world and underprotected them online, and these principles are just trying to get those two to balance. When you’re talking about the real-world freedom thing, it’s not a matter of letting kids completely run wild and do whatever they want. We’re talking about giving kids some of the freedoms that parents themselves had when they were kids, and to build independence in a way that is really good for kids and good for them as they grow up. 

I can’t even remember who said this to me when I had young kids: “You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults.” And that’s just so true. That is your job as a parent. Giving kids some freedom and independence is a really, really key part of raising an adult.  

I wrote a whole book about learning games, and one of the powerful ideas that I took from that reporting is that many adults don’t realize video games have become. You acknowledge that, saying gaming is the primary way that some kids spend time with friends. But I gather that you see the risks as well. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

It really comes back to the principle of “Everything in moderation.” Many games are not as obviously toxic as social media. Games tend to be more in real time, more interactive. But is it a good idea for kids to be spending five or six hours a day gaming? Probably not. There have to be some limits.

You quote , the Facebook founder, admitting they’re “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to keep users on the app. Given social media’s sophistication, are mere parental rules sufficient? I mean, don’t we need a bigger hammer, like legislation and policies? 

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! It would be absolutely amazing for parents and for kids if we had laws that verified age for social media. I mean, ideally, that would be age verification to make sure they’re 16 or older, to raise the minimum age to 16. But even if we just enforced existing law with the minimum of 13, that would be progress, given the enormous numbers of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are on social media, often without their parents’ permission — often explicitly against their parents’ permission — and actually against the law [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule] that was passed in 1998.

What is the biggest obstacle to getting better regulation, or, to your point, to enforcing the existing regulations?

It’s interesting. The barrier is not the inability to verify age or the inability to verify age without a government ID. There are so many companies that will verify age now that they have their . It can be done in many different ways. The biggest barrier is tech companies themselves. Any time a state passes a law about verifying age on social media or even pornography sites, the companies — every single time. They have sued to keep those laws from going into effect.

Are any emerging technologies that parents should be concerned about? Do your rules need updating for AI or virtual reality or whatever comes next?

AI chatbots are what a lot of parents are rightly worried about. And yes, you could certainly modify or add to the rules and say, “No AI chat bots until 16 or 18 — probably 18.” And of course, it depends on what we’re talking about. It is common for kids to use ChatGPT when they need to look up something for homework or even have it write their essays — that’s a whole other horrible discussion. But what I’m specifically referring to is the many chatbots out there right now that are supposed to be AI friends, or worse, . There’s already been a tragic case of a child who , apparently due to one of these AI girlfriends. It’s just really scary to think of kids having their first romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. It’s terrifying.

The good news is, if you follow that rule about your kids having basic phones, if you give them one of the phones that’s designed for kids, those phones do not allow AI relationship chatbots. It’s on their banned apps, just like social media and pornography and violence apps. Parents have such a tough job, and it’s nice that there are at least a few tools out there that can make their lives easier and keep their kids off of things like AI girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots.

In keeping with the theme of overwhelmed parents, I wonder: If I were to come to you as a parent and say, “Oh my God, Jean, 10 rules is a lot. If I could only do two or three, where would I start?” Is that even a smart thing to do? And if so, where would you start?

I would say, “No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight.” Start there, because the research is so solid on it, and it’s such a straightforward rule, and it works for everybody, of all ages. Your teenager can’t say, “Well, you do it differently,” or, “You get to be on social media.” No, actually, my phone is outside my bedroom when I sleep at night too. So that’s a great place to start. And then, just because they have so much utility, I would probably say the second rule, about basic phones, because even with all of the mess of the laptops, I’m just so happy and grateful that my kids did not have the Internet or social media in their pocket until they were older.

As a parent and a grandparent, I really appreciate you using your real life to inform a lot of these rules. In a way, it hardens them a bit, makes them more durable. Anything I haven’t asked you about that you feel needs to be in the mix?

Two things I’ll throw out there just in terms of pushbacks: With “No phones during the school day,” the pushback is often “What about school shootings?” And it’s actually less safe for students to have access to their phones during an active shooter situation. And I go through the reasons for that in that chapter. 

And then the real-world freedom piece: When you look at the things that I’m suggesting in terms of how to give your kids freedom, obviously letting them go off on their own in the real world is important, and you should do that too. But there are lots of things in that list of suggestions you can do without even leaving the house: teens making their own doctor and hairstylist appointments, for example, or middle-school kids, or even elementary school kids, cooking dinner for the family. Those are great experiences for kids to have without too much parental interference. 

You do have to — and I know this by experience — step back, especially with the cooking piece, and let them do it by themselves and learn how to make mistakes. It’s tempting to just be there when they’re doing that, but you learn quickly that if you leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. And then you can go do something else. Go and read that book you’ve been meaning to read for a while. Go for a walk. Watch TV. Have some relaxation time that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 

I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on unschooling, this idea of pulling kids out of school and letting them find their own level and their own interests. This almost strikes me as unparenting.

It is — and I’m not a huge fan of unschooling, because it’s a rare kid it would actually work for — but it is. It’s the general idea that not being up in your kids’ business all the time is better for both parents and kids. It’s something we really have to consider more.

We analyzed four waves of Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study from the 2020-21 school year for 6,245 teens (mean age 13.2 years) nationwide. Forty-two percent of them attended school remotely, 27% attended at least partially in person, 24% moved from remote to in-person learning and 7% attended in some other pattern (moving into and out of in-person learning multiple times, for example). The racial/ethnic composition was similar to that of the United States teen population, with 53% white respondents, 14% Black, 24% Latino and 10% students with other backgrounds. The sample was approximately evenly split by gender, and about one-fourth of responding students came from households with total income under $50,000.

What did we find?

In line with the accepted wisdom, teens who attended school in person during the 2020-21 school year reported better than those who took online or hybrid classes. They reported being both happier and less stressed.

But when looking at the relationship between the type of school attended and mental health for teens of different races/ethnicities, family incomes and types of neighborhoods, we found disparate patterns.

Black and Latino teens, lower-income students and those from less-advantaged neighborhoods often reported being happier and less stressed when they attended school remotely that year than hybrid or in person. This is in contrast to the finding that, overall, teens in remote schooling reported being less happy. In some cases, the less-privileged teens reported being happier than their more privileged peers in remote schooling; in others, it meant that less-privileged teens reported similar mental health across all types of schooling, whereas their wealthier classmates reported worse mental health when attending remotely.

More privileged teens were happiest and least stressed when attending school in person.

These differences were sometimes quite large. For instance, white students attending school in person scored 2.7 points higher on our 36-point measure of happiness than those in fully remote classes. But for Black students, it was the opposite — those attending in person scored 0.5 points lower. Latino students also did not see nearly the large benefit of in-person attendance as white students did. Similarly, students whose families earned between $100,000 and $199,999 a year scored 2.7 points higher when attending in person versus remote. But those whose families earned less than $25,000 per year scored 1.2 points lower. Similar patterns were seen on our measures of stress levels.

The survey responses do not contain enough information to explain these widely disparate patterns. Maybe less-privileged teens, whose families were by the pandemic than their wealthier peers, were more concerned about contracting COVID and infecting loved ones. Perhaps their schools were more stressful than those attended by more privileged teens, so remote schooling was a welcome reprieve. Whatever the reason, the type of school predicted different mental health outcomes for different groups of students, complicating the story that school closures were bad for all kids.

This is not to say that kids with different backgrounds should be encouraged to attend school remotely versus in person in the name of mental health. At a baseline, that’s segregation, which is morally repugnant. On top of that, our analysis didn’t touch on the academic harms of remote schooling, which are — particularly for less-privileged students, who tend to suffer greater learning loss than their more privileged peers. When making a decision as important as whether to close schools, officials must consider multiple effects, including academics and mental and public health.

But it is critically important to get to the bottom of why students from varied backgrounds experienced different types of school so differently. If schools are to be places where all students can learn at their best and thrive, they must support the mental health and well-being of students from all backgrounds.

It is clear from our research that simplistic understandings about what happened in schools during COVID no longer suffice. Our results provide valuable new evidence that the closures were experienced differently by varied groups of students, so it shouldn’t be surprising if different student groups need different interventions and resources in recovering from the pandemic and its aftermath.

Unfortunately, the possibility of future pandemics and other disasters means spring 2020 may not be the last time U.S. schools need to close on a large scale. The next time schools shut and then reopen, less-privileged students may need help in transitioning back to in-person schooling, above and beyond the support all students will need to make up missed learning.

Research described in this article was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health,  Award Number R01HD108398 (PI: Hackman). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

McDonald predicted that even a few weeks of displacement from school for millions of kids could fundamentally change education. 

And while most kids would eventually return to school once the epidemic faded, she wrote, “some parents may discover that learning outside of schooling benefited their children and strengthened their family.” They might begin to consider homeschooling or other alternatives as a longer-term option. “They may realize that education without schooling is not a crisis but an opportunity.”

Five years later, it seems, something fundamental has changed: As many as 125,000 microschools now operate nationwide, according to the National Microschooling Center, and several states now support homeschooling and microschooling with public funds.

McDonald, a Massachusetts mother of four, frequent contributor to The 74, host of the and the author of a about self-directed education and alternatives to traditional schooling, set out to capture what the movement looks like now in her new book, . It’s out Tuesday.

She charts an ideologically diverse group of parents and teachers who are striking out on their own to essentially start small education businesses. The common thread, she finds, is a “desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.”

McDonald talked to The 74’s Greg Toppo recently about the book and the microschooling movement.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I wanted to start with this quote in your book from a Kansas mom who launched a microschool. She says, “The fringe is becoming the cloth.” That’s quite a statement, quite a realignment, if true. Do you agree that that’s what’s happening?

I’ve been covering unconventional education — homeschooling and microschooling — for over a decade now. This movement really began prior to 2020, and at the time I thought that we would continue to see slow but steady growth in homeschooling and alternative education more generally. But I always thought it would stay in the margins.

When COVID hit in 2020 and there was that massive educational upheaval, it enabled families to start to think more creatively about education options, to maybe look more openly at homeschooling and microschools and other ways of approaching teaching and learning. And many families liked what they saw. Some families even built these new alternatives. Since 2020, we’re really seeing a much more mainstream push towards alternative education.

I think it’s fair to call these folks disruptors. 

Peaceful disruptors. 

But I wonder if we’re getting ahead of ourselves to start calling it mainstream. I mean, there are still in public schools.

If you look at some of the data in Arizona, for example, so many families are of traditional district schools. Obviously, charter schools would be their primary alternative at the moment, but certainly with the expansion of school choice programs and universal programs in places like Arizona, you’re seeing more and more families realize that they have other options, and they’re able to find schools and spaces that are aligned with their values and viewpoints in ways that they haven’t before.

We have to give it a little bit of time, because we need to let these entrepreneurs do their work. As more and more entrepreneurship takes hold, we’ll see more options for families, and families will be able to find just what they’re looking for.

I want to define just who you write about in this book, because it’s a really specific kind of person. As you say, they’re people who “built what they couldn’t find.” You’ve got folks who start religious microschools, Montessori microschools …

LGBTQ+ microschools, Afrocentric microschools …

You talk to folks like , who opens this in Massachusetts, and it’s interesting that he’s in the mix because he blanches at the “coercive qualities” of traditional schooling, even the compulsion to attend at all. That’s a pretty broad coalition. And I wonder: What do these folks have in common?

It is a broad coalition. What’s so exciting about this current decentralized, entrepreneur-driven educational moment, is that it’s extremely diverse. There are founders of every demographic and ideological persuasion, and different motivations for creating programs, whether it’s that they can’t find what they’re looking for for their own children and they want to create something better, or they just think that there’s a different way of approaching education. 

I think about Tamara Becker, the founder of in Arizona. Her microschool, which now has 73 students across several locations — she didn’t build that for her children. She doesn’t have children, but was a long-time public school teacher and administrator, and just felt that COVID provided this moment to individualize education and move away from a one-size-fits-all learning model into something more relevant and personalized for the 21st century. That’s the common thread among these entrepreneurial parents and teachers, that desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.

