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.

The director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, she thinks that language presumes too much about how education should be delivered in a free country. Sure, it seems to suggest, there are options out there — Catholic schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, take your pick — but the default is the local public school into which families are zoned. Anything else is just an anomaly.

Many other nations, including some that have been operating schools for much longer than the United States, don’t see it that way.

Just 30 percent of Dutch children attend their equivalent of district schools, with the rest enrolled in a variety of secular and parochial academies that all receive support from the state. Australia’s federal government is the most significant funder of private education, helping to subsidize the tuition of a huge number of economically disadvantaged students. Singapore, perhaps the most famous academic powerhouse in the world, directly funds private and religious schools attended by a diverse mix of pupils.

The overarching concept is one Berner calls “educational pluralism”: Governments don’t favor one system or model, but all are held to common academic standards. Parents can send their kids to an Islamic school, but they must learn the tenets of Christianity and Judaism as well; similarly, students at creationist-minded institutions have to demonstrate knowledge of the processes of evolution in their biology classes.

The idea is unfamiliar to most Americans, who grew up in school communities that all straddled a central divide of private versus public. Those favoring secular instruction have recoiled at the thought of public aid flowing to religious institutions since the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.

The last few years have seen an explosion in school choice systems, including the streak of red states establishing education savings accounts, which grant families money to spend on schooling costs, including private tuition. This spring, in the ultimate clash of public authority and private conscience, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency seems likely to escalate the tension between warring camps. But in her 2024 book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy, Berner argues that a considered embrace of diverse worldviews can actually be a salve to cultural conflict by separating two key functions of schooling. No matter where they attend class, all children receive academic instruction in core subjects like math, literacy, science, geography, and languages. But the work of imparting ideals and moral values can differ according to the preferences of families. At the heart of pluralism, she says, is the acknowledgment that schools are character-forming institutions by necessity.

“Education cannot be neutral,” Berner said. “It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin.

In an extended conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, the author and academic spoke about the possibilities for more pluralism in the wake of the national ESA wave, the unexpected consequences of the end of school prayer, and why she feels schools get it wrong by trying to build students’ skills instead of knowledge.

You’ve been writing about the idea of educational pluralism for some time now. What led you to it?

Ashley Rogers Berner: I came to educational pluralism because of the shock of living in another country and realizing that their framework for education was entirely different from ours.

I went to Oxford to get my doctorate when my children were in elementary school. When it came time to enroll them in schools, I was confronted with a panoply of state-funded options. And it didn’t take long to realize that this division we’re so familiar with in the States, public versus private, just didn’t apply. The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.

At the same time, my doctoral research allowed me to learn a lot about how schools were funded in the 19th century. That’s how I discovered that the U.K. has funded educational pluralism since 1833, and they were taking their cues from Prussia, and the Netherlands has been on a similar journey since the time of the American Revolution.

I realized, “This could change our whole conversation.” This zero-sum game of pitting sectors against each other is not only dysfunctional, it’s actually rare. We’re the outliers.

You say something similar in one of the book’s early chapters, describing pluralism as “countercultural” to what we do in the United States. Why is that?

It’s countercultural in two respects.

First, a plural system assumes a certain level of diversity by design. It assumes that the government should not dictate students’ beliefs and values, so you need to support a variety of institutions. The fact that that is taken for granted is totally countercultural to what we expect of education, including the binary of public versus private. Even the language of “school choice” derives from an expectation that the district school is the only carrier of public education, and any departure is basically asking for an exception from that. I don’t tend to use the word “choice,” even though it’s the American terminology, because it just reinforces those assumptions.

And just as important, it’s countercultural because of the importance of shared content taught in schools. At its very best, a plural system is one in which the ethos of each school should be distinctive — but there is also some kind of shared academic material across all kinds of schools. That’s how you fulfill the civic mission of public funding for education, by having some basic content in common in order to teach kids to exercise effective citizenship. Some examples would be historical documents, the geography of the country and the world, the markers of history, comparative religion and ethics, basic literary references, etc.

