PART 5

At the Fall 2025 “Impact in Action Summit” for i-Ready, the experimental e-learning software that is the bane of 14 million American children’s existence, a numbing panel discussion was unfolding atop a drab, fluorescent-lit dais. As a glad-handing moderator from i-Ready’s publisher Curriculum Associates (CA) lobbed softball marketing questions to administrators from Houston’s Alief Independent School District, a YouTube video captured the moment when district functionary Katrina Harris boasted cheerily, “i-Ready is tied to our teachers’ TIA!”

TIA is the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a uniquely Texas merit pay system for granting five-year bonus packages of up to $180,000 to public school teachers. At the very mention of it, Harris’ co-panelist colleagues grimaced uncomfortably as the room filled with audible murmuring from the off-camera audience of educators. This low drone persisted as the bureaucrat continued, “this adds another layer of competition or motivation on our teachers!”

Why was the audience murmuring? Because Harris’ revelation that i-Ready is “tied” to TIA means just one thing: any Alief ISD teacher failing to compete, by rigorously drillmastering students as young as kindergarten to ace their screen-based i-Ready assessments, can suffer severe personal financial consequences.

In practice, this means that Curriculum Associates’ proprietary, black-box platform now functions as a shadow evaluation arbiter for public servants: creating a perverse financial incentive for teachers to push i-Ready usage, regardless of whether the program supports real learning, or even harms student cognitive development by virtue of requiring countless hours of screen time.

Dr. Sarah Woulfin, Chair of the Department of Education Leadership & Policy at University of Texas at Austin, expressed concern at this usage of i-Ready. “It is not meant to be used as an assessment of the teacher’s teaching,” she told me of i-Ready by phone. “If TIA funding is attached to it, that’s high stakes for the individual teacher,” she noted. “It adds stakes and teeth to i-Ready in a way that I feel is inappropriate. A teacher could end up losing their job.”

TIA: Teachers Inquisition Accounting

The TIA program was created in 2019 as part of an $11.6 billion state school reform package which passed the Texas Legislature with unanimous bipartisan support. Its mission is to provide Texas teachers, whose compensation lags $8500 below national averages according to the Texas State Teachers Association, with “an accessible pathway to a six-figure salary.” But the program is no wokey pork barrel handout; it awards bonuses only to teachers who pass hard-nosed corporate-style reviews: using micromanaging classroom inspections to ensure compliance with its many onerous mandates, coupled with “student growth” accounting based on standardized test scores. If any teacher’s classes come up too short on their testing averages — bye-bye, big bonus.

Cynthia Ramirez, a recently retired history and English teacher who taught grades 6-12 across tenures at three different Texas school districts, penned an op-ed last year describing TIA as primarily an “incentive to obey.” She told me that she and her colleagues found the system “bewildering and humiliating.” Ramirez recalls that while most of her fellow faculty members went along to be compliant, privately teachers complained that TIA requirements were “unfair and random,” adding “a colleague told me she was so stressed, she felt she needed to take a medical leave.”

Norma De La Rosa, president of the El Paso Teachers Association (EPTA), also sees pronounced TIA anxiety among her members. She describes the program as “a monster” that is “pitting teachers against each other.” De La Rosa told me by phone, “a lot of my teachers are telling me, ‘You know, I don’t want the TIA money because it’s become so stressful,’” adding, “I have teachers getting out of education because all the focus is on this testing.”

As of 2026, 85% of Texas Independent School Districts participate in the opt-in TIA program, which annually disburses over $750 million in teacher bonuses across 1000+ districts enrolling 4.5 million students.

To be accepted into TIA, Texas school districts must devise formulas for scoring their teachers. These “designation” calculations vary, but all heavily factor “student growth” metrics, which must be measured using products from the state-produced Third-Party Assessment Options catalog. i-Ready has appeared in that catalog since its 2019 inception.

While Texas produces no centralized public list of which districts have i-Ready baked into their TIA designation calculus, an extensive review of publicly posted district handbooks reveals at least twelve that do, including Alief ISD, Dallas ISD, and El Paso ISD. Several of these districts rank in the top 1% of American public school systems by size, with all twelve collectively schooling over 380,000 K-12 students and employing over 26,000 full-time teachers.

Texas Districts Rating Teachers with i-Ready

Official public documents and TIA Handbooks from these districts codify i-Ready scores accounting for significant portions of teachers’ overall bonus scores — as high as 65% and 70% at El Paso and Pearland ISDs, respectively. This, of course, is easily enough to make or break an already-underpaid educator’s annual five-figure TIA bonus.

