Fifteen Minutes a Day Just Solved a Reading Crisis. Then the Money Disappeared.

Six percent. That's how many first graders in thirteen Massachusetts school districts were reading at grade level when the year started.

By year's end, it was 48%.

The thing that changed? Fifteen minutes a day with a tutor on a screen.

The Study That Should Be Front-Page News

Johns Hopkins University just released the results of a two-year study tracking 1,596 first graders across Massachusetts who received virtual tutoring through a program called Ignite Reading. The numbers are hard to argue with.

Students gained more than five months of additional learning beyond what was expected. The share needing intensive reading intervention dropped from 70% to 31%. And here's the kicker: 85% of students who hit grade-level proficiency kept it through second grade — without any further tutoring.

Twelve percent of those who didn't reach proficiency in first grade managed to catch up later.

Read that again. If you catch kids early, the fix sticks. If you don't, almost nine out of ten fall further behind.

"Intervening to ensure students are reading on grade level by the end of first grade is highly effective," said Dr. Amanda Neitzel, the lead researcher. The effect size — +0.23 standard deviations — matches what you'd expect from in-person tutoring, which is the part that surprised even the optimists.

The Virtual Tutoring Question

For years, education researchers had a bias. In-person tutoring was the gold standard. Sitting across from a real human, in a real room, with real eye contact — that was what worked.

Virtual tutoring was the budget option. The thing you did because you couldn't afford the real thing.

That assumption is crumbling.

Ignite Reading's model is deceptively simple: 15 minutes a day, one-on-one, during the school day, with a trained tutor over video. The sessions focus on phonics and reading fluency using the Science of Reading — the evidence-based approach to teaching kids how letters map to sounds.

A separate study from Kansas City showed similar results. Students who received virtual one-on-one tutoring from Hoot Reading, another online program, outperformed peers who didn't get extra help. A third study, covering elementary students in Texas and Louisiana using Air Reading, found nearly three additional months of learning gains.

"Virtual models are getting stronger," said Neitzel. "If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them."

The key ingredients aren't the screen or the software. They're consistency and dosage. High-dosage tutoring — roughly 90 minutes a week, during school hours, with the same tutor — works whether that tutor is in the room or on a laptop. What matters is that kids show up, and the tutor knows what they're doing.

"We obsess over student attendance," said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading's founder. The program now operates in 24 states and has delivered more than 62 million minutes of instruction to over 50,000 students.

The Timing Problem

Here's where the story turns.

This research is landing at precisely the moment America is pulling the plug on tutoring funding.

The federal ESSER funds — the $190 billion emergency package Congress approved during the pandemic to help schools recover from learning loss — expired in September 2024. Those dollars paid for most of the tutoring programs that now have the strongest evidence behind them.

High-impact tutoring costs between $1,200 and $2,500 per student per year. For a district serving thousands of struggling readers, that adds up fast. And the money that was covering it is gone.

In North Carolina, a state-funded tutoring program backed by research is asking lawmakers for permanent funding after schools started dropping it due to budget cuts. In February, the Trump administration cancelled $168 million in community school grants mid-year — wiping out after-school tutoring, sports, and clubs overnight.

The pattern is striking: the evidence for what works has never been stronger, and the willingness to pay for it has never been weaker.

Why First Grade Matters More Than Third

Most US states use third grade as the checkpoint. That's when standardised tests decide whether a student is reading well enough to advance. Some states hold kids back if they're not there yet.

But the Johns Hopkins data suggests third grade is already too late.

"We are so caught up in 'reading by grade three' that we aren't honoring that kids need to learn in first grade," Sliwerski said. Many students entering the Ignite Reading program still didn't know basic kindergarten skills — letter names and sounds. Their tutors had two years of content to push through in one.

The window for learning to read isn't wide. If kids don't crack the code of how letters map to sounds by the end of first grade, they don't just struggle with reading. They struggle with everything. Science worksheets, maths word problems, history textbooks — it all requires reading. A child who can't decode unfamiliar words at seven will drown in comprehension tasks at nine.

The research calls this the Matthew Effect: readers get better at reading, and non-readers fall further behind. The gap doesn't close on its own. It widens.

The Global Picture

America isn't the only country grappling with this.

In Australia, the Independent Schools Association just warned that AI-powered learning tools are creating a "two-speed system" — well-resourced schools racing ahead with chatbots that quiz students on their assignments, while under-resourced schools struggle to keep up. Only two Australian states have even rolled out AI programs to public schools.

In the UK, the Education Endowment Foundation has spent a decade building the evidence base for tutoring as one of the most cost-effective ways to close achievement gaps. Their findings echo the Johns Hopkins data: small-group and one-on-one tutoring, delivered consistently, works.

Globally, UNESCO estimates 250 million children are in school but not learning to read. The promise of virtual tutoring — that you can connect a trained teacher to a struggling reader anywhere there's an internet connection — is exactly the kind of solution that could scale beyond wealthy countries.

But only if someone pays for it.

What Happens Next

The data is in. Fifteen minutes a day, delivered consistently by a trained tutor over video, can take a first grader from not knowing the alphabet to reading at grade level. And that gain lasts.

The question was never whether virtual tutoring works. The question is whether the system will fund what the science says works — or let the evidence pile up while the programs that produced it disappear.

Right now, schools across America are watching the strongest tutoring research in a generation arrive just as the funding that made it possible vanishes. The kids in those Massachusetts classrooms proved something remarkable. Whether anyone acts on it is a different story entirely.