The other common thread, and why the book is titled Joyful Learning, is that despite the tremendous diversity of these models — from secular, progressive microschools to conservative, faith-based, microschools, and different educational philosophies and approaches, from classical to Montessori to unschooling and everything in between — these programs are places where children are happy to be learning. I saw that as I crisscrossed the country and interviewed the founders and families on my podcast and interviews related to the book. That was a very apparent characteristic of all of these spaces: Children are happy to be there. They are often sad when snow days hit or when summer vacation approaches. 

As you were going through this list of different kinds of schools and all these founders, I wondered, “How did you find all these folks?” Obviously, you have this podcast. Were they coming to you? Were you going to them?

Great question. I’ve been in the alternative education movement for a long time. I wrote my 2019 book, Unschooled, which is where I first connected with people like Ken Danford. So I have, thankfully, a rich network of folks in the alternative education world and in homeschooling that crosses political and ideological lines. In many cases, folks have come to me. 

Then, of course, COVID hit, and there was more and more interest in alternative education. In early 2022 I decided to launch my LiberatED podcast, because I wanted a multimedia approach to storytelling beyond the articles I was writing, and was able to connect with many of these founders there. For the most part, founders have come to me. I’ve been able to visit many of these founders, either by reaching out to them because they’ve been on my podcast or featured in articles, or by them inviting me to come. I also have done a lot of collaboration with the [a group of entrepreneurs supporting alternative learning models] that’s now supporting over 4,000 of these innovative educators across the country.

My work now is just sort of an extension of the work that I’ve been doing in alternative education for over a decade.

As much as anything, this book is an instruction manual for future founders and, I guess, for policymakers as well.

And parents.

What are you hoping readers come away with in terms of real instruction?

The book is primarily geared towards founders and families. Obviously, I’d love it if policymakers read it as well, and members of the media like yourself who are curious about this movement. But it’s primarily a book for parents and founders of programs. And there’s often a lot of overlap between those two groups. A lot of the founders that I talked to had no intention of becoming education entrepreneurs, or opening a school or a microschool or learning pod, and either because of COVID and the disruption caused by that, or just being unable to find exactly what they were looking for for their own children, ended up making that leap into entrepreneurship. In most cases, they found the experience to be incredibly rewarding. 

The majority of the founders are former public school teachers who were disillusioned with the standardization and test-driven learning environment that they found in conventional schools. Many of these teachers found their own creativity and autonomy stifled within a conventional classroom and wanted somewhere where they could be free to educate the way they felt was most effective and beneficial to the students they’re serving.

There’s got to be a very steep learning curve for the parents who are not trained teachers, and I wonder if you saw that in your reporting. Did you see parents struggling to make school come alive?

Most of the founders in the book are former teachers. Some of them became homeschooling moms after being public school teachers and then opened homeschooling collaboratives. I think about Alicia Wright in Richmond, Va., who runs . She was a longtime public school teacher-turned-homeschooling-mom-turned-founder. So there’s also that trajectory. A lot of these founders who are parents and who launch programs are highly successful in their own right.

I think about Sharon Massinelli, who runs in Georgia, a physician associate as well as a long-time homeschooling mom who has balanced work and homeschooling for years. She was really attracted to a hybrid homeschool model that enables part-time enrollment off-site with trained educators working through a curriculum for half the week, and then the other half students are at home working through that same curriculum with their parents. That has been a model that’s been around since the 1990s and continues to gain popularity, especially over the last five years. She was able to create her own hybrid school after her children had been attending another hybrid school program that was far away and not quite what she wanted. She was able to use that model and create something new. 

That’s what we see with many of the entrepreneurial parents who may not have a background in education but are incredibly successful in their own professions. Now, they have so many resources to help them launch and grow their programs, largely because of the network effects from more and more of these programs existing. You have these microschool startup programs like or that really work with these everyday entrepreneurs to create successful, sustainable programs.

I want to be sure to address this issue, which a lot of people coming to your book might be wondering about: This idea that the choice movement itself is not as simple as just joy and entrepreneurialism. There are a lot of people who feel like it’s a play to undermine public schools, and I wonder how you approach that.

What we’re seeing now is the expansion of choice, variety and abundance in education that we enjoy in so many other parts of our lives, but that we haven’t had much of in education because it’s been largely dominated by traditional public schools. It’s a good thing that we see more options for families, more ways of approaching education beyond a conventional classroom. It’s no surprise that more families are gravitating to and and outdoor learning environments, because they want something that’s much more play-based, that’s much more learner-centered, and that’s much less restrictive and standardized than a conventional classroom. That’s a key piece of this: We see so much innovation in the 21st century in so many other segments of society, while K-12 education has largely been standardized and stagnant.

For folks who might not know about you, it’s fair to say you lived this. During the pandemic, your oldest set off on her own to do distance learning, and you enrolled your younger three in the private . Talk a little bit about your experience — right in the middle, by the way, of doing the reporting for all this.

My kids were unschooled, homeschooled since birth — never attended a conventional classroom. They were attending a microschool a couple of days a week when COVID hit and the microschool shut down. All of the classes that they were taking throughout the city were shut down for months in many cases, more than a year in some.

I write in Joyful Learning about how at one point I realized that all of this education disruption that I was documenting among other families was hitting my family as well, and we were making education changes as a result, including, as you say, my older daughter, Molly, who had always been homeschooled. She began taking online classes and then ended up enrolling in a full suite of high school online classes through while remaining legally a homeschooler in Massachusetts. She’s since graduated and is off to college. Next Saturday she moves in. And then the younger three enrolled in the Sudbury Valley School, which I had written about extensively in my Unschooled book and always really adored, but it’s far away from us, and also is a state-recognized private school. We were comfortable with homeschooling, but changes among our education ecosystem during that time of disruption led us to pursue other options, and they were thrilled to join Sudbury Valley.

Do you envision us ever going back to the way things were before COVID? And how do you think this movement is going to change the system itself?

Do I think we’re going to go back to the way it was before COVID? No, and my answer is related to your second question. What we’re seeing is a much greater focus around decentralized, choice-enabled, entrepreneur-driven education that’s responsive to the needs and wants of parents in local communities. One of the things I talk about in the book is the contrast between the education disruption and reform that happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, of course, we’re coming up to the 20th anniversary later this month and what we’ve seen in terms of education reform and change in the wake of COVID. 

After Hurricane Katrina, the change largely came from the top. It was the state of Louisiana that took over the New Orleans Public School district to orchestrate change from the top, albeit with the goal of eventually returning New Orleans schools to local control, which would take more than a decade to accomplish. By contrast, the educational change that we’ve seen since COVID is the opposite. It’s an entirely bottom-up, decentralized movement of entrepreneurial parents and teachers creating the kinds of schools and spaces that enable young people to flourish and be happy. 

The annual , released last month from the , found that while there’s some bright spots nationally compared to 2019 — including a growing number of children covered by health insurance and a decrease in teen pregnancies — many states are struggling to take care of children, whether it’s the number of children living in poverty, a growing number of teen deaths or older students who are not in school or working.

“When we look at the overall numbers, we see a somewhat mixed picture,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director of P-12 policy at , a national education policy group and grantee to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “But, when we actually break it down by demographics, we see that there continues to be very large gaps between racial groups, in particular with Black and Latino students … [and their] educational outcomes.”

Nationally, there was improvement in seven of 16 indicators, the report found. Of the remaining measures, six worsened since 2019 and three remained the same. In almost all 16 categories, however, American Indian, Alaska Native, Black and Latino children fared worse than the national average. 

The report found education topped the list for the weakest rebound in recent years with continued declines in reading and math proficiency for all demographic groups between 2019 and 2024; and a smaller percentage of children attending preschool across the country. 

Using federal NAEP test data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the report found 70% of American fourth graders in 2024 were not reading on grade level, worsening from 66% in 2019 “[and] essentially undoing a decade of progress.” About 73% of eighth graders are not proficient in math either.

Black, American Indian, Alaska Native and Latino students saw widening gaps compared to the national average and their white and Asian peers. In 2024, for example, about 84% of Black fourth graders and 90% of Black eighth graders were not performing on grade level in reading and math respectively compared to 61% of white fourth graders and 63% of white eighth graders.

Nationally, high school graduation rates have increased by one percentage point to 87% between 2018-19 and 2021-22, but similar to proficiency, most students of color lag behind the national average by between four to 13 percentage points.

“This really is indicative of the fact that we’ve had generations and generations of disproportionate resources going to students,” Munyan-Penney said. “We know that students of color and from low-income backgrounds have continually seen less investment in their schools and communities, and that is really borne out here in the data.”

Children of color disproportionately lived in high-poverty areas in 2019-23, with around 20% of Black and American Indian or Alaska Native, followed by about 11% Latino children, who lived in areas of concentrated poverty compared to 3% for white, Asian and Pacific Islander children. 

Most states fund public schools through local property taxes, so there’s often a direct correlation between concentrated poverty and struggling student achievement, Munyan-Penney said.

Disparities also extended beyond education – particularly with the number of child and teen deaths per 100,000. 

From 2019 to 2023, the number of kids and youth who died between the ages of one and 19 per 100,000 children increased from 25 to 29, with cause of death mainly from accidents, homicides and suicides. That figure for Black youth is nearly double the national rate, with a 30% increase between 2019 to 2023, from 41 to 53 deaths per 100,000.

State-by-state child well-being has also been a moving target.

While New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts topped rankings for overall child well-being, Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico scored the lowest. The report acknowledged that despite overall rankings, some states “show vastly uneven scores across domains,” including Maine, which scored overall at No. 17, but simultaneously ranked No. 41 in education or North Dakota which ranked first in economic well-being, but No. 42 in education. 

“Strong performance at the state … level can mask the reality that millions of individual children are still struggling to access the resources,” the report said.

Federal investments toward healthcare coverage and economic stability during the pandemic were credited in the report as sources of improvement in parental employment and children covered under health insurance. 

About 25% of children had a parent who lacked stable employment between 2019 and 2023, which improved by one percentage point. The report found financial aid, including pandemic relief funds in 2020-21 and an expanded child tax credit, helped “strengthen family financial security.” The report also found an increase of children covered by health insurance from 5% in 2019 to 6% in 2023 was an “encouraging milestone.”

But, these gains may too be in jeopardy in upcoming years as several pandemic-era supports expired and President Donald Trump’s administration has recently made cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

“The pullback in federal investment… is definitely a concern of mine,” Munyan-Penney said. “I’m not optimistic that these numbers will continue to go up unless we sort of see a change in the way that the federal government is approaching this and or we have very robust state investment.”

For nearly 20 years, academic strategies, support and policies focused on closing long-standing achievement gaps in STEM between boys and girls. These efforts paid off, and by 2019, girls’ achievement in  and  equaled or exceeded boys’. Then the pandemic hit, and the gaps that took two decades to close were back.

My colleagues and I at NWEA, an education assessment and research company, recently released examining how the pandemic impacted achievement for boys and girls in math and science. We looked at scores from three large national assessments (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the National Assessment of Educational Progress and NWEA’s MAP Growth). The data highlighted two main trends:

•  The achievement gap in math and science reemerged during the pandemic, once again favoring boys. However, an achievement gap did not resurface in reading, where girls continue to outperform boys.
• Looking at high-achieving students, boys showed significantly higher scores across assessments than girls in both math and science. For low-achieving students, however, boys’ scores were lower than girls’.

These trends are not limited to the U.S. Other English-speaking countries show similar gaps, pointing to a broader issue. A similar trend is seen more locally.  On the NAEP assessments, which provide California-specific data for eighth grade math, the results mirror the nation. In  had an average math score that was not . By 2024, however, boys had an average score that was  than girls’ in math.

Our research also looked at enrollment by boys and girls in eighth grade algebra across 1,300 U.S. schools. Enrollment in this math course is often used as a predictor of future enrollment in higher-level math in high school, as well as a predictor of participation in college and career opportunities in STEM fields. In 2019, girls enrolled at higher levels than boys in eighth grade algebra (26% vs 24%). By 2022, enrollment had declined for both groups, with the drop-off for girls being slightly sharper than for boys. While the decline was experienced by both, enrollment for boys in algebra had bounced back to pre-pandemic levels by 2024.

