If you’ve been anywhere near the internet, you have seen concerns about iReady reach a fever pitch. First came a damning UnHerd piece (just republished openly in Substack), then a fierce parent critique and a viral thread about its efficacy.
Yet these pieces only scratch the surface, because they miss instructional nuances.
iReady deserves renewed scrutiny. The teachers in our team want you to know why we’d like to yeet it off the nearest cliff.
Here’s the rub:
District and school administrators like iReady because it gives them the illusion of insight into student progress. Eyes into the classroom.
To be fair, iReady offers a reasonable screener. However, its reliability is overstated, and it’s incredibly time-consuming. Districts should ask whether the juice is worth the squeeze.
Use of iReady for “differentiated instruction,” on the other hand, is hugely problematic, because it isn’t actually personalizing learning at a fine-grained level.
But it offers the illusion of finely-tailored instruction, and district leaders are falling for the con.
The fact that kids hate iReady, thanks to its clunky user experience, just adds fuel to the fire.
In this two-part series, we unpack key issues with iReady’s assessments and supplemental materials1, which account for most of the company’s $750 million in annual revenue.
The Issues with iReady for Instruction/Intervention
iReady is two separate-yet-connected products: an adaptive test that places students at a level, and an online learning tool that uses the assessment data to deliver “personalized” instruction.
The instruction misses a number of marks.
It isn’t truly personalized
iReady marketing promises “personalized instruction designed to give every student what they need when they need it.” Everyone assumes this personalization is happening in a sophisticated and granular fashion, isolating a student’s most precise struggles, then delivering ongoing instruction in his or her precise area of need.
Not so much.
In fact, students are placed in lessons based on the general domains where they show weaknesses, not specific skills in need of development.
Let’s take an example. In fifth grade math, there are four domains (Number and Operations, Measurement and Data, Algebra and Algebraic Thinking, and Geometry). In the Measurement domain, fifth grade students study volume, measurement conversion, and line plots.
Say two fifth graders, Mateo and Oliver, take the iReady assessment:
– Mateo performs well on volume questions, but worse on measurement conversion and line plots
– Oliver performs well on measurement conversion and line plots, but poorly on volume questions
– Both students receive a score of 460 in the Measurement domain
Mateo and Oliver would both be served up lesson materials in the Measurement domain, not different lessons targeting their precise weaknesses. In each domain, there is a pre-built sequence of lessons, and Mateo and Oliver are put through that sequence, even though they have different needs2.
Teacher reviews of iReady have been saying this for a long time3:
“the ‘personalization’ feels generic and disconnected”
“doesn’t always provide helpful, targeted explanations”
“simply serves up more of the same material”
That all assumes students take the assessment carefully. If instead students rush their assessments, or disengage and phone it in, they will earn a low score… locking themselves into a season of instruction below their actual skill level.
We found it interesting that Ryan Moulton, the parent who wrote about his son’s disdain for iReady, sniffed out the fact that it isn’t all-that-adaptive, and theorized about the reasons: “I do not know why it fails entirely at its goal of being adaptive. One possibility is that the software is so poor at receiving user input that students can’t reliably enter the answers they know.”
The truth is worse: it was never designed to be as targeted as its marketing would imply.
It delivers inefficient instruction
By delivering instruction via slow, even laborious animations, iReady doesn’t make tight use of classroom time. Teachers move much more efficiently through material.
Lessons in which kids practice only a few problems move at a snail’s pace.
We loved the way Moulton described it:
“It is not physically possible for a student using i-Ready to get a reasonable amount of math practice during the time they have for schooling. The software spends nearly all of its time forcing them to listen to narration instead of doing math. When a problem starts, the computer slowly reads aloud the text written on the screen. An animation slowly demonstrates the concept. The student is not allowed to do anything at all until it finishes. It repeats this for every single problem, even when the problem is identical to the previous problem. For every minute the student spends actually thinking about math, i-Ready spends 10 minutes narrating the same instructions over and over again.”
Yup.
Its ELA instructional design flies in the face of research
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.
Students who score poorly on the assessments because they are rushing or distracted will also be tracked into weaker texts and instruction below their level.
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.
It steals time from intervention
K-1 students have a hard time manipulating the keyboard and figuring out what to do on a computer assessment, so interventionists get pulled away to administer assessments— taking time away from actual intervention for struggling readers, schoolwide.
Also, kids really hate it
We could write a novel about student perspectives. Maybe another day… we still need to share our concerns as educators regarding iReady assessments.
Can We Stop Using iReady for Instruction, Already?
As we’ll discuss in Part II, reasonable people can disagree about the utility of iReady as a screener. (We are on Team Give It a Pass, in favor of other options.)
Still, misuse of iReady for instruction, and especially mandates for teachers to use it for instruction, are the really outrageous part, given the questions about its efficacy.
Many teachers report that they are badgered to put kids on iReady, rewarded for hours their students log in the tool, and reprimanded when their students don’t log time. We think that’s insane.
Sometimes excellent teachers can resist the pressure because of their high student performance. Often, they can’t. It’s maddening.
Yet as a community of educators, we know all-too-well that teacher efforts to question iReady (which are not new!) have had little effect on its national popularity.
So, we’d like to thank Ryan Moulton for lending his parent voice to the conversation and John Allen Wooden for the media spotlight. The lesson of the Emily Hanford era is this: flawed products are very hard to uproot from school districts without this kind of national conversation.
Let’s keep it going.
Stay tuned for Part II, on iReady Assessment
The better use of iReady is as an assessment tool. But even as an assessment, it’s misunderstood, and there are red flags.
More in Part II, later this week.
Related Reading
Holly Korbey has also written on the issues with iReady.
Don’t miss our earlier posts related to Ed Tech:
How Tech-Free Curriculum is Fueling the Southern Surge
To Future-Proof Your Curriculum, Go Print, Not Digital
iReady has separate products for core and supplemental instruction. For clarity, we are not talking about the core programs in this post.
Supposedly iReady places students at different points in that progression based on their item-level responses, but it sure doesn’t seem like it, from what we see.
Funny story about these quotes; ChatGPT insists that they are direct quotes from teacher reviews of iReady on Common Sense Media. It gave us links to find them. But when we went to search iReady (and i-Ready) on the Common Sense website, nothing came up. Has Common Sense redacted the critiques? We have questions.
We published them as they were, because they are 100% representative, and you can find a zillion similar teacher comments in every social media platform. Go ahead and test this for yourself.
Post-Script: John Allen Wooden confirmed that Common Sense Media has sunset (and removed access to) its Ed Tech reviews. Which is interesting timing, given the Ed Tech backlash in our midst.
As an educator, I am so happy this conversation is being started. Teachers are being pressed to have students on computers with programs that we do not feel are effective. I’d also love a part 3 on the curriculum. Incoming 2nd graders come in lower every year since we’ve adopted the iReady Math Curriculum. Is iReady the new Lucy Caulkins?
I watch both grandkids (smart kids) go through iReady. It stinks! As an educator I was not pleased and I was further annoyed when district curriculum expert gave me the standard song and dance. We can’t buy into every new techy thing. Too expensive money wise and children’s future wise