That second aspect goes against the grain of what we do in the United States because our teaching profession has opted in favor of skills and process over content for 100 years. Many of our teachers have come up in a system that says that learning something specific is less important than learning how to learn and that setting goals for knowledge-building is somehow oppressive. It’s countercultural to say that building knowledge really, really matters for closing achievement gaps.

I’ve sometimes considered it strange that kids learn very different material depending on where they live. But it sounds like you’re saying that’s only half the picture: Teaching differs a lot across state lines, but our system is also very rigid about only wanting to fund local public schools, plus the occasional charter.

That’s right, and I think it’s a losing proposition to offer children a really uniform structure and really eclectic content. Wealthy kids are going to be better off in any system because their families take them to museums and talk to them about the world all the time. But this is really the worst of all possible worlds for first-generation, low-income families: There’s a rigid structure in which parents do not have agency about where they enroll their children, but also really patchy content where kids miss whole areas in the English curriculum.

The uniform structure was built by design after the Civil War, and it was the product of an unholy alliance between nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Republican Party. Up to that point, we had funded all different kinds of schools, but there was suddenly concern that all these Catholic immigrants just couldn’t become competent citizens, and all the variation between schools was going to undermine democratic formation. So lawmakers at the state level decided to defund “sectarian” schools — which meant Catholic schools — and only fund district schools. But those same state legislatures then turned around and required that district schools be, in effect, Protestant institutions with Protestant prayers and Protestant Bibles.

To me, this history makes the core point of pluralism: Education cannot be neutral. It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin. And interestingly, one of the big Progressive complaints about district schools is that — because they can’t answer some of the deeper questions with explicit moral frameworks — they unintentionally reinforce the baseline culture of the United States of individualism and utilitarianism. It’s just going to default to whatever the cultural majority is.

Whatever schools do to build character, or civic virtue, or whatever, doesn’t seem to be producing great results. There was a really startling survey in 2023 showing huge declines, among younger adults especially, in the importance attached to patriotism, family formation, hard work, and community involvement. Meanwhile, well over half of Generation Z has said they would choose to be a social media influencer over any other career.

I’d make two points. One is that the civic outcomes we care about, whether it’s volunteering or civic participation or affirming others’ right to disagree with your views, are learned behaviors that have to be explicitly taught. And we’re not doing that; classrooms aren’t really places marked by a lot of deliberation and debate.

But it’s also true that those outcomes are the byproducts of deeper sets of belief and moral frameworks about what it means to be human. For a long time, Catholic high schools have been great at producing graduates who give back to their communities. It’s very difficult to analyze what about that is coming from the direct influence of schools, but eminent researchers like James Coleman and Tony Bryk have looked at the data and said, “There’s something about this organic community that forms a certain kind of person.”

You can’t control people’s beliefs, and you can’t control outcomes. But in the aggregate, you can make it more likely that your students have a sense of duty to something outside themselves.

You list a lot of places — England, Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, Hong Kong, Belgium — in which the government directly funds private schools, including parochial schools. But do those countries deal with the same constitutional issues we face in the United States? Things may be changing at the Supreme Court, but my guess is that until very recently, the Establishment Clause would have been a massive obstacle.

That’s a fair question. Obviously, England has a state church. But the Netherlands has had a secular constitution since the end of the 18th century, and they’re the most pluralistic system in the world. They fund 36 different kinds of schools!

The argument for pluralism is not a religious argument. It’s a principled argument about political philosophy and the role of civil society, but not one that gives special pleading to religion. The Anglican Church is a huge provider of elementary education in England, yes. But in another pluralistic country, Sweden, only 3 percent of non-state schools are religious because the population is mostly secular and doesn’t want those schools. It varies quite a bit.

But in a country like the U.S., there would presumably be a huge appetite for direct government funding of Christian schools. And the political opposition to that kind of shift would also be huge, right?

There’s the reality of our separation of church and state, and there’s the mythology of it. When you look at the Supreme Court decisions over the last century, there have consistently been mechanisms that allow state funds to flow to civil society organizations that include religious institutions.