Taken together, the results of this research signal that the effects of the pandemic were not felt evenly by boys and girls. More significantly, this data does not provide the “why” for these setbacks and the reemergence of achievement gaps. One area to spotlight is the trend of girls reporting more emotional challenges, like depression and anxiety, during and after the pandemic that may have impacted their learning. Notably, the widening gender gap emerged after students returned to in-person school, pointing to factors in the school environment as potential contributors, like the  among boys, leading teachers to pay more attention to them in class.

While many of the  in the last few years about gender differences in school have focused on the ways that boys are  than girls, our research has illustrated an overlooked area where girls could use more support. As schools continue to focus on academic recovery and approaches that drive academic outcomes for all students, it’s crucial that those efforts are measured and evaluated effectively to ensure new inequities don’t arise or old ones don’t take permanent root. We have three primary recommendations to address these gaps:

1.    Monitoring participation in STEM milestones by boys and girls, over time, and not just within a single year to gain a better view of trends. For example, eighth grade algebra enrollment in 2024 appears to be balanced by gender, but it overlooks a critical trend that boys’ enrollment has returned to pre-pandemic levels while girls’ enrollment is still below 2019 levels. Analyzing longitudinal trends within each group is key to uncovering and addressing setbacks that may be hidden by a single-point-in-time snapshot.

2.    Providing specific academic and emotional support to students. Girls reported feeling more stress, anxiety and depression than boys, and noted it as an obstacle to their learning during the pandemic. Addressing both the academic needs and emotional needs of students may be critical in closing these emerging gaps in STEM skills.

3.    Evaluating classroom dynamics and instructional practices. If shifts in behavior and teacher attention during the pandemic disproportionately benefited boys in STEM subjects, understanding these shifts may help address the re-emerged achievement gap. Targeted professional learning that promotes equitable participation and inclusive teaching practices in STEM can help ensure all students have equal opportunities to succeed.

As our schools continue to navigate this long path toward academic recovery, it’s important that those efforts don’t unintentionally grow existing inequities or create new ones. More and more evidence is emerging that the pandemic was not an equal opportunity hitter, and its disruptions affected students differently. For girls in math and science, moving forward will require renewed attention to addressing achievement gaps, targeted support and careful monitoring of progress. Reclosing STEM gaps will take time, but with the right focus, it is possible to not only recover, but to build a more equitable STEM education system that ensures both boys and girls have immense opportunities to succeed.

This was originally published on .

Their teacher engaged them in a call and response: “You can poke it!” she says. “You can?”

“Poke it!” they responded in unison before she added, “and take a little bit of dirt out!”

Down the hall, in a kindergarten classroom, kids spent the morning working on math problems before moving into a purposeful play session focused on fossils.

“I’m working on three plus three equals six … using blocks!” exclaimed one student, Gabriella, who shared that her favorite parts of the day are “snack and recess and lunch.”

Later that afternoon, she and her classmates headed to one of a number of extracurricular activities ranging from martial arts to step dance and soccer.

These students at New Bridges Elementary, a school which sits along a stretch of the Eastern Parkway in the heart of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, were participating in a partnership between New York City Public Schools and the Department of Youth and Community Development. The program, launched in 2021 in the depths of the pandemic, gives students access to free academic and enrichment programming over the course of six summer weeks — a time when schools have historically been shuttered to all students except those in need of the most concentrated, remedial academic support.

New York City is one of scores of districts across the nation who have worked to transform traditional summer school into a more inclusive, enrichment-filled yet still academically rigorous space. 

Some of these districts began this shift over a decade ago, following the release of a which put forth a case for rebuilding summer learning and highlighted the ways in which this time could be used to fight some of the academic backslide typically seen between June and September, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. 

These efforts were supercharged during the pandemic, when schools were faced with a learning loss crisis and, simultaneously, a seismic funding influx from the $189.5 billion Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, also known as ESSER.

The pandemic, “really lit a fire in everybody to say, ‘We can’t do things the same,’” said Nancy Gannon, senior advisor of Teaching and Learning for U.S. Education at , a nonprofit which built the to help districts and states rethink what can be accomplished during these down months.

“I don’t think people really dug into the potential of summer until these last couple years,” she added. “And now that they see how potent it can be. I don’t know that there’ll be any going back.”

But some districts and states are scrambling to hold onto this new vision of summer with ESSER money sunsetting, the recent freeze — then release —  of the federal dollars that keep many of these programs afloat and a greater uncertainty about the very future of the U.S. Department of Education and all its funding streams.

‘It can be a joyful place’

Kevyn Bowles, the principal of New Bridges Elementary, said he’s witnessed the transformation of summer first hand over the course of his 12 years running the school.

Historically, you were “bringing together the students who had done the most poorly over the course of the school year in eight different schools, and putting them all in a class together,” he said. “So even if you were bringing your most joyful teaching self to it, it still just was a challenging situation.”

Kids didn’t want to be there, he added, and it showed. That changed with the introduction of Summer Rising in 2021. 

“Even from that first summer, it felt more like an opportunity for students,” Bowles said, “versus something that we were forcing just a small number of kids [to do] because they had quote, unquote, failed. … We had enormous demand”

This summer, around 250 elementary school students have signed up to attend Summer Rising at Bowles’ school, and fewer than 30 of them are mandated to be there. 

Each morning, the kids gather in the auditorium at 8 a.m. for Bright Start, a five-minute morning meeting filled with songs, affirmations and high fives. 

“To me that just sets the tone,” said Bowles, “like we’re here together. We’re in this together. It can be a joyful place. It can be a fun day.”

Kids next head to a half-hour block of social-emotional learning through yoga and mindfulness, followed by three-and-a-half hours of concentrated academics, taught by licensed teachers. After lunch and recess, students have their afternoon “specials” — including soccer, martial arts, theater and dance — which wrap up by 6 p.m. each evening.

Bowles said the vast range of enrichment activities they’re uniquely able to offer students over the summer bring a lot of happiness and motivation to the school building. And while attendance in July and August remains a challenge, New Bridges Elementary has seen positive results in math and reading, especially for the youngest students: Kindergarteners through second graders who attended Summer Rising in past years either maintained their skills or grew, whereas their peers who didn’t, slid slightly backwards.

“Summer learning arguably has the greatest impact at the lowest price on the greatest number of students of any policy solutions,” Chris Smith, executive director of , told The 74. “And it’s time that we invest in it in a serious way with public funding.”

‘A blank canvas’

For summer learning to be an effective tool to combat learning loss — rather than merely functioning as child care or summer camp — school leaders need to strategically implement research-backed best practices, experts and researchers told The 74.

From 2011-16 a group of RAND researchers , free and district-led summer learning programs for low-income elementary students in five urban school districts: Boston, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Duval County, Florida and Rochester, New York.

They found it was important to pair strong teachers with rigorous academic curriculum and high-quality enrichment experiences. Other recommendations include:

• Programs should run for five to six weeks with three to four hours a day of concentrated academics, including 90 or more minutes of math and 120 or more minutes of English Language Arts.

• Small class sizes, capped at 15 students per adult

• A clear attendance policy and incentives for showing up

• Recruitment and hiring of the district’s most highly effective teachers

• Curriculum anchored in school-year standards and student needs

• Early planning led by a program director who dedicates at least half of their time to this work, beginning in January

After two consecutive summers, students who attended one of these programs for 20 or more days outperformed their peers in math and ELA and displayed stronger social-emotional competencies, the Rand researchers found.

The pandemic provided a perfect opportunity for districts across the country to implement some of these practices, both because students had a heightened need of academic and social-emotional support and because of the unprecedented sum of federal rescue funds that were poured into schools. One-fifth was allocated to with 1% specifically earmarked for summer learning.

Because the money was distributed through states — rather than districts — this also invited them into the conversation, when historically summer programming had been locally driven by schools or other organizations. And this unique moment provided fertile ground for more research, according to Allison Crean Davis, the chief research officer at , who also directed a three-part funded by the Wallace Foundation.

“Never had we seen this natural experiment where it’s like, ‘We’re going to give 1% of these large funds to states to then tee up summer learning … all across the country [and] give some of that money to districts to actually do it,’” she said. “So it just felt like it would be a real missed opportunity not to say, ‘What does this end up looking like? How do states respond?’”

She and her team found that 94% of the local education agencies they studied offered some kind of summer programming in 2021. Of those that did, all implemented academic programming, 59% were traditional “credit recovery” programs aimed at students who had failed and 57% supplemented academic programs with social-emotional learning.

RAND also expanded on its earlier during the pandemic and found that 81% of schools nationwide offered summer programs in 2023, yet districts’ largest summer programs typically enrolled less than half of eligible students and less than 1 in 5 of the largest elementary programs met the minimum recommended hours of academic instruction. 

Despite some of these ongoing trials and errors, summer remains an exciting space for innovation and collaboration, said Julie Fitz, a researcher at the .

“Summer is just an interesting space where you have a little bit of a blank canvas, and states were getting really creative with thinking about how to design that space,” she said.

It also became an area of rare bipartisanship, she added. “It’s just been so refreshing to see people coming together around kids and putting the needs of kids and families first.”

‘Little shy about investing in summer right now’

This is the first summer since the pandemic that most states are navigating summer school without COVID relief funds — and with increased uncertainty about federal education spending more broadly.

While the hope initially was that districts and states would find ways to sustain programming after that fiscal cliff, many remain concerned that even basic “foundational funding” needed to educate students might disappear, Davis said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if people are a little shy about investing in summer right now,” she said.

This tension became especially apparent on June 30, when the Trump administration announced it would withhold almost $7 billion in previously allocated money, including $1.3 billion for the , which districts rely on to run afterschool and summer programming. The news came one day before schools were meant to receive the money.

“This type of uncertainty — where they thought they were going to have it, and then all of the sudden we’re told the day before they expected to be given it, to no longer have it — is unprecedented,” said Tara Thomas, government affairs manager at

The move disproportionately harmed smaller districts and those serving larger populations of students from low-income families, “because they didn’t have money to float these services while they wait to figure out if the federal government is going to give them the money that they were promised,” Thomas said.

Following widespread, bipartisan pushback, the Office of Management and Budget said on July 18 that the $1.3 billion for afterschool and summer programs, although filed by two dozen states after the sudden freeze alleged critical academic and extracurricular programs had already been “irreparably harmed.”

Despite these hurdles, researchers and district leaders remain excited about where summer learning is headed.

“I think it’s really encouraging and there’s a lot of vision about how summer can be an important tool in the state toolbox in terms of improving educational outcomes and other social focus areas,” said the Learning Policy Institute’s Fitz. “I think it’s really an optimistic area right now.”

Childhood vaccination rates have markedly declined across the U.S. since the start of COVID, according to new Johns Hopkins University showing 78% of more than 2,000 counties reported drops and the average immunization rate had fallen to 91% — further below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity.

While existing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data has historically shown broadly declining measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates at the state and national levels, the county-level analysis published this week in JAMA is far more granular.

It provides a “better understanding of these pockets where you have more exceptionally high risk,” said senior author Lauren Gardner, the director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

“Knowing where there are problem areas,” she added, “gives policymakers and public health professionals locations to target their limited resources to try and improve vaccination coverage and therefore minimize the potential risk of measles outbreaks.”

The country is currently experiencing a deadly measles outbreak that has infected over people across 30 states and killed two unvaccinated children. Case numbers this year have already surpassed 2024’s total and mark the second-highest number of confirmed cases in a year since the disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. Some 96% of reported infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown and 13% have resulted in hospitalization.

Gardner, who also led the data collection efforts behind , and her team collected county-level, two-dose MMR vaccine rates for kindergarteners from each state’s department of health website from 2017 to 2024, where available. Ultimately, they were able to analyze trends in 2,066 counties across 33 states and made all their data available to download.

While state level average rates may decline by a few percentage points, the researchers found 130 counties where they dropped by at least 10 percentage points, and in 15 of those counties, they plummeted more than 20.