Picture a hypothetical kindergarten teacher in El Paso ISD with and an above-average classroom observation score of 4.5 and 24 students. According to the district’s 2026-27 TIA manual, unless at least 50% of her class meets i-Ready’s self-defined “Typical Growth” targets, she is ineligible for any TIA bonus, which in her district ranges across tiers from around $5,600 to $21,000 a year for five years. This means that one illiterate five-year-old clicking the wrong button on i-Ready’s confusingly designed user interface can cost an otherwise top-performing teacher tens of thousands of dollars, all on a black-box test that can’t be independently audited.

Clay Robison, Public Affairs Specialist at the Texas State Teachers Association, expressed his organization’s concerns. “We do not like these standardized assessments being heavily used to evaluate teachers and determine how much extra they’re going to get paid,” he told me. “They’re given too much weight in determining how much student achievement has improved, and if the system itself is dubious, or unproven, or opaque, we have problems with that.”

Harming Texas’ Youngest Students

In May 2026, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use called on all American schools to “Limit screen use by assigning work in books or on paper whenever possible” — especially for young students.

Which makes for cruel irony that at the twelve Texas districts examined for this investigation, i-Ready TIA pressure is exerted overwhelmingly on teachers of K-3 students — the youngest and most vulnerable to screen time cognitive harm. That’s because student growth for older students can be measured using Texas’ annual STAAR standardized test, which assesses grades 3-12. But because the TIA program’s unflinchingly rigid bureaucracy demands teachers of every grade level be scored, i-Ready’s black box data is used to fill the gap.

I reached out to all twelve districts for comment on how they reconcile their continued use of i-Ready with this year’s US Surgeon General health advisory on the cognitive harm caused to children by screens. Only four responded, all with boilerplate statements.

Dallas ISD replied tersely, “You can view our screen time guidelines here.” Sherman ISD replied that the district is “currently reviewing technology use in the classroom with the goal of reducing unnecessary screen time,” adding that “tools and platforms will be evaluated” and “those findings will inform future decisions about their use.”

A Kinder Calamity

For Ms. S, a 25-year veteran kindergarten teacher at one of the largest districts using i-Ready for TIA scoring, and who requested anonymity for fear of what she described as widespread professional retaliation, i-Ready is a developmentally inappropriate classroom distraction. She told me her students were utterly flummoxed and frustrated by the platform. “These poor kids, they didn’t know how to use the program,” she said, “they’re looking at you like, ‘Do I just push this button, or this button?’ They’re not grasping the information, and they’re losing basic thinking skills because we’re just pushing ahead.” She insists that her students’ i-Ready scores don’t accurately reflect their knowledge. “All of our kids came out low because of the technology,” she recalled.

Because of that glaring disconnect, Ms. S balked when teachers at her school were mandated to create classroom cohorts based on i-Ready data. Protesting that her fluent readers had been grouped with kids who didn’t even know the alphabet, Ms. S recalls telling a Curriculum Associates employee, “You're asking me to make an intervention group based on incorrect data.” She said the i-Ready rep shrugged in response, suggesting the false baseline could help create a positive data narrative later, stating, “Well, at least you could say that you’re going to get some growth — and that’s good.”

Exacerbating the dysfunction, Ms. S said neither the faculty nor administration at her school were even trained on the platform. “The teachers didn't know the mechanics of how the test was working,” she said, “Like, when does the button light up? Do they have to pick one answer? Do they have to scroll?” Later, when she approached her principal to request guidance on picking realistic growth targets within i-Ready’s points system, the uninformed response was merely, “I don’t know, but each kid just needs to have a goal.”

As for student i-Ready results constituting over 50% of her TIA bonus score, Ms. S disapproves. “Am I stressed about the money?” she asked aloud. “The thing that puts pressure is when you see another teacher that maybe you don’t think is as great, and they get the money,” she sighed. “I think it’s 100% unfair that TIA is using an i-Ready program that I don’t even know about.”

A Circular Vetting Loophole

Alief ISD’s TIA handbook is typical among Texas districts in justifying its decision to score teachers using i-Ready, stating it has “chosen assessments that have been found by the State to be both valid and reliable.” But have they been?

i-Ready appears in the official online TIA Third-Party Assessment Options catalog — the homepage of which prominently indicates TEA conducts reviews of every product therein to ensure it “meets the requirements” of Texas law for student growth measures. But in a jaw-dropping instance of bureaucratic ineptitude double-speak, just two paragraphs later, a prominent disclaimer indicates that all product details are “vendor-provided and not verified… inclusion in this list does not imply TEA endorsement.”