The landmark ruling with respect to schools was Zelman v. Simons-Harris [the 2002 case in which a conservative majority ruled that Ohio’s school voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause], where the Supreme Court said very clearly that these programs are constitutional as long as the state laws authorizing them are neutral. In other words, if the state law sets out to give low-income kids either state funding or tax credit funds to go to a private school, it’s constitutionally viable even if every school that families choose is religious. It’s robust because it’s the result of private decisions.

There are now lots of state mechanisms that support private schools. Florida has had a tax credit program for 20 years, the outcomes of which have been studied by the Urban Institute. Low-income kids who attended private schools on tax credit support scholarships had higher college-going and college graduation rates than their peers. Indiana has had something similar for a long time. And this isn’t just in conservative states. Illinois had a bipartisan tax credit for a brief episode. D.C. has one. A state as blue as Maryland has one, with a built-in requirement that money can’t go to a school that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

So there are a lot of levers that states can use. What you want is for high-quality private schools to participate, but you can’t impose so many regulations that the best schools opt out.

How long have American kids mostly attended public schools that are, as you put it, “uniform” in their outlook? You draw attention to an event that I haven’t thought much about in the context of education policy: the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned school prayer. What was the importance of that decision?

Public education had a particular kind of uniformity from the end of the 19th century. After that, public schools were basically Protestant institutions all the way through 1962, when the Supreme Court effectively secularized them.

Up to that point, they were uniform, vaguely Protestant schools, and if you were Protestant, you probably didn’t notice it. But if you were Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or Jehovah’s Witness, you knew that the schools your children attended were values-laden institutions that reflected the majority culture. Following Engel v. Vitale, schools were still uniform, but now they were secular.

That was when you started to see the evangelical grievance about taking God out of public schools. That cultural animus came from a decision that I think was completely correct, but evangelicals experienced a sense of loss.

It seems like that moment unsettled a lot of families who had unconsciously believed that public schools were meant to embody their own worldview and values. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s, you start seeing the origins of what will become the movement for both school choice and homeschooling.

You’re right that those decisions in the 1960s spawned a whole host of church-based schools to spring up, including evangelical schools. There was some religious homeschooling as well.

But there was also a concurrent movement on the progressive side that was called “deschooling.” When you look at the history of the homeschooling wave, it included evangelical pietists as well as people in the hippie culture, who thought school bureaucracies were oppressive and conformist. I wrote a report last spring that looked at the criticisms of district schools that grew out of the Left during those years, and it was interesting to note the parallels.

The school choice movement has gotten a lot thicker. There’s a whole strain that emerged among progressives who were concerned that district schools weren’t serving African Americans well, and that helped build the charter movement. Even long before that, there were Freedom Schools in the South in the ’60s. Some of the biggest champions of educational pluralism were radicals in that period. Look at Howard Fuller, who eventually launched Milwaukee’s voucher program. He was a civil rights activist, and he’ll still say, “Let this community regulate its own schools.”

You write that the case for educational pluralism is connected to a need for more emphasis on knowledge and content-rich teaching in schools. You’re arguing that knowledge has been crowded out, to an extent, by things that have variously been called “social adjustment” or “21st century skills” or “social-emotional learning.”

In the book, I call it, “anything but the academic curriculum.”

The consequence of that long-term trajectory toward teaching skills, which has been written about by people like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch and Natalie Wexler, is that we have generations of teachers who haven’t worked in knowledge-building classrooms. When my colleagues at the Institute for Education Policy work with states to help them adopt high-quality curricular materials, we also try to push them to allocate resources toward professional development so that classroom leaders know how to teach it well.

The great thing about a historically pluralistic system like the U.K. is that they have both a large variety of schools and a knowledge-rich curriculum. The people leading classrooms had to pass serious exit exams to graduate and demonstrate that they actually knew the content they were going to teach, whether it’s history or philosophy or English. So there’s a virtuous cycle where young people learn a certain amount of shared content; they have to pass content-specific exams to graduate; then they get more of the same while preparing to be teachers in university. And by the time they’re in a classroom talking to an eight-year-old about the Greeks and Romans, they’re confident in that knowledge.

In the United States, we haven’t had the same virtuous cycle. So there’s a lot of work to do, including in professional development.