Only four of the states studied — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — reported an increase in the median county-level vaccination rate. They are currently the only four states that exclusively allow medical — and not philosophical or religious — exemptions to mandatory vaccines for school-aged children.

Gardner said she pursued the county-level data after observing growing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. Based on her years of work in the field, she said she was “100% expecting to see [these current outbreaks].” 

If vaccination rates continue to drop “measles is likely to return to endemic levels in the US,” according to the Johns Hopkins’ report — a concern other experts see as heightened by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now heading the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. A well-known vaccine skeptic, Kennedy initially the measles spread in late February and has been in his support of the MMR vaccine.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Trump administration released the controversial “Make America Healthy Again” on May 22, which misinterpreted studies, and is suspected of being generated in part . The report, which involved , questions the safety and importance of some childhood vaccines.

“Despite the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule,” the report reads, “there has been limited scientific inquiry into the links between vaccines and chronic disease, the impacts of vaccine injury, and conflicts of interest in the development of the vaccine schedule.” 

Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, pushed back on these assertions.

The issue has been well studied, and there is no evidence of links between childhood vaccines and chronic diseases — including diabetes and autism — said Offit, who is also member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

He referenced 24 studies across seven countries and three continents involving thousands of children that show they’re at no greater risk of developing autism if they receive the MMR vaccine.

Current skepticism is not isolated to the measles vaccine: The Food and Drug Administration, which falls under HHS, recently released which no longer recommends the COVID vaccine for healthy children or pregnant women. In response, a top COVID vaccine adviser at the CDC resigned this week, according to reporting from  

And across the country, numerous states have introduced legislation to loosen vaccine requirements for school-aged children, opening the door for more parents to opt their kids out.

“I think this is only going to get worse,” Offit said. “I think vaccines are under attack. You have a secretary of Health and Human Services who will do everything he can during the years that he is in that position to make vaccines less available, less affordable and more feared. … So I think this is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America.”

Correction: In a previous version of this story, we incorrectly characterized Dr. Paul Offit’s status on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is a former voting member of the CDC’s advisory committee and a current member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.

A new analysis of data from three states — North Carolina, Texas and Virginia — shows that prior to COVID, 17% of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year. By 2023, long after schools had to cope with new variants and hybrid schedules, that figure hit 37%.

“Absences are both more common for everybody, but they are also more extreme,” said Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University.

Additional new research shows that while post-pandemic chronic absenteeism lingers across the board, rates were substantially higher for low-income students. In North Carolina, for example, the chronic absenteeism rate for students in poverty before the pandemic was 9.2 percentage points higher than for non-poor students. By 2023, the gap increased to 14.6 percentage points.

“The income gap really was the main driver that showed up over and over again,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education researcher at the University of Southern California. But it’s hard for schools to make a dent in the problem, he said, if they aren’t investigating the reasons for chronic absenteeism. “There’s a big difference between the kid [who] has an illness and is chronically sick versus the kid [who] is super disengaged.”

Kirksey and Polikoff were among several researchers who Friday at an American Enterprise Institute event focused on facing what Kirksey called the “under-the-hood dynamics” of chronic absenteeism in the post-COVID era. Since 2022, when the national average peaked at 28%, the rate has dropped to 23% — still much higher than the pre-COVID level of about 15%, according to the conservative think tank’s . 

“I have a question that keeps me up at night. That question is ‘What’s the new normal going to be?’ ” said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at AEI. “We see this rising tide, but I think that it’s incumbent on us to say that chronic absenteeism still affects disadvantaged students more.”

The research project began in September with the goal of offering guidance to districts in time for students’ return to school this fall. The researchers stressed that those most likely to be chronically absent this school year — low-income, highly mobile and homeless students — are the same ones who will frequently miss school next year.

“Absenteeism should seldom come as a surprise,” said Sam Hollon, an education data analyst at AEI. “It’s hard to justify delaying interventions until absences have accumulated.” 

Teacher absenteeism

One new finding revealed Friday contradicts a theory that gained traction following the pandemic — that students were more likely to be absent if their teachers were also out. As with students, teacher absenteeism increased during the pandemic and hasn’t returned to pre-COVID levels. 

The relationship between teacher absences and student absences, however, is “pretty negligible,” said Arya Ansari, an associate professor of human development and family science at The Ohio State University. 

“These absences among teachers don’t actually contribute to the post-COVID bump that we’ve seen in student absences,” he said. “Targeting teacher absences isn’t going to move the needle.”

The researchers discussed how even some well-intentioned responses to the COVID emergency have allowed chronic absenteeism to persist. States, Malkus said, made it easier to graduate despite frequent absences and missing school doesn’t necessarily prevent students from turning in their work.

“In my day, you had to get a packet and do the work at home” if you were absent, Polikoff said. In interviews with 40 families after the pandemic, 39 said it was easy to make up work because of Google Classroom and other online platforms. “How many said, ‘Let’s make it harder’? Zero.”

In another presentation, Ethan Hutt, an associate education professor at the University of North Carolina, estimated that chronic absenteeism accounts for about 7.5% of overall pandemic learning loss and about 9.2% for Black and low-income students — a “nontrivial, but modest” impact. 

He stressed that missing school also affects student engagement and relationships with teachers. While technology has made it easier for students to keep up, “there may be other harms that we want to think about and grapple with,” he said. 

From one to 49

The new research comes as states are mounting new efforts to more closely track chronic absenteeism data and share it with the public. In 2010, only one state — Maryland — published absenteeism data on its state education agency website. Now, 49 states — all but New Hampshire — report rates on an annual, monthly or even daily basis, according to a released Tuesday by Attendance Works, an advocacy and research organization. 

The systems allow educators and the public to more quickly identify which students are most affected and when spikes occur. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington D.C. post rates even before the end of the school year. Rhode Island offers real-time data, while Connecticut publishes monthly reports.

The New Hampshire Department of Education doesn’t monitor chronic absenteeism, but has a statewide 92.7% attendance rate, a spokesperson said. 

The report highlights states that have taken action to reduce chronic absenteeism. In Virginia, bus drivers ensure their routes include students who might be more likely to struggle with transportation. With state funds, , west of Washington, D.C., opened a center for students on short-term suspension to minimize the when a student is removed from the classroom. 

Overall chronic absenteeism in the state declined from 19.3% in 2022-23 to 15.7% in 2023-24. To Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, such improvement proves “we can still get things done in our country and in education, despite all of the culture wars and binary thinking.”

‘Priced out’

Some district and school leaders have looked to their peers for ideas on how to get kids back in school. After participating in a six-month program with 16 other districts across the country organized by the nonprofit Digital Promise, Mark Brenneman, an elementary principal in New York’s Hudson City Schools, started interviewing families about their challenges. 

He learned that Hispanic parents often keep their children home when it rains because they’re worried they’re going to catch a cold. Several had transportation challenges. His school, Smith Elementary, even contributed to the problem, he said, by holding concerts, award ceremonies or other family events in the morning. Parents would come to celebrate their children’s accomplishments, then take them out for lunch and not return.

Hudson, about 40 miles south of Albany, has undergone significant change since the pandemic, added Superintendent Juliette Pennyman. Some families leaving New York City have settled in Hudson, driving up the cost of housing. 

“Our families are being priced out of the community,” she said. “Housing insecurity was … affecting families’ and students’ ability to focus on school.”

As a result of the intense focus on the issue, Smith, which had a 29% chronic absenteeism rate last year, has seen an about a 15% increase in the number of students with good attendance. 

“It’s not like we’re down to like 10% chronically absent,” Brenneman said. “But we’ve hammered away.” 

In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and minimally contagious when they caught it. He envisioned a magazine piece arguing for reopening schools, and began pitching it to major outlets. 

No one was interested.

Eventually, WIRED agreed to run it, and as he reported it, the evidence only seemed to build. In New York City, out of more than 14,000 deaths at the time were reported in people under 18. He remembers thinking: “This is a major, major story.” As the magazine took its time with edits, he was in a panic, “waiting to get scooped” by other media. 

It never happened.

He soon realized that most major outlets had little curiosity about the science — or lack of it — underlying COVID remediations. 

His piece, , appeared in mid-May and instantly went viral. But its premise — that the U.S. was following “a divergent path” on reopening — got lost in the larger debate swirling in major media. And Zweig, a former magazine fact-checker who had always entertained the notion that health authorities and journalists in legacy media took science seriously, began to wonder what he’d missed.

A year later, with his two kids still not back to school full time despite mountains of evidence that it could be done safely, his sense of who the “good guys” were had been thoroughly shaken. Social isolation, masking and hybrid schooling were taking an enormous toll on his kids and millions of others nationwide, even as most schools in Europe opened early and stayed open, often without the dogged reliance on masking and distancing that American schools employed.

“The sense that all of this suffering for them and millions of other kids was for naught consumed me,” he writes. “I could not silence the voice in my head that this was gravely stupid.”

By 2021, he was testifying as an expert witness before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on reopening schools, as well as a House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Five years after the first school closures, Zweig’s third book, An Abundance of Caution, out Tuesday, looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: “a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

He finds bad decisions everywhere, with experts basing assertions about the virulence of the virus on that themselves were based essentially on guesswork. Media outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite that children were not major carriers — and schools .

The media perseverated on the effectiveness of remedies like masking, social distancing and isolation, Zweig finds, despite that any of them made a difference. For months, they credulously transcribed experts’ predictions, often relying on the loudest, most overwrought voices, who often brought questionable credentials to the task. In one instance, an expert quoted on reopening was actually a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies.

Lawmakers dropped the ball as well, he says, prioritizing — perhaps even fetishizing — ”safety” over normalcy, even when there was little evidence for keeping schools closed beyond the few weeks in which public health experts urged Americans to “flatten the curve” of COVID cases.

Zweig has found a receptive audience for his reporting on the center-right — the book this week was excerpted in the conservative online publication — but his work has also bolstered arguments in left-of-center publications, from and to and .

Ahead of the book’s publication, Zweig spoke to The 74’s Greg Toppo, further exploring its themes of a false medical consensus amid America’s “uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment.”

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe? 

That is a very good question, which I spend 500 pages discussing [Laughs]. I’m saying that jokingly, but I’m not joking. The answer to that is long and complex. A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason. It’s not the only reason, but it is a significant reason.

You bemoan the politics surrounding the pandemic, but in one instance you quote on mitigation efforts. Early on, in March 2020, he  talked about wanting to act aggressively. DeWine invoked the example of St. Louis, which did so in the and had a death rate of just 358 per 100,000 people, while Philadelphia was slower to respond and suffered 748 deaths per 100,000. “We all want to be St Louis,” he said. Part of me wonders: What’s wrong with that? Motivating people to not be the bad example makes sense, doesn’t it? 

The example that so many politicians and so many media outlets used from the 1918 pandemic, where they often compared St. Louis to Philadelphia, was a deeply flawed misunderstanding of what the data actually showed over time. This was a misrepresentation and misunderstanding about what school closures can actually accomplish over time.

What’s the basic flaw in that approach?

A core flaw in the entire pandemic response, and in particular school closures, was the assumption that everyone was going to remain home and sequestered from each other for a lengthy period of time. While these interventions could be effective for a week or maybe two weeks or so, over time there is no way of effectively stopping the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus in a free society, and in particular a society as economically and professionally stratified as America.

From the beginning, a significant portion of people in our country continued to move about because they had to. So while the laptop class sat home, and their children were home in a comfortable room, possibly aided by tutors or maybe a pod teacher, or maybe they were in private school, a significant portion of our country were delivering food and goods and other services from warehouses and restaurants and  slaughterhouses to the wealthier Americans who sat at home on Zoom. 

This was one of the most class-based, inequality-thrust decisions in our recent history. And to make matters worse is the idea which was continually perpetuated, that if you didn’t comply, that you were immoral, that there was a tremendous amount of virtue attached to the notion of staying home. Yet a significant portion of society could never comply with that. Beyond professional obligations, there are many millions of children who live in homes that are not safe, that are not conducive to being sequestered in a room for hours upon hours and sitting in front of a screen that they were supposed to learn from.