Indeed, inclusion in the state’s catalog is not based on any independent validation or formal state vetting; it’s granted following biannual vendor self-checks, which take the form of thin FAQ documents. Stunningly, despite being vendor-authored and “not verified,” these files are distributed to districts on official TEA government letterhead PDFs via the TIA website, thereby oxymoronically signaling their contents are state-endorsed.

In further disclaiming, “Districts should confirm assessments meet all legal and local requirements,” Texas Education Agency foists its ed-tech vetting responsibility onto districts, whose TIA guidebooks often indicate their selections are based on the presumption that TEA has completed said vetting. In other words, Texas has created a kind of circular regulatory hot potato loop in which Curriculum Associates’ spurious claims of efficacy escape all necessary scrutiny, enabling i-Ready to be effectively self-approved into the TIA program.

Unsurprisingly, Curriculum Associates’ TIA FAQ instructs districts to measure student growth using its proprietary "Typical Growth" and “Stretch Growth” metrics. This is another deployment of CA’s notorious closed-loop evidence system, wherein it defines the baseline, sets the growth targets using proprietary algorithms, and writes, administers, and scores the tests. Everything under the i-Ready hood is a trade secret, meaning neither classroom teachers nor Texas state auditors can see test questions or verify how a student's target was calculated. It’s the ed-tech fox guarding the TIA henhouse — wearing a Texas Ranger uniform, no less.

Given that Curriculum Associates has also long been criticized by the likes of Johns Hopkins University and others for gilding its own lily with self-authored research, and is now facing a class action lawsuit alleging false advertising over those same science-washing marketing practices, this raises enormous red flags.

I reached out to Texas Education Agency multiple times to request comment on the vetting contradictions within their Third-Party Assessment Options Catalog, the propriety of distributing vendor-authored marketing documents on TEA stationery, the appropriateness of grading teachers using an unauditable proprietary black-box product, and whether they accept the US Surgeon General’s screen time advisory as valid. TEA Communications did not respond.

But Norma De La Rosa of the El Paso Teachers Association expressed certainty that this vital regulatory ball was indeed being dropped. “The way the districts are running right now is that they’ll see these programs coming through the TEA catalog, and they’re saying ‘we’re going to assume it’s a good program,’ without really vetting.”

Edu-Groupthink Blues

So how did i-Ready come to dictate K-3 teacher compensation in Texas? UT Austin’s Dr. Sarah Woulfin chalks this up to the herd mentality of educators, explaining, “Everyone in Texas knows that everybody’s using i-Ready, and so a lot of districts assume, ‘Dallas is using it, therefore it must be a good thing’ — but we actually don’t know the impact of i-Ready in Dallas or Alief.”

Woulfin notes that Curriculum Associates’ self-authored research also fills a void that’s been created by a dearth of legitimate research. “The education research community should take a little bit of blame that we have not spent more time and energy to try to study how districts and schools are taking up these ed-tech platforms.”

But Woulfin also laments that it’s increasingly difficult to conduct such research in Texas. “It’s hard to get access to schools and districts and it’s only gotten harder,” she said. “They don’t want too many eyes on what’s happening with products like [i-Ready].” She believes education administrators fear what transparency might reveal. “If I said I wanted to study how is i-Ready doing in kindergarten, I think folks would be like, ‘we’re not sure we want to show you how our kindergarteners are crying during i-Ready assessments.’”

A Nationwide i-Ready Pressure Cooker

It’s said that “as goes Texas, so goes the country.” And in many ways, Texas succumbing to Curriculum Associates’ data-based marketing narrative is not unusual. In the Lone Star State, as across America, the pressure exerted on educators to deliver higher i-Ready scores is often so intense, schools launch fever-pitch incentive campaigns. Parents are bombarded with flyers and invitations to special morning coffees and evening trainings, where school staff and Curriculum Associates employees jointly implore moms and dads to jack the kiddies into the i-Ready matrix for more screen time hours at home, too.

Worse, as explored in this series’ supercut videos, desperate educators resort to cringe-inducing “i-Ready Challenges” to stimulate student usage: offering bribes of sugar, cash prizes, video games, and humiliating acts of self-debasement like pies in the face — all because the stakes attached to i-Ready student usage rates can be career-derailing. This, of course, is classic panicked herd behavior borne of financial intimidation and professional existential dread.

