ABOUT IREADY

The online learning program is facing serious national scrutiny on two fronts - growing questions about whether it delivers any meaningful outcomes for students, and a recently filed lawsuit alleging that it collects and monetizes student data.

Lack of research demonstrating efficacy

The Digital Delusion, i-Ready: 13 Million Students, Zero Meaningful Evidence

Jared Cooney Horvath, an educator turned neuroscientist, dove into the available research and found:

ZERO randomized controlled trials
ZERO top-tier (Q1 or Q2) peer-reviewed journal articles
TWO lower-tier (Q3) journal articles
- One article suggests i-Ready diagnostics are less predictive than traditional end-of-year state assessments
- One article measures improvements only within i-Ready itself — not beyond the tool
TWO unlisted journal articles
- One article finds no difference between users and non-users
- One article does not include any form of a control group
A LARGE VOLUME of gray literature
- Dissertations, vendor reports, conference posters, and white papers.

NBC News, The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury

"Curriculum Associates has not done a randomized controlled trial — considered the gold standard of scientific research — to prove i-Ready’s effectiveness. It would be too expensive and would rely on a school district volunteering as a test case, company leaders said, so they don’t plan to do one."

The Curriculum Insight Project, We're Ready to Break Up With iReady

“If schools are placing students in iReady’s supplemental/intervention products for core reading instruction, they have a big problem: the students who are below grade level will be ‘tracked’ into working with texts below their grade level. Research shows this to be the opposite of what readers need to grow…Quality curriculum is designed around grade level text work for all students. iReady cannot be considered a good use of ELA instructional time, over this issue alone.”

Kayla V. Campaña, et al., Classification Accuracy of i-Ready and Prior Year State Exams on Year-End Outcomes

“when compared to the previous year’s end-of-year state test, i-Ready was generally not more successful, and sometimes worse, with lower accuracy and AUC values.” “...CATs may be time-consuming, expensive, and are often advertised as serving an essential role as a screener.”

Questionable business practices

Two viral articles take a deep-dive into the questionable business practices of Curriculum Associates, the makers of iReady.

UnHerd, Why Your Kid Hates Learning Apps: The Popular iReady Platform Dulls Young Minds

Epostasy, The "Extraordinary Educators" Scam Turning Young Teachers Into Ed-Tech Shills

The iReady lawsuit

MSN, Parents, i-Ready is facing a lawsuit — here’s why

The lawsuit “alleges that the core business model of this company is to harvest as much information as is technologically possible on our children and then monetize that data.” She continued, “We are alleging that this monetization involves sharing our kids’ personal information with dozens of other companies for a host of commercial purposes.”"
"The lawsuit also claims Curriculum Associates “uses student information to build highly invasive psychological profiles on children that purport to predict future student behavior and performance but are often to the students’ detriment.”"