This whole idea that closing schools was going to have any impact was just manifestly absurd from very early, and there is just an endless amount of evidence, much of which I observed myself as a parent over time: Kids are going to interact with each other no matter what, and particularly when you think about kids whose parents had to work. What happened with them? Did they stay home alone? Some did, but many of them went to a grandparent’s house, a neighbor looked after them, or they went to a daycare or other situation where they were intermixing with children from a whole variety of nearby neighborhoods and towns. What I show is that this whole hybrid model, where schools were only open two days a week for some kids, or less, with the idea that that was going to mitigate transmission, was nonsensical, and there are tons of data that show this. 

You can look at cellular phone data, and you can see the mobility of American citizens began to increase over time. What we can see is that this completely is in line with what scientists had known for many, many years: People’s ability to comply with unpleasant or difficult directives understandably wanes over time, and there was never any inkling that human beings, by and large, were going to all just imprison themselves and be hermetically sealed. Only the most motivated and financially capable people could and would actually achieve that.

It sounds like you’re saying that we were asking schools to do something that virtually no one else could do.

Even if schools were closed, the point is that children were still mixing with people, and the adults themselves were mixing as well. Lockdowns in a free society do not work over time. There’s some evidence that perhaps they could work if they are absolute and total, where every single thing is closed for a very brief period of time. But the idea that children were locked out of a school building while adults could go to restaurants and bars and casinos and offices and stores — the idea that that logically was going to have any impact — was absurd. Yet it continued for more than a year for many children.

Including yours. At a certain point in summer of 2020, it seemed as if schools might reopen in the fall. And then on July 6, President Trump tweeted, all caps, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” As you write, four days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out . They had argued “forcefully and unambiguously” for opening schools before this. How much of this disaster was, as you say, Newtonian physics in the political realm? 

The equal and opposite reaction. 

Trump is for it? I’m against it.

It’s quite stark. The example from the American Academy of Pediatrics is quite stunning. The about-face was so obvious that even NPR . But that’s just one example. Throughout the book, I show over and over how people on the left were just reactive against Trump, and even those who wanted to talk about what they thought was wrong often generally didn’t do so. 

I had doctors, many of whom were at prestigious institutions around the country, reaching out to me, talking — always off the record — about how they vehemently disagreed with what was going on in schools: Mask mandates with kids, if the particular schools were open, or quarantines, or barriers on the desks, the six feet of distancing — all of these things that we were told were critical and that there was a consensus, and that this is “what the experts say.”

All these things were a manufactured consensus. This was artificial, and unfortunately, I couldn’t talk about it that much because all of this was off the record. 

Many of these doctors and others, including former CDC officials who would reach out to me, were simply afraid of being cast out amongst their peers. But many of them also were very explicitly told by their administrators, by their bosses at their university hospital or whatever institutions they were with, that they were not allowed to say this. They were not allowed to go against the narrative of the CDC. To me, that’s a far more frightening form of censorship, that the American public was misled in part because there was a false story about a medical consensus. I had access to this information, knowing it was a false narrative, but I was constrained in what I could say. But I will say this: That sort of false narrative continued, not just from doctors who were contacting me and other health experts. 

All we had to do was look at Europe: Tens of millions of children were in school there. But by and large, the media ignored this — not just the media, but our health officials. Or they contrived a variety of reasons that were false about why those kids were in school there.

That actually leads me to my question about journalism: You seem to hold a special disdain for the coverage of the New York Times, which you feel set the tone for fearful, expert-based coverage that largely ignored evidence. What happened, and how did things go wrong so quickly there?

Well, I single out the Times only because they were particularly egregious in their misleading coverage about the pandemic in general and in particular about children in schools. It’s not exclusive, I talk about all sorts of media outlets, but there’s extra focus on the Times because arguably it is the most influential news outlet in the country, certainly amongst the elite decision makers in our culture, whether in politics or other fields. It’s very important for how policy gets made in our country. The framing that The New York Times puts on certain topics is very important. 

If you think about Israel and Palestine, people already have kind of baked-in positions on that largely, so the framing of the Times will probably just anger one group or another, depending on the story. But something like the pandemic, this was new. So people didn’t come at it with a preconceived idea. They came somewhat blank-slate, at least among the broader kind of political left who reads The New York Times. The Times is telling them, “Don’t look over there. Don’t look at what’s happening here,” and if you do look then they give you a about a school in Georgia without providing any context, or a about Israel without providing any context. 

So one of the important things that I hope readers come away with after they finish my book is an understanding about how media can be incredibly misleading without necessarily publishing errors or facts that aren’t true; that you can write something that’s fact checked, and it still can be incredibly misleading by the way the story is framed, by the information that’s left out, by who you choose to interview and quote. All those things are incredibly important regarding how people perceive reality, and you can do all of it without having any errors.

I want to ask about your kids. How are they doing five years later? I guess they’re now in eighth and 10th grade?

That’s right.

How do they see this period of their lives?

They’re like any other teenagers. It’s impossible to have specific correlates for most circumstances, to say, “Pandemic school courses now have led to X in my child.” We, of course, can look at broader data, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of focus on “learning loss” and test scores. And there are a number of studies that clearly show a direct correlation: The less time that kids were in school during the pandemic, the worse their educational outcomes and scores were. We know that it’s directly linked to that. There’s no ambiguity.  

But what I talk about in the book is that there’s so much that happens in life that you can’t quantify. If you just think about what happened to the high school football player who was relying on a scholarship in order to get into college, but the senior year season was terminated. Never happened. What happened to that kid and so many others like him? What happens to the kids who relied on their school theater program or arts programs? 

What happened to the kids who relied on teachers to report abuse at home, because teachers and educators are the No. 1 reporter of child abuse. When schools were closed, those kids had nowhere to go and no one to see what was happening. So a perverse thing happened during the pandemic: Child abuse reports actually went down. But it’s not because there was less abuse. It’s that children lost this important vehicle to actually bring what was happening behind closed doors into the light. Harm is incurred whether there’s a lingering effect or not. 

I’m glad you brought up abuse because that’s one of those things people don’t necessarily see right away.

This was known immediately. In April 2020, they already could see this. The data were already coming in. So to be very clear, health officials knew harm, great harm, was being done to many children, and they continued with the school closures nonetheless. 

A lot of “blue” parents say that COVID radicalized them. And I wonder how you’d describe what it did to you?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been radicalized, but I would say as someone who, generally, for my whole adult life, had positioned myself pretty far on the left, I have always been an independent thinker. I’m not one to go with the crowd. I’ve been independent politically. But observing the way our health authorities behaved in conjunction with legacy media, both of which are predominantly on the political left, and observing the complete disconnect from science, from following evidence, from a clear-eyed, honest view of empirical reality, was incredibly destabilizing. You can never go back from that once you observe that type of behavior. 

These were supposed to be the good guys. I’m not saying this was purposeful, necessarily, or conscious, but people’s hatred for Trump and hatred for Republicans or people on the right so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality. One of the great ironies of that era was these lawn signs, “In this house, we believe in science.” These people with the lawn signs generally had absolutely no clue what the science said. They had no clue what they were talking about.

What I’m left with after reading the book is just this kind of sick feeling about what’s going to happen the next time, in the next pandemic. I wonder if you have a sense.

It’s so hard to know. I would just close by saying that I hope my book can do a small part in trying to reveal how the views of society, and in particular, of elite society, spin. My book is essentially one giant case study, composed of a series of case studies, of how health officials and the media operated. And by reading through this narrative of these case studies, you gain a deeper understanding about how things actually work, how individuals and societies make decisions with limited information. Hopefully, people will be armed with that awareness and knowledge. So whatever the next crisis is — it doesn’t need to be a pandemic — you’ll have a more clear-eyed and educated view about what’s actually going on around you. And perhaps that will be able to ultimately change what’s going on around us.

A group of 16 Democratic attorneys general along with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Trump administration for halting access to hundreds of millions of dollars of federal pandemic relief money.

School districts had earmarked the money for tutoring struggling students, supporting homeless children, upgrading HVAC systems to improve indoor air quality, and a host of other programs to address the long-term effects of the COVID-19, the lawsuit said.

Under extensions granted by the Biden administration, schools were supposed to have until March 2026 to spend the money. But on March 28, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the U.S. Department of Education would .

“COVID is over,” a spokesperson for McMahon’s department previously said in justifying the decision. “States and school districts can no longer claim they are spending their emergency pandemic funds on ‘COVID relief’ when there are numerous documented examples of misuse.”

The day McMahon sent the letter, the department gave states a 5 p.m. deadline to use or lose the money.

, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, claims that McMahon’s sudden about-face terminating states’ access to the funds was an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of federal law, creating massive budget gaps for state education departments and local school districts. She said this will lead to serious harm to students nationwide.

New York, for instance, lost access to $134 million in funds due to McMahon’s move, according to the suit. Pennsylvania lost $185 million, according to Shapiro’s office. New Jersey had nearly $85 million in remaining funds, and Illinois had about $77 million.

The lawsuit also alleges that the federal department failed to provide a sufficient explanation when terminating access to the funds, and that the move was contrary to Congress’ intent.

The suit is seeking a preliminary and permanent court order preventing the administration from blocking access to the money so the states can continue to access the funds.

The U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond for comment.

“Cutting school systems’ access to vital resources that our students and teachers rely on is outrageous and illegal,” James said in a statement. “As a proud graduate of New York public schools, I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to fight for our schools and make sure every child has access to a quality education.”

School communities are still recovering from the pandemic, and the needs the funds aim to address haven’t disappeared. show that student performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Chronic absenteeism also remains high.

New York had earmarked the remaining funds to repair school buildings and construct additional classroom space, as well as purchase additional library books, playground equipment, and wheelchair-accessible buses.

The state also planned to use the money for programs that help homeless youth, by providing food and basic necessities, classroom supplies, and specialized training for teachers who work with these students.

In Pennsylvania, one district that had been granted $20 million to replace HVAC systems and make other building repairs was already in the middle of these projects. Another district was spending its allocation on adding electronic locks to school entrances.

Now, Shapiro said, local taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

“Congress and the federal government made a commitment to our students, and school districts across Pennsylvania started construction to make schools safer, delivered supplies to students, and invested to create more opportunity for our kids based on that commitment,” Shapiro said in a statement. “Now the Trump Administration is trying to renege on its commitments to our kids and leave Pennsylvania taxpayers holding the bag.”

The lawsuit is part of against the Trump administration’s various education directives.

Chalkbeat Philadelphia bureau chief Carly Sitrin contributed reporting.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Throw parents in jail. 

Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled — to about 30% — the year after the pandemic shuttered classrooms, and of more than 1 million Americans. Student attendance rates have improved by just a few percentage points since the federal public health emergency expired nearly two years ago, a reality that’s been dubbed “Education’s long COVID.” 

But Johnson, a Republican district attorney representing three counties , said the persistent absences have nothing to do with the pandemic and instead are because “we’re going too easy on kids” and parents have been given “an excuse not to be accountable.” 

Since Johnson was elected in 2022 on a campaign promise to enforce Oklahoma’s , he’s forced dozens of students and parents into hasty court appearances and, on several occasions, put parents behind bars in the hope it will compel their children to show up for class.

Lawmakers nationwide have taken a similar approach, including in Indiana, Iowa and West Virginia, where new laws leverage the legal system to crack down on student absences. 

“We prosecute everything from murders to rape to financial crimes, but in my view, the ones that cause the most societal harm is when people do harm to children, either child neglect, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence in homes, and then you can add truancy to the list,” Johnson said. 

“It’s not as bad, in my opinion, as beating a child, but it’s on the spectrum because you’re not putting that child in a position to be successful,” continued Johnson, who has dubbed 2025 the “

Since the pandemic, policymakers have taken on a heightened role in addressing persistent student absences, and lawmakers nationwide have proposed dozens of bills this year to combat chronic absenteeism, typically defined as missing 10% of school days in an academic year for any reason. Such efforts have fallen broadly into two camps: incentives and accountability. have taken a similar approach to Johnson’s, imposing fines and jail stints for missed seat time. Other efforts have focused on addressing the root causes of chronic absenteeism, like homelessness, and have sought to draw kids to campuses with rewards. 