Other states have also begun using i-Ready as a high-stakes lever. In California, Michigan, New York, and Florida—i-Ready usage is loosely woven into teacher evaluations, placement and promotion decisions, contract renewals, and the overall picture of teacher effectiveness. For now however, Texas still appears unique in cranking this pressure to eleven by explicitly tying i-Ready results into calculations for teacher bonuses.

I reached out to Curriculum Associates’ press office multiple times via email to request comment on whether the company condones the practice of tying i-Ready usage and data directly to Texas teacher compensation, and inquire what role (if any) the company plays in districts adopting such policies. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

But why would they? Because in retrospect, those were silly questions for me to ask. After all, i-Ready didn’t appear in the official TIA Third-Party Assessments Option catalog by divine intervention. Curriculum Associates applied to be included therein at the program’s inception, explicitly opting in its flagship product to become a high-stakes arbiter of teacher compensation. And Curriculum Associates has conscientiously renewed its TIA program participation for the past seven years, repeatedly updating those self-authored i-Ready Vendor FAQs that get distributed on TEA letterhead, in which CA deliberately markets and tailors its student growth models to satisfy state merit-pay criteria.

How i-Ready Messes With Texas

As America’s second-most populous state, Texas is clearly a major business priority for Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates. While the company does not publish public rosters of its client school districts, its market penetration in the Lone Star State is significant. CA produces a custom Texas-focused variant of i-Ready, and in a 2025 self-authored report, indicated that i-Ready is actively used in at least 149 Texas school districts.

Last month, Curriculum Associates also held its secretive annual “Ferguson Institute” event in Texas for the second time since 2024. This strictly private, invitation-only gathering exists to bring “district leaders together to share ideas and connect.” Photos posted to social media by Curriculum Associates and guests from Dallas ISD show CA’s C-Suite brass in attendance: CEO Kelly Sia, CIO Ty Holmes, and controversial ed-guru John Hattie, presenting on “Skills when using AI.”

While all details about Curriculum Associates’ Ferguson Institute are carefully guarded — including attendees and event content — public board meeting documents from one Arizona school district reveal the event to be a classic Ed-Swamp™ affair, with CA footing the bill for all district officials’ travel, registration, meals, and lodging at Austin’s tony Hyatt Regency conference resort.

In other words, like Curriculum Associates’ “Extraordinary Educators” program, the “Ferguson Institute” is nothing more than another ethically dubious luxury junket for public school district employees, bought and paid for by a private equity-backed ed-tech vendor with a documented penchant for mendacity and an ice-cold indifference to the cognitive health of children.

It’s at Ed-Swamp™ events like The Ferguson Institute, where Curriculum Associates wines and dines district officials, that the big i-Ready deals are brokered, and tens of thousands of helpless teachers’ fates are sealed.

All Data, No Cattle

And so in Texas, i-Ready remains entrenched, effectively self-approved into the TIA program despite lacking any verification or legitimate proof of effectiveness. Most egregiously, it is deployed aggressively against K-3 students, who are most likely to suffer harm from its hours of screen-based tedium. This at the hands of their very own teachers, pressured to crack the whip on the very littlest ones under their care — all to deliver results that primarily benefit Curriculum Associates’ bottom line.

As for 25-year kindergarten teacher Ms. S, she’s equal parts fatalistic and resigned. “I think TIA was supposed to motivate teachers, but people at this point are like, ‘if I get it, I get it, if I don’t, I don’t,’” she said. “God knows I could use the money,” she said, “but I feel bad when it’s messing up all these kids.”

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Last week, the online photo licensing giant Getty Images filed for bankruptcy. Founded in 1995, Seattle-based Getty has enjoyed an epic run, but increasingly looks poised to go the way of the Dodo — another pillar in the temple of human artistry being carpet-bombed by soulless A.I. drones. Sadly, in an era where chatbots can instantly vomit out virtually perfect slop of whatever your noodle can dream up, the business model of paying for visuals generated by us camera-toting primates is pretty much toast.

I have complicated feelings about this. As a photography lover and creative pro who’s done time across many sectors of media, I’ve licensed Getty assets for countless projects over the years. I even remember using many other services that Getty has since gobbled up: PhotoDisc, Archive Photos, Image.net, etc. That rapacious scale has long made Getty both a blessing and a scourge for anyone working in creative roles — an indispensable one-stop resource, yes, but also overpriced and tediously rigid in its usage limits.