Do you think the way we approach instruction has something to do with the way the teaching profession is thought of in the States? A lot of teacher training seems to prepare them in disciplines like child development and theories of pedagogy, rather than just pushing lots of academic content that they can later teach to kids.

I spent a lot of time studying the history of teacher training institutions in the U.K. Going back many years, they were seen as both cultural and academic institutions that tried to impart cultural experience to teachers — many of whom came from the lower-middle classes in England — as well as knowledge. In the United States, these programs also had these two functions of building up knowledge and expanding access to cultural experiences such as theater or live debate.

But there was a shift within the profession that eventually led to the emphasis of skills over knowledge. In the early 20th century, there were voices within the field of teacher preparation that wanted programs to be based in universities as opposed to local communities. The key lens was essentially meant to be child psychology, so by the ’20s and ’30s, everything became very influenced by the psychoanalytic model, and teachers were supposed to know all about Freud and child development. That kind of thing became the currency of teacher preparation.

England actually also went down that path, but the ministry of education kept the curriculum knowledge-based. So whatever else was going on in the training programs, aspiring teachers had graduated high school with subject-matter expertise. They came back from the brink, but we haven’t here in the States. To this day, our teaching programs are not institutions that really promote knowledge building. Just look at the science of reading.

How do these dynamics influence policy discussions? It’s unclear how this debate involves teachers’ unions, for example.

There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.

We need to push against both those dogmas because they’re distorting of what healthy school systems need in the long term. That’s why I’m attracted to the pluralist vision: It acknowledges the rightful role for the parent, it acknowledges the rightful role of the state, and it locates the delivery of education in civil society and voluntary associations. No system is perfect, but I think this vision does a good job encompassing all of those realms. It’s a third way.

Do you think it’s a philosophy that is so attractive that most developed countries are just inevitably going to adopt it?

I’m on the board of an NGO [non-governmental organization] that works on educational pluralism and has privileges at the U.N. I’ve learned so much just from the U.N. covenants that affirm the rights of cultural minorities to enroll their children in schools that reflect their values — and the obligation of the state to ensure quality. Both of those things are there, and they’re both practiced in so many countries.

Internationally, the historic practice in many, many countries has been to support nonprofits and religious groups to deliver education. According to UNESCO, 171 out of 204 countries are pluralistic in some fashion. But there is a huge pressure against those funding systems, and it’s coming from both the international teachers’ unions and a number of NGOs that have some animus against religion.

There have been a lot of conversations at UNESCO wrestling with these questions. What do you lose if you say that only the state can deliver education, and how does that comport with the organization’s human rights documents? So these arguments are very much international.

Where are you looking for signs about the future viability of a more pluralistic system? It seems as though there’s still room for growth in state ESA systems, and the Supreme Court has taken up the case of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

I’m not someone who thinks that all school choice systems have to offer religious options, and I don’t think that more state funding for private schools is contingent on that Oklahoma case. The funding is already happening, and there’s a wide array of state policies making it possible.

You’ve got Iowa, where ESAs can be applied to any private school. I’m personally a little more skeptical of the ESA in places like Arizona or Florida, where parents get a lump sum and a huge menu of options. I’m skeptical that that’s sufficient quality control to drive better outcomes. No doubt it’ll work fine for most families, but will it work for a majority of families? Will it actually change academic outcomes? I’m not sure it will.

What I’m hoping will happen is that the momentum to expand options will be met with a reasonable concern for academic quality. That’s where centrist Democrats can come along and be supportive. The teachers’ union was able to kill the school choice legislation that went through in Illinois, but that law was bipartisan. There was support for more funding for district schools, funding for tax credits for low-income kids to go to private schools, and the requirement of an assessment for those students.

I think that’s a reasonable approach. I’m looking for the grand bargains that can sustain education into the future. For me, it’s not just about destroying the situation we have; it’s about making sure that all families can choose among good options.

How would you accomplish that? Should big school choice expansions always be accompanied by a curricular or accountability reform, including testing if necessary?