In Hawaii, for example, pending legislation seeks to entice student attendance with the promise of . In Detroit, where 75% of students were chronically absent last year, the district employs both the carrot and the stick: handing out $200 gift cards to 5,000 students with perfect attendance while warning those with an extremely high number of absences that they can be held back a grade in K-8 or made to repeat classes in high school.

In Oklahoma, where parents can be jailed for up to five days and fined $50 each day their child is absent from school without an excuse, proposed legislation would let schools off the hook. 

For years, Oklahoma schools have received poor grades for chronic absenteeism, one metric the state uses to gauge school performance. If approved, would strike chronic absenteeism from the state accountability system, a change officials said is necessary because it’s the responsibility of parents — not principals and teachers — to get kids to class. 

Schools in Oklahoma “have very little control over whether or not a kid gets to school,” Rep. Ronny Johns, a Republican from Ada, told The 74. Ada, the county seat of Pontotoc County, is ground zero for Johnson’s truancy initiative, an effort that Johns, a former school principal, said should be replicated statewide. 

“We can encourage them to get their kids to school and everything,” Johns said. “But in the end, parents have got to get their kid up and get them to school.”

‘A shared responsibility’

The , collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2022-23 school year, found that some 13.4 million students — nearly 28% — missed 10% or more of the academic year. In a majority of states, chronic absenteeism has shown marginal improvements since its peak. Nationally, chronic absenteeism reached an all-time high in the 2021-22 school year of nearly 30%. Pre-pandemic, the national rate was about 15%. 

Some states like Colorado and Connecticut have seen substantial improvements in absenteeism, the data show. In others, including Oklahoma, since 2021-22. In 2023, nearly a quarter of Oklahoma students were chronically absent, according to the federal data. 

among Native American, Pacific Islander, Black and Hispanic students, as well as those who are English learners, in special education or live in low-income households. 

Hedy Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said the key to solving chronic absenteeism is to address the underlying problems that make kids absent in the first place. The California-based nonprofit focused solely on improving student attendance identifies a range of , including student disengagement, boredom and unwelcoming school climates. Caregivers’ negative education experiences are a factor, according to the nonprofit. So, too, is homelessness and community violence.

Last year, lawmakers in 28 states focused on identifying, preventing and addressing chronic absenteeism, according to analyses by the nonprofit FutureEd. This year, legislators in 20 states are weighing focused on chronic absences, including efforts to improve data collection and create early interventions. 

The Oklahoma legislation seeks to replace chronic absenteeism in its school accountability system with an alternative, such as a climate survey, a softer measure that would gauge students’, parents’ and educators’ opinions about their schools. The move would require approval from the U.S. Department of Education. 

States have been required to collect chronic absenteeism rates since the passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Since then, chronic absenteeism has been included as one of six school performance indicators on Oklahoma’s annual A-F report cards from the state education department. Currently, 38 states use chronic absenteeism to grade school performance, Chang said. 

For schools in Oklahoma, the measurement has proven to be a hurdle. In 2022-23, the state’s schools received an F grade in chronic absenteeism. Last year, the state grade ticked up slightly — to a D. 

Removing chronic absenteeism from the state accountability system, Johns, the state lawmaker, said, could allow schools across Oklahoma to receive better grades. Meanwhile, he supports initiatives to handle student absences through the courts, arguing that “parents need to have some skin in the game.” 

“Chronic absenteeism is driving our report card down,” Johns said. “Without the chronic absenteeism [measurement], our report card is not going to look as bad as it is because our public schools are doing some really good things, so why shouldn’t the report card be a reflection of that?”

Chang argued the move is misguided. She pointed to a growing body of research that has found schools can combat absenteeism if they form meaningful relationships with parents and partner with social services agencies that to attendance, like food insecurity. 

There’s little research to suggest that fines and other forms of punishment improve attendance. Even as some states ramp up truancy rules, others have scaled them back as studies report that punitive measures can backfire. In South Carolina schools, for example, students placed on probation for truancy wound up with even worse school attendance than they had before the courts got involved, by the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center. 

In , the Oklahoma State Department of Education highlighted school districts that have made “impressive strides in reducing” chronic absenteeism and that “offer valuable lessons on how schools can re-engage students.” Among them is a 24% drop in absenteeism at Dahlonegah Public Schools, which hired a school-based police officer to visit the homes of students who failed to attend school. The district also credited improvements to “a welcoming and engaging school environment.” 

The state education department didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

“Families have to be involved and they have to be partners and they have to take responsibility for getting kids to school, but it’s not solely about what families do or don’t do,” Chang said. “I think it’s a mistake to assume it’s only one group’s responsibility. This is a shared responsibility.”

‘Broken families, no economic opportunity, no education’

Johnson, the district attorney, said his office has stepped up to address a problem that state education leaders have failed to solve. He took particular aim at the state’s high-profile education secretary, Ryan Walters, who has become an outspoken champion of conservative education causes. 

Yet, as far as chronic absenteeism goes, Johnson said the state schools chief “has no interest in talking about” the topic except “when he could get a soundbite on Fox News.” The state education department did not respond to Johnson’s comments.

The 51-year-old father of four also pinned persistent chronic absenteeism on parents — those living in poverty, in particular. Children in his district who most often miss school, he said, are “kind of feral.” 

“My friends generally don’t have children that are in crisis because, just economically speaking, they’re on the higher end of the spectrum,” Johnson told The 74. 

Johnson said there are about 7,500 K-12 children in the counties that make up his district and estimated that at least 30% contend with “economic poverty, multi-generational drug abuse, domestic abuse in the home, broken families, no economic opportunity, no education.”

“If you live in a school district where there is a real high poverty level and a real high incarceration rate, then a lot of times you’re going to get kids that have been raised in those environments,” Johnson said. “So you’re going to have a lot more challenges with that group than you would if every person had a four-wheel drive vehicle and in their driveway and everybody has a good industrial job and is making a good living and providing for their families.”

Johnson said schools should play a role in encouraging students to go to school, but when that doesn’t work, threats of jail are needed. In Pontotoc County, just two truancy charges were filed against parents in 2023, according to data provided to The 74 by Johnson’s office. That number jumped to 20 last year and, so far this year, there have already been eight. 

David Blatt, the director of research and strategic impact at the nonprofit Oklahoma Appleseed, questioned the accuracy of the data and said it could be an undercount. He said he attended a truancy court case in Ada last year where as many as 30 parents and students made appearances before a judge that lasted just 60 to 90 seconds each. 

In , Blatt found that truancy laws were enforced inconsistently across the state and urged policymakers to adopt interventions and supports for families to address chronic absenteeism rather than criminalize them. Blatt backs the legislation to remove chronic absenteeism as a school accountability measure, acknowledging that certain attendance barriers are outside of educators’ direct control. But he said Johnson’s characterization of the problem is “rather harsh and one-sided.” 

Rather than being apathetic toward their children’s education, he said many parents struggle with work responsibilities and transportation while children wrestle with in-school factors that can discourage attendance, such as persistent bullying. 

“There may be cases where being called before a judge will help convince them of the seriousness of things, but for other cases, it’s just going to compound their problems,” Blatt said. “Adding court appearances and fees and fines doesn’t solve their problems. It just adds to them.” 

Yet for Johnson, the issue stems from a lack of repercussions. By enforcing truancy cases, he said schools have “a little bit of a weapon” against parents whose children are missing school and can threaten them with jail time. Most of the time, he said, threats alone improve student attendance and in many cases the charges wind up getting dismissed.

In fewer than a dozen instances, he said, his truancy crackdown has led to parents serving time behind bars. 

“Generally, they’ll go in for about four hours,” Johnson said. “We’ll give them the taste of it.” 

As , the department told 41 states and the District of Columbia they had another year to spend down the rest of the $122 billion for schools awarded in the 2021 American Rescue Plan. Among the biggest potential losers from McMahon’s move are Texas and Pennsylvania, which have well over $200 million in unspent funds, according to a department spreadsheet shared by a source close to the department. The source asked not to be named to protect former staff members from retaliation. Several more states, including Ohio, New York and Tennessee, have over $100 million left over.

In a letter to state chiefs, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called it “unreasonable” for them to rely on those earlier decisions. She said she might reconsider if states can make a stronger case for how their projects continue to address COVID’s impact.

“We’ve seen a lot of receipts and reimbursement requests coming in that just aren’t aligned with what students need in this moment,” a senior department official told The 74. The official asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the department’s decision. The administration wants to “make sure that funds are still being spent to fix student learning loss.”

The official cited a $1 million window replacement and an order of “glow balls” as examples, but declined to name the district that ordered the balls and offered no additional information on their price or how schools planned to use them. 

The department, however, will pay any invoices that were submitted before Friday at 5 p.m. Most of those are tied to extensions from the second COVID relief package, which included $58 billion in education spending, the official said. The deadline to spend those funds was Monday. 

In total, Congress approved about $200 billion in school relief funds. While states and districts spent the vast majority — — by the end of January, they asked for more time to deal with supply chain delays, labor shortages and the fact that student performance has largely not recovered from the pandemic. McMahon’s action, some experts say, should not have come as a complete shock given by many Republicans that districts failed to make the most of the unprecedented infusion of money. 

But the action leaves states and districts in the lurch, having spent millions of dollars of their own funds and signed contracts with vendors tied to the promise of reimbursement from the education department. 

Some leaders are pleading with McMahon to reconsider.

“This abrupt change in course will slow efforts and, in many cases, grind them to a halt,” Maryland state Superintendent Carey Wright said in a statement. Her state risks losing over $400 million in funding for K-12 schools. The funds, she said, are paying for science of reading materials, teacher training and a variety of facility upgrades. “State and local budgets will be impacted. Maryland students deserve for the federal government to uphold its agreements.” 

McMahon said the extensions offered by both the Biden and Trump administrations were merely “a matter of administrative grace,” and that the department has the authority to hold states to the original spending deadline in the law — Jan. 28. But as with other decisions the department has made to cut off funding Congress already approved, Friday’s announcement is likely to spark legal challenges.

“We are exploring all legal options at this time given the severity of this action,” Joshua Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, told reporters Monday. The funding, he said, is supporting ongoing tutoring programs. “That tutor will probably not be there next week.”

‘Unpaid invoices’

Other states say the department’s decision will have an immediate impact on students. Illinois, for example, is using its remaining relief funds on transportation to school for homeless students, afterschool tutoring and technology for students with disabilities, said Jackie Matthews, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education. 

Last week, the state was still waiting on a $720,000 reimbursement from the department and had yet to submit another $8 million in expenses. 

“The unpaid invoices continue to stack up,” she said.

In Tennessee, education officials received an extension for nearly $131 million for expenditures like tutoring, nursing services and computers, according to state education department spokesman Brian Blackley. Staff members, he said, were preparing to submit a reimbursement request. 

The American Rescue Plan — the third and largest round of funding — also included $800 million earmarked for homeless students. Extensions on those funds are paying for summer learning programs, mental health services and “” who help homeless families with housing, food and transportation needs, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless students. 

An released just before former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona left office showed the program was effective at helping districts identify homeless students and reduce chronic absenteeism.

Canceling the extension, Duffield said, “pulls the rug out from underneath school district efforts to stabilize and support homeless children and youth.”

David DeSchryver, senior vice president at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, said states should not have been caught off guard by the department’s latest move, but emphasized that the “door is still open” for further extensions. 

“This is another invitation for state and local leaders to tell better stories about the impact of federal funding on their schools and communities,” he said. 

‘The people’s bank account’

Districts began asking the department for extensions back in 2022 when supply chain delays and escalating construction costs prohibited them from finishing projects on time.

To get reimbursed, the department required to submit funding requests describing how the expenditures related to the pandemic. The department didn’t ask for purchase orders or contracts, but told states to keep those on hand if needed later. 

The department tightened the process in February, states to submit detailed receipts for every purchase in order to get reimbursed. Then on March 11, McMahon fired all 16 staff members in the office responsible for processing payments.

By that point, state education leaders had grown impatient. On March 15, a Pennsylvania official emailed the department, saying “I’m reaching out again to find out the status of these approvals,” according to a copy of the message shared with The 74.

“It makes me incredibly angry,” said Laura Jimenez, a Biden administration appointee who led the relief payment office until January. “We very carefully administered $200 billion, and they’re completely destroying that with the last couple of billion.”

In a statement Friday, department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said it was “past time for the money to be returned to the people’s bank account” and referred to “numerous documented examples of misuse” of relief funds. She declined to offer examples.

The GOP has consistently criticized how districts used the money, focusing on expenditures that appeared removed from helping students recover lost learning, like . They argue that sharp declines in achievement and spending on what they dismiss as like LGBTQ-inclusive efforts and social-emotional learning offer evidence of misspent funds. 

Georgetown University school finance expert pointed to “eyebrow-raising spending decisions,” like contracts to family members, in a teachers lounge in Montana and six-figure salaries for district leaders in Stockton, California. 

But compared to other COVID aid, like the Paycheck Protection Program — which from theft — there’s been little evidence of actual fraud in school relief funds, Roza said. The department took steps to prevent it. In 2023, the found that the agency had taken “significant actions” to improve monitoring of the funds. 

Even so, researchers largely agree that despite many bright spots, districts missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prioritize academic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID emergency. Tutoring is one example. While most districts offered it — and still are — they didn’t always use methods backed by research, experts say.

Some districts initially demonstrated a lack of urgency and were slow to spend the money, according to Roza created to follow relief funds. Then they had to pick up the pace as deadlines approached. Many went on a hiring spree, quickly adding classroom aides, counselors and other support staff, but showed that those positions weren’t always targeted to schools that needed them most.

“You don’t want to force school systems to spend money more quickly than they are wanting to,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

shows that while the money contributed to significant recovery in math, students continue to lose ground in reading. But as a one-time school board member, he sympathizes with districts that pushed to spread funds out as long as possible. 

“That rush to get a lot of money out the door,” he said, “may have led to some of it not being spent very well.”

Rachel Hodge worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and was earning an online degree in social work when schools shut their doors due to COVID. Spending hours in front of a laptop with a 5-year-old just didn’t fit into the picture.

But in the fall of 2020, her daughter Vanessa was set to start kindergarten at KIPP Upper Roseville Academy in Newark, New Jersey. With Hodge working and school still remote, Vanessa spent her days with a babysitter, who cared for multiple kids and struggled to manage the technology for virtual learning.

By November, Vanessa was one of 24 kindergartners in Newark’s KIPP charter network listed as missing from remote school.

That’s when KIPP staff created the , a condensed school day that accommodated parents’ upended schedules. The program, which ran weeknights from 5:30 to 8 p.m, remained in place until the end of the school year.

“It was really a sad and scary time,” Hodge said. “But I was like, ‘The kid’s got to learn.’ ”

As Hodge worked on her own assignments from Rutgers University, kindergarten teacher Meredith Eger led Vanessa and classmates in songs and games, and through the reading and math they’d missed since August. 

“It was fun and it was kind of weird,” Vanessa, now 9, recalls. “When class was over, I didn’t have to pack up, because all my stuff was at home.”

The program is a rare example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school — a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil. 

But nationally, many students who missed out on a normal kindergarten are still feeling the lingering effects of that lost year. released this month documented how the pandemic’s youngest learners experienced significant declines in general knowledge, cognitive development, and language and social skills compared with their peers before COVID. Academically, these students are still performing below pre-pandemic math and reading levels. 

Five years later, Vanessa is one of 11 night-school kindergartners who still attends KIPP Newark schools. She “writes up a storm,” Eger said, and often draws during lunch. Others prefer math. Parents notice their kids sometimes keep to themselves at home — a preference they blame on a shortage of playtime with peers during lockdowns. The educators who ran the program, which served students up to third grade, enjoy a special bond with the kids they nurtured through that trying period, grabbing hugs in the hallway or cafeteria when they can. 

“They were falling drastically behind,” said Rebecca Fletcher, the charter network’s director of school operations. “It was a bright spot in such a dark time.”

‘They weren’t coming to school’

Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University who tracked in kindergarten enrollment during school closures, called KIPP’s night school “a creative way to meet the needs of parents during the crisis and one that wasn’t common in traditional public schools.” Such flexibility may have also kept families from pursuing options, like pods or private schools that were in-person, he said. 

KIPP leaders didn’t compare the performance of the evening kindergartners to students who logged in during the day, making it difficult to measure student outcomes. But the program was born of necessity, Fletcher said: The abbreviated school day was better than no kindergarten at all. 

“They weren’t coming to school,” she said. “It was about meeting families where they were.” 

Parents turned to night kindergarten for a variety of reasons.

Nateesha St. Claire had just had her third child and couldn’t juggle an infant daughter and online school for Omari, her kindergartner.

“At night, there were really no distractions,” she said. The baby was asleep. But it was still a struggle to keep Omari focused on his teacher. If St. Claire didn’t sit close, he’d walk away from the screen. He frequently asked why he couldn’t go to school.

Now in fourth grade, Omari is “thriving” in math, growing in reading and getting help in speech class to pronounce words more clearly, his mother said.

‘A labor of love’ 

One advantage of the evening sessions were smaller classes, which allowed staff to identify students who had learning delays or qualified for special education services. Such needs might have gone undetected in a larger online group, said Kaneshia Clifford, who was principal of the program. 

Two children were on the autism spectrum and others, she said, were nonverbal or “mildly verbal.” She recruited special education teachers to the team who broke lessons down into smaller segments and organized separate Zoom groups for more targeted support. But keeping the kids’ attention while trying to assess their skills proved daunting. Teacher Adrienne Rodriguez Liriano rewarded students who focused on lessons by putting her dog Harlem on her lap in front of the camera. 

“Teachers had to keep a lot of things on their brain,” said Clifford, who had her own kindergartner at home at the time. “They’re looking at screens, asking kids to hold up white boards. They’re trying to monitor engagement in a virtual space, while also collecting data.”

And that was after a full school day of teaching online and sometimes delivering laptops and hotspots to students’ homes. Fletcher described the schedule as “grueling,” but also “a labor of love and devotion.” 

Because of the late hour, some students showed up on Zoom with wet hair and wearing pajamas. Others ate dinner during class. Some nodded off.

Beatriz Warren, who worked during the day as a home health aide in New York City, welcomed the evening option, which allowed her to attend to her son Josiah.

“It’s a mom thing, I guess,” she said. 

Ear infections and surgeries caused Josiah’s learning to be delayed. He received therapy at home before the pandemic, but as kindergarten approached, Warren worried about whether to put him in a general or special education class. Night kindergarten offered a welcome mix of individualized support and as-close-to-normal a classroom experience as possible. 

“He bonded with the kids and the teachers,” she said. And when schools reopened, Warren enrolled him in KIPP Upper Roseville Academy, where Liriano, his teacher, worked — even though it was a half hour away. Liriano now teaches outside of the KIPP network, but still Facetimes with Josiah and his mom.

“He asks about my daughter,” Liriano said. “We became invested in each other’s lives because of the environment we set for them.”

‘He lost a year’

With their children nearing the end of elementary school, parents continue to see the ripple effects of a year without in-person learning. 

Josiah has overcome most learning delays and “does not stop talking,” his mother said. But he often spends time alone rather than playing with friends or toys. And Hodge described Vanessa as a “hermit” who often retreats to her room.

“The kids were so young, they were conditioned to be inside because of COVID,” Hodge said. “I feel like a lot of the kids still are behind socially … because they couldn’t have normal interactions.” 

Aminah Cooley’s grandson Ayden, also part of the evening kindergarten program, didn’t hold a pencil correctly until nearly second grade, she said.

“They were looking at the screen. A lot of times, they weren’t using a pencil,” she said. Now a fourth grader, Ayden loves math and enjoys the popular Dog Man series of graphic novels by Dav Pilkey. But academically, he’s not where he should be.

“He’s behind,” Cooley said. “He lost a year.”

In the fall of 2020, Ayden often missed out on daytime virtual school. His mother was looking for work, internet access was spotty and the “dynamics of the household,” Cooley said, weren’t conducive to keeping a 5-year-old in front of the computer.

Cooley shopped on Facebook Marketplace for a table and chair set so he could do his work and called his house every evening to make sure he logged into class. 

“I knew I had to step in,” she said. “He’s in the fourth grade, and I’m still stepping in.”

When KIPP opened an optional hybrid program in March 2021, Ayden was there.

“He recognized me, and he was like ‘You came to my house!’ ” Fletcher said. “To this day, I’ll see him in the hallway, and he’ll just give me a hug.”

In March 2020, resilience, innovation and adaptability became urgent priorities, backed by billions in federal funding. It was a Sputnik moment for American education.

We blew it.

We failed to take advantage of the moment. Instead of embracing lasting change, most school systems rushed back to “normal” — as if normal had ever been good enough.

The results are horrifying. Student achievement is in free fall. Fewer than one-third of students scored proficient in reading and math, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. These declines predated the pandemic but were exacerbated by prolonged school closures.

Given these realities, can policymakers still pretend the traditional education model works? A system designed over a century ago to train students for farm and factory labor is woefully inadequate for today’s needs. It cannot deliver the personalized learning students require in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

This outdated system relies on one-size-fits-all solutions while assuming teachers can somehow provide differentiated support for every student. It rests on an increasingly fragile social contract: that students will attend school daily, that marginalized families will trust and wait for better service,and that schools are the sole places for learning. The pandemic shattered these assumptions.

The U.S. must rethink education. On this, the fifth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, the Center on Reinventing Public Education has launched , a forum for exploring bold, new ideas. Phoenix Rising looks back on the root causes of the disastrous pandemic response and articulates a vision for a more nimble, personalized, joyful and evidence-based public education system. Five years after the pandemic began, we reflect on the failures and propose a path forward.

Our research identifies key failures in the pandemic response and recovery:

• Schools lacked incentives, autonomy and capacity to deliver the personalized instruction needed to accelerate learning.
  
• States and the federal government provided little leadership, leaving districts to fend for themselves.
  
• Politics, not science, dictated too many decisions.
  
• Federal aid was distributed without clear expectations or accountability, offering only temporary relief.

The consequences are clear: declining test scores, wildly varied student needs within classrooms, disruptive behavior, chronic absenteeism and increasing mental health challenges for both students and teachers. Parents remain unaware of the full extent of learning loss, and public trust in education is eroding.

Rather than blame educators or school districts, we at CRPE diagnose a deeper problem: The education delivery system is fundamentally overmatched by its challenges. It cannot deliver the outcomes today’s students need.

We propose a future-ready system that prioritizes:

• Providing flexible, personalized learning pathways: Schools should act as portfolio managers, offering students personalized learning options rather than delivering all the instruction and support themselves. Core academics would remain in assigned schools, but students could use public dollars for apprenticeships, enrichment programs, tutoring and mental health support.
  
• Breaking down barriers in schools: Schools must dismantle rigid structures that limit student potential. Advanced coursework should be more accessible. Universal design for learning and individualized pathways to college and careers should be the norm, not the exception.
  
• Preparing students for the future: Success after high school requires more than career pathways, internships or college applications. Schools must emphasize durable skills like critical thinking, communication and leadership. By high school, students should be immersed in career exploration and have universal access to early college.
  
• Rethinking teacher roles and instruction: New schooling models should encourage team-based teaching. Evidence-based instructional practices must become standard. Research-based methods for reading, writing, math and behavior regulation should be integrated into teacher preparation and school support structures.

Forty years ago, CRPE advocated for a portfolio system of governance, where school boards diversified their offerings — traditional public schools, magnets and charters — while focusing on core services like funding and accountability.

Managing personalized pathways requires going further. It demands not just new governance structures, but also transformed instruction and student support.

States and localities must unlock funding, teacher assignments and student intervention strategies to enable innovative approaches. They should empower new governing bodies, whether independent boards, mayors or state-appointed leaders, to integrate ideas from outside the traditional district framework.