Texas is actually doing this. They’re starting to change their curriculum, and while they’re unlikely to command all funded schools to use some individual curriculum, there are ways of incentivizing the use of better curricula across the board and testing the knowledge base.

In places like Texas, the horse is out of the barn. It’s going to be a school choice state. The question is, how do you protect quality in the long run? Should all participants have to take a nationally norm-referenced test? Most private schools require their students to do that and report the scores to the state. But if you’ve got a plug-and-play ESA model where parents can buy a trampoline here, a homeschooling curriculum there, it’s pretty hard to ensure that children are getting an appropriate education. So in my view, you have to test outcomes.

We all get attached to things that don’t serve us well, and that’s true of parents and schools along with everything else. Even a miserable school, whether it’s public or private or charter, can win the affection of parents who don’t want to shut it down. So it seems like an appropriate goal of public policy to make sure that bad providers don’t get into the market to begin with.

Look at the Drexel Fund, which helps high-quality, low-cost private schools scale up. Well, if I were expanding access to private schools, I would want those Drexel Fund schools to be able to grow rapidly in my state. We should go where the high performance is, where there’s already attention to detail and quality. We simply don’t have enough good seats right now.

What was so great about Florida is that they built it slowly, and the market responded. There are schools for autistic kids, schools for kids with dyslexia. But it’s taken time. We need stability around high-quality providers, and we need to remember that we’re educating for a purpose: civic preparation, academic capability, and social mobility. If we’re not doing those things, we’re failing.

We have to keep these purposes in mind. There’s confusion around some of these points because of the political dogmas on both sides. To teachers’ unions, I would say that the key question can’t just be how school choice will affect district schools. District schools are a means to the end. I also would say to libertarians that parental choice and autonomy is a means, not the end itself.

High-dosage, in-person tutoring gets , recent research suggests. But as federal funding for remediation dries up and schools struggle to raise students’ post-COVID skills, educators have been hoping for a lifeline in the form of live, online tutoring.

While virtual tutors still work directly with students in real time, they can work from anywhere, expanding the potential talent pool and lowering costs.

Until recently, virtual tutoring had that it works very well, with few rigorous studies of its effectiveness. But new findings, including two recent studies from Johns Hopkins University’s , are beginning to offer a different narrative: Done well and with the same safeguards as traditional in-person tutoring, the virtual version can be nearly as good.

“I was always one of those people who was so skeptical — ‘it’s never going to work,’” said Amanda Neitzel, an assistant professor at Hopkins and the research center’s deputy director. “And then I did these studies, and I was shocked, because it did work.”

In a quasi-experimental study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used , a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.

The share of “struggling” readers also dropped, from 64% in the fall to 28% by the spring.

The study tracked about 1,900 students in 13 high-poverty Massachusetts school districts in the 2023-24 school year. The data suggest that tutored students showed nearly five-and-a-half months’ more progress on a key reading test than the typical student. And they improved across the board, with English learners, students with disabilities and low-income students all gaining ground.

Ignite tutors work with students for 15 minutes every day, typically during “literacy blocks” in class or in separate, staff-monitored rooms.

In a separate, more rigorous study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that students who got online tutoring outperformed their peers by about two points on NWEA reading assessments, a “significant” change that would raise the average student slightly to the 55th percentile in the class, or just above average.

While researchers saw no difference in impacts for English language learners or those with special needs, they found that first-graders got more out of the tutoring, meaning that the hypothetical 50th-percentile student who got tutoring would rise to the 58th percentile.

Six elementary schools in a district in Texas took part in the randomized controlled trial evaluating Air Reading for 418 first-through-sixth-grade students during the 2023-24 school year. The small-group tutoring ran for just a few months in the spring, from late January through April.

Neitzel said the effect sizes in the two new studies aren’t necessarily as large as those of the most effective in-person models, but the new evidence provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for schools wondering whether they should offer virtual tutoring. 

“It’s really exciting that every month or two there’s another out,” she said. “And there are more in the field right now too. So I think in the next couple years, we’ll be able to answer that question better.”

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, agreed, saying several to amount to “ on the efficacy of virtual tutoring programs,” suggesting they hold promise.