This transformation required bold action. Simply calling for more patience, more money and less regulation is not enough. Schools need sustained state leadership. With the federal government pulling back from education oversight, states must step up. Empty declarations of emergency won’t suffice. Top-down mandates won’t work.

Students can and will learn if given the chance — but only if educators rethink how they learn. That means transforming classroom instruction, teacher roles, technology use and more. States must reallocate federal funding flexibly, revamp laws to incentivize innovation and create new opportunities for experimentation beyond the traditional system.

Above all, the next wave of education reform must look forward, not backward. American schools cannot afford to cling to outdated structures out of a misguided allegiance to the past.

Policymakers must empower schools to embrace new ideas, act on evidence and be bolder in pursuing better outcomes.

Students’ futures — and the country’s economic and social prosperity — depend on it.

As some child care programs kept their doors open, others  to . With parents pulling children out of early learning programs because of health concerns, financial constraints and other pressures, many providers suffered tuition losses and low enrollment, while struggling with the . By March 2021, nearly 16,000 child care programs had shuttered, according to a report from Child Care Aware of America, which was based on data from 37 states. Some experts  that the number was closer to  if all states were accounted for. Much of the . Additionally, without care for their children, many mothers left their jobs — a phenomenon some economists refer to as a “shecession.”

The pandemic temporarily devastated the field, but five years later, a number of these effects seem to . There are now slightly more  than before the pandemic, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Mothers with young children have in record numbers. What has endured is a sense among the public and lawmakers that affordable, accessible child care is essential to a healthy economy. 

But experts say that such good-on-paper developments can cloud a more nuanced story. To better understand the ways in which COVID-19 radically altered child care and early learning in the U.S., I interviewed five experts about what they consider key to the legacy of the pandemic on the field. Here’s what they shared, edited and organized for length and clarity.  

Julie Kashen

Julie Kashen is a longtime child care advocate and the director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, where she conducts research on families, caregiving, economic mobility and women’s labor participation.

The pandemic showed elected officials how much the public cares about child care.

The pandemic shone a spotlight on a challenge that many of us knew had been there all along. For so long, people had bought into [a] false argument that child care and early learning are an individual problem for each family to solve on their own. Seeing the impact of school and child care closings on parents and the workforce around the whole country, and at the same time [changed that]. 

CEOs and employers were finally understanding the [child care] challenges parents face. There was increased media attention on the issue because it was so prevalent, and also more reporters had firsthand experience with it. So as members of Congress got ready to put money into the airline industry, the restaurant industry and the retail industry — sectors that Congress has long been comfortable bailing out — we were able to make the case that child care is a sector that’s impacted, and that also impacts all those other sectors, and therefore needs investment.  

It quickly became clear that this was not being treated as a partisan issue. Leaders on both sides began stepping up to say, “child care needs to be part of our pandemic relief package,” and that led to significant investments. 

Now more elected officials are eager to be child care champions. They understand that they need to have a position and perspective on child care, that leading on child care is a popular thing to do. 

Mary Cheng

Mary Cheng is the director of childhood development services at the Chinese-American Planning Council, which has several early childhood centers and after school programs serving low-income families in New York City.

We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span and families depend on us even more than before.

Providers feel exhausted by everything that’s been happening. I feel like they haven’t had a full break since COVID hit. 

There has been a definite drop in enrollment in our programs due to the pandemic, but [we now serve] a higher number of [children with] special needs. In our classrooms, like 50% [of the children] need services such as early intervention or speech and occupational therapy. 

I think parents were scared to bring them out for services [during the pandemic]. But it also has to do with the way that kids were being occupied at home. If parents were working remotely, they weren’t paying attention to children the same way. They were giving them screens to keep them quiet. Today, a lot of the children want that instant gratification. We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span.

We’re also finding it harder to get parents to the table to work with us. When people are cornered and feel like they have no choices, and no connection, [the way they did during the pandemic], they close up. A lot of families are still not willing to gather together the same way as before, so there isn’t that same family support or peer system that they need. A lot of families don’t feel like there are systems in place to really support them. They want us to do it all.

Chris Herbst

Chris Herbst is a professor at Arizona State University focused on the economics of child care and early childhood education.

The child care workforce is like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.

Prior to COVID-19 not a lot of child care research was focused on the workforce. Now, a lot is very much focused on the workforce. Pretty much every [recent] paper I’ve written has focused in some way on , documenting its , or how public policies — whether it’s the  or immigration enforcement — have affected it. 

The child care workforce is a bit like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market. When there are shocks to the larger labor market — like if lots of  — that has obvious implications for the child care sector. 

The shocking piece of news coming out of the pandemic that keeps me coming back to the workforce is how hard it has been for child care providers to hire and keep teachers, never mind highly qualified teachers. In the wake of the pandemic, the pay in the low wage labor market really started to increase, but child care providers couldn’t keep up, so it made hiring and retaining highly qualified staff even more difficult, and you continue to hear that to this very day. 

Erica Phillips

Erica Phillips is the executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, a non-profit dedicated to promoting high quality child care by strengthening the profession of family child care. 

The pandemic showed the world how important family child care is.

Before the pandemic, many home-based providers felt invisible and not supported. The pandemic gave a window into how important they are. Family child care providers were lauded as heroes for staying open when many child care centers closed, and a lot of parents were interested in their small size.

Some advocates leveraged that spotlight to talk about the systemic changes needed to support home-based child care. [When COVID funding became available to stabilize the child care sector,] a lot of family child care programs entered the public funding system for the first time. More began engaging with their state child care registries to access technical assistance or grants. In several states, family child care providers  and were able to collectively bargain, resulting in  or  or . 

We continue to see a significant hunger and momentum for ensuring that our sector is respected and supported. But as COVID funding has dried up, many family child care providers are beginning to feel forgotten. There are states that have invested in their early education systems who have been inclusive of family child care. And then there are states where the providers feel like they are trying to shut down family child care.  

The sentiment we hear from family child care is, “We are essential for a lifetime, not just for a pandemic.”  

Steven Barnett

Steven Barnett is founder and senior co-director of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which publishes an annual report tracking preschool policies, funding and enrollment in the U.S.

Because of the pandemic, we began collecting desperately needed data that our country had not been monitoring before.

During the pandemic, kids weren’t in classrooms so studies in classrooms were completely disrupted. A lot of data collection was also delayed. On the flip side,  of a representative sample of 1,000 families of 3-5 year olds on their preschool learning activities, including home learning activities. We wanted to see the impacts of this moment on kids’ learning activities, because a bunch of them were not going to preschool, they were getting this remote stuff — and who knows how well that was working. We started in the spring of the pandemic and we’ve been doing it every year since.  

Our data show that parents read less to their kids during the pandemic. It was like, “I’ve had that kid all day while I’m working at home, and we’re both too beat to do this.” 

Eventually, the reading bounced back up, but it never came back to where it was. Even in the spring of 2020, before people had really been wrung out by the pandemic, the . 

We [also] found that children’s social emotional development tanked during the pandemic. [Some] behavior problems and mental health issues seem to have receded, but the prosocial — how well do you get along with other kids part — hasn’t come back to where it was before. 

. That’s a problem. If kids are outdoors less, and on screens more, then wouldn’t we think they would have fewer experiences playing with other kids? These aren’t things we had been monitoring nationally, and we know they have consequences for kids’ learning and development. We plan to continue this work. 

Perhaps you already knew that?

In a series of posts in 2020 and 2021, I wrote about the research on past educational disruptions and predicted what they might mean for children going through COVID-19.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the pandemic. What have we learned since then? Here’s my analysis of what I got right and what I got wrong:

Prediction No. 1: Lost learning time will translate into lost learning.

As I wrote in 2021, “ and sometimes even after a disruption in schooling, researchers are able to detect noticeable differences in student outcomes.”

COVID’s effects were so large that they showed up immediately. And they were worse for students who missed more school. For example, a recent in Nature concluded that, “countries with the shortest closures experienced relatively small losses” and “countries with the longest closures, experienced losses of … 9 to 12 months of learning.” Here in the States, a team of researchers led by University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber that remote instruction was the “primary driver of widening achievement gaps.”

Predictions No. 2 and 3: The losses are likely to be large. Their full extent may not show up immediately, but small losses can grow over time.

In 2020 and 2021, I was looking at localized events like an earthquake in Pakistan or teacher strikes in Argentina. Researchers found noticeable negative effects from these events, but there was no modern precedent for the scale and length of the COVID-related disruptions.

Here in the States, the average student by the equivalent of half a grade level in math and one-third of a grade level in reading. Today, with federal COVID funding ending, student performance is still far below where it was.

Prediction No. 4: Learning losses are likely to be larger in younger children.

Based on prior research, I anticipated that kids in middle school and high school might transition to remote learning better than their younger siblings. But it’s hard to know which age group ultimately struggled the most. scores for high schoolers fell to 30-year lows, but so did fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores. Curriculum Associates data point to ongoing gaps among younger kids, while NWEA data middle schoolers are the furthest behind. In other words, there’s no biggest loser here; achievement is down across the board.  

Prediction No. 5: Math scores are likely to drop the most.

Math skills are generally picked up at school, while in English Language Arts, proficiency is more closely linked to a student’s home environment. That shows up in the data: Math scores declined more when students were learning remotely and have shown more signs of recovery since then.

Meanwhile, reading scores have continued to decline. That could partly reflect broader societal trends, but state leaders should be looking toward Mississippi and other Southern states for ideas on how to get those back on track.

Prediction No. 6: Beyond academic losses, students are at risk of disconnecting from education.

In 1916, schools in many parts of the country closed for weeks in the midst of a polio outbreak. Researchers later that those shutdowns caused some students to drop out of school and never return.

More than a century later, COVID magnified this to an extreme, changing the relationship kids had with school and leading to in chronic absenteeism. While those rates have come down a bit from their highs in 2022, I didn’t anticipate just how much COVID would break cultural norms around school attendance, and how hard it would be for schools to restore those (good) habits.

Prediction No, 7: Higher-income students may not suffer any noticeable effects.

I underappreciated how much a district’s decisions about in-person versus remote schooling would have on all students. The Goldhaber found that, “even at low-poverty (high income) schools, students fell behind growth expectations when their schools went remote or hybrid.”

Still, higher-income and higher-performing students have managed the post-pandemic recovery better than others. For example, in eighth-grade math, the top 10% of students made noticeable gains from 2022 to 2024, while scores continued to fall for lower-performing students. At the high school level, the percentage of students who took and passed an Advanced Placement test dipped in the wake of COVID but has pre-pandemic levels. Similarly, the of high school students who are also taking credit-bearing college courses is hitting all-time highs. In other words, even as average achievement scores are down, many more high school students are finding ways to take more advanced courses.

However, this leads to …

Prediction No. 8: Low-income and disadvantaged students will suffer the biggest losses.

The virus may have been the same, but it did not affect everyone equally. As I last year, all kids missed more school in the wake of the pandemic, but those increases varied substantially. For example, the kids with the best attendance records missed about one extra day of school per year, while the kids with the worst absentee rates missed multiple weeks worth of school time.

The same trends appear in achievement scores: The bottom has fallen out across a variety of  tests, grades and subjects.

Prediction No 9: The COVID-induced recession will affect children, families and schools in many ways.

The pandemic’s effects on students have the potential to be long-lasting. For example, the of teacher strikes in Argentina found that the children of strike-affected students were more likely than their peers to be held back in school. That is, the effects passed on to later generations.

But beyond the students themselves, no one could have anticipated all the downstream effects of the COVID school closures. They are at least part of the story behind public school enrollment declines, families moving  away from and , and declining satisfaction with the nation’s public schools, not to mention political realignments.

Prediction No. 10: Without any action, the losses are likely to have long-term consequences.

To its credit, Congress provided states and school districts with $190 billion in 2020 and 2021. As hard as it is to fathom, the best research suggests it would take a lot more money to get kids fully back on track. The achievement declines were that large.

The money is now gone, and the national conversation has moved on. But I’m struck by what I wrote a few years ago: that if policymakers don’t act to get kids back on track, they will be, “condemning a generation of children to worse academic and economic outcomes throughout their life.”