He noted that randomized control trials generally find that virtual tutoring has positive effects, but often of smaller magnitude than those found in meta-analyses of in-person tutoring programs. “However, the devil is in the specific program design details,” he said. For instance, several studies find that one-on-one virtual tutoring is more effective than programs that use small groups.

Jennifer Krajewski, director of outreach and engagement for , a clearinghouse for research-proven tutoring models housed at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Research and Reform in Education, noted that both Air Reading and Ignite Reading employ well-trained live tutors and a “highly structured” program, with ongoing coaching for tutors and a clear instructional process that addresses students’ individual needs. These characteristics, she said, are often part of in-person tutoring programs that have been found effective.

Both programs work hard at getting students to actually attend, she and Neitzel said. 

Reviewing the Ignite study, Neitzel said the percentage of students actually receiving tutoring when they were supposed to was “shockingly high,” topping 85% for the vast majority of students. That suggests implementation is key in a field where attendance isn’t always tracked very well. 

“You could have the best model in the world, but if the kids aren’t actually there, it’s not going to move the needle,” she said.

Attendance remains one of virtual tutoring’s biggest challenges, she said. “When it’s a physical person in the building, they can pull you out of class. It’s harder to avoid. Whereas if it’s on a computer, you just don’t log in — or you log off, or [you say], ‘Oh, it’s not working.’ ”

Krajewski said that for the study, Ignite worked with a local funder in Massachusetts to hire on-the-ground workers who ensured that students were showing up. It also held regular virtual meetings with educators “to make sure everyone understood the milestones and the goals,” ensuring that the program would be launched consistently across several districts. “Everyone was really on the same page because of these meetings,” she said.

Ignite and the local funder also appointed paid school and district “champions” to supervise implementation. Each school champion worked about three hours weekly to troubleshoot problems that arose. And they required that schools review student achievement data weekly, moving students out of tutoring when they succeeded and filling those seats with struggling students. 

Neitzel said one of the keys to Ignite’s success, at least in the study, was that it paired students with tutors who spoke the same language, offering “a little connection” between them, even if tutoring took place primarily in English.

If schools can’t find enough bilingual teachers locally, she said, “maybe virtual tutoring is the best option you have.” In-person tutoring programs might be slightly more effective, she said, but virtual programs offer flexibility on hiring and other challenging aspects of implementation. 

In the Air Reading study, Neitzel said, company representatives met with schools every other week, focusing closely on attendance and which students weren’t attending sessions.

On occasion, she said, Air Reading teams flew out to schools “to make sure stuff was happening and getting set up or trying to troubleshoot what’s going on. I was impressed with just how well they knew the schools they were working with.”

In one case, she recalled an Air Reading worker who was so attuned to the school he oversaw that he knew an attendance monitor’s father had died. “That’s how involved they are with this,” Neitzel said. “When it works well, there are these tremendous relationships with people in the district to make it work.”

Krajewski, who was not an author on either study, said researchers haven’t yet seen evidence of effectiveness for tutoring using AI agents working directly with students. “We’ve seen that the most effective models use human tutors,” she said. 

Hopkins researchers are working on an evaluation of an AI-assisted tutoring model developed by Carnegie Mellon University and predicted there’d be noteworthy data by the end of 2025. “But even then, it’s not that the tutoring is replaced by AI,” she said. The AI, she said, is helping human tutors be more effective.

“These studies show how important that human tutor continues to be,” she said. “We’re learning that that human tutor, virtual or in person, is driving the instructional process.” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story included graphics that mischaracterized the amount of benefit students gained from the two virtual tutoring programs.

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

“We can’t mobilize fast enough,” said Robert Balfanz, an education professor running the new National Partnership for Student Success, housed at Johns Hopkins University. “There are still some lost opportunities.” 

But he said the effort’s connection to the White House and AmeriCorps — a national agency that recruits volunteers for community service — is central to overcoming staffing challenges that have plagued efforts by schools and nonprofit organizations to scale up tutoring efforts since the beginning of the pandemic. 

“Everybody has been trying to solve this in their own little microworld,” he said. 

Working with colleges, large employers like Starbucks and Target, and established nonprofit organizations serving youth, Balfanz said, should develop the Partnership into the national tutoring corps that experts have been recommending for several years. AmeriCorps will also spend $20 million to help organizations recruit and train tutors.

In March, President Joe Biden encouraged Americans to “sign up” as volunteers and mentors for students struggling to recover from school closures. The new initiative follows recent showing that learning declines among students were worse in districts slower to return to in-person learning. “What I’m asking for is a level of urgency unlike any level of urgency we’ve had,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said last week during the virtual announcement, joined by White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice. They stressed that districts should be using American Rescue Plan funds for academic recovery through high-quality tutoring, afterschool and summer programs — and if they aren’t, they should start. 

The law “requires that 20% be spent on learning loss. But it is increasingly clear that for many districts, that guesstimate was way too low,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, who has argued that districts make students’ academic progress their “north star” for allocating funds. 

Tennessee is among the states directing relief money toward tutoring. — which stands for Accelerating Literacy and Learning — began in the 2020-21 school year and now involves over 80 districts, which provide matching funds to participate. 

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn said the state has learned lessons from implementation that could benefit the national effort. The state program, she said, contributed to recent showing that performance in English language arts among elementary students is back to pre-pandemic levels, with students making greater gains than they have in five years. Gaps in math due to learning loss are also shrinking. 

But at the district level, students performed better when tutoring was offered during the school day instead of before or after school, and when tutors were paid educators instead of volunteers. Some districts, she said, hire “surplus” educators who don’t yet have a classroom position, retired teachers and those still in teacher preparation programs.

“There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom and anybody can tutor,” Schwinn said. That’s one reason why she said it’s not “super realistic” to have a “meaningful” national program in place for fall.

Roza added that districts have already approved their budgets for the 2022-23 school year and changing them will require school board approval. 

As part of last week’s announcement, the Education Department launched showing how other states are using the funds. And building on efforts from and , also at Georgetown, the National Center for Education Statistics will track the extent to which schools are spending the money on tutoring and other academic enrichment programs.

“If your children aren’t getting the support they need, you will have the tools to make sure your principal or superintendent or mayor hear about it,” Cardona said. “Funding alone is not going to get it done. If anything, you could waste it. We could be looking back five years from now and saying, ‘Did we do everything we could have done?’ ”

In the American Rescue Plan, Congress set aside more than $1 billion each for summer and afterschool programs, and the department has encouraged districts to use relief funds to enlist community-based organizations to help students catch up and reconnect to school. 

With summer programs already in progress, Cardona urged districts to find a balance between engaging programs that interest students and ensuring that tutoring efforts are tightly connected to what students learn in school. 

Since 2020, the administration has urged districts to use relief funds to help students make up for lost learning over the summer. A new from Education Reform Now highlights how states have fared. It shows that 15 states require districts to join with outside groups to serve students over the summer. But just 10 states have requirements on how long such programs should be and how many hours they should devote to academic instruction.

Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C. require programs to have one staff member for every 15 students, a ratio backed up by research. The report noted that state officials worry that adding dosage and staffing requirements would discourage programs from applying for grant funds in light of “widespread reporting” on vacancies, turnover and stressed-out staff. 

Locating the Partnership at Johns Hopkins, where Balfanz runs the Everyone Graduates Center and is a respected researcher on dropout prevention and improving school climate, increases the focus on using proven strategies. 

“This is not just somebody helping you with homework every third Sunday. What we need is really high-intensity tutoring. It’s multiple connections with your mentor in a week,” Balfanz said at last week’s event. “If you’re only showing up once every 21 days … you’re not there to give support in the moment when it’s needed. That’s really what turns the kid around when they know there’s someone there that has their back.”

Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance — one of the organizations involved in the Partnership — said working with AmeriCorps is also a “terrific way” to address the facing afterschool programs. 

Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, has the same expectations for school districts.

“We know that this partnership will lead to an increased pipeline of educators,” he said, noting City Year, Teach for America and the College Advising Corps as proven examples. “When young people are working in the schools, working next to children, they get a spark. They get ignited, and the data is showing us that they stay … in the education system.”