Still, fundamentally Getty has been an ally to human creativity. It has provided an invaluable service to the creative community — making untold gazillions of visuals instantly accessible at the click of a mouse. It has also ensured photographers are compensated for their work, and democratized the field by empowering unknown, aspiring creators to upload their output for monetized licensing via its platform. This sparked a vibrant new economy, with photographers around the world generating speculative, lavishly polished imagery for every conceivable editorial and marketing need — however ultra-niche or even bizarre.

In fact, photographers’ collective output became so voluminous and imaginative, at one online magazine I produced for a big legacy media outfit in the mid-aughts, our editorial team created a popular “Insane Stock Photos” running feature to highlight the sheer hilarious absurdity of it all: from heat-packing cat ladies to corny corporate douchery to, um, deeply perplexing boudoir tableaus. On one hand, that wellspring of visual product was a glorious manifestation of humanity’s limitless imagination and industrious spirit, but on the other, it was symptomatic of the rapid commodification of the image — a harbinger of the A.I.-scraped implosion to come.

As the glut of quality stock imagery grew, the first casualty was the bespoke professional photo shoot — a previous mainstay of media production. Increasingly, instead of booking an expensive photographer and studio time, I found myself clicking over to Getty. By the late-aughts, multiple pro photographers I knew had reluctantly thrown in the towel to pursue other careers. One lamented to me, “my images are now worth pennies on the dollar to what they were just a few years ago.” Alas, in the A.I. era, that slow-swinging creative wrecking ball has become a whirring chain mace, and I confess to contributing to Getty’s current financial pickle.

Most recently, after paying a monthly subscription to Getty’s iStockPhotos for umpteen years, I cancelled it in 2025. Why? Because overall, GenAI photos are now as good as generic stock — and for creatives on deadline, mayhaps a bit better. Look at the two chimps atop this page. Can you tell which is the real Getty image? Yeah, I can too — but only if I pause to really scrutinize, despite the Getty image (on the left) costing thirty times more. So which one would I pick if I started producing some crappy new ad campaign tomorrow? Much as it pains me to say, probably the A.I., and not just because I’m a penny-pinching tech whore.

The truth is that using stock photo/video has always meant settling for something less-than-ideal. Most creative directors will tell you we already have a crystal-clear vision of a desired visual before ever searching a resource like Getty: the subject, style, lighting, composition, etc. Unfortunately, even if you’re lucky, a typical stock media asset might be 68% in sync with your vision. But suddenly, with a well-written prompt, GenAI visuals can get you to 91% — basically for free. That’s why A.I. images have largely replaced stock in projects for so many creative pros. (Mind you, I’m so anal, whether I’m using human-made or GenAI stock, I still spend hours in Adobe programs tweaking and recompositing to achieve my desired 100%.)

But even this reality shall not last. Because in the span of five short years, we have gone from A.I. images that looked like grotesque hallucinations, to realistic-but-flawed eight-fingered facsimiles, to the present: where the A.I. tells are increasingly hard to discern — even for those of us who can spot a stray pixel from twenty paces. At this rate of advancement, A.I. photography will be indistinguishable from true photographs in just a year or two.

As much as I’ve always loved stock photography, I’ll concede it’s a lower art form — what Hallmark greeting cards are to epic poetry, or Kraft Easy Mac is to haute cuisine. So maybe we needn’t mourn stock. Perhaps it was fated to be displaced, much as photography largely obliterated the artistic tradition of formal oil portraiture — itself once a load-bearing pillar of that temple of human artistry. History abounds with antecedents to A.I.’s decimation of photography: like what typesetting did to calligraphy, or green screens to hand-painted set backdrops, or Kanye West to melody. That’s not automatically a bad thing, either. Without the disruption of photography, painting might never have evolved to give us impressionism, surrealism, or pop art. Imagine poor Andy Warhol doomed to painting Baroque frescos of Nancy Reagan!

And that’s why even some A.I. skeptics agree with the blathering A.I. boosters who insist that A.I., in eviscerating demand for commodity human-produced stock photography, might spark a renaissance for prestige photography. They theorize that once A.I. liberates humanity from the drudgery of commercial creativity, we’ll be empowered to pursue our authentic muses and achieve new heights of capturing the beauty and nuance of the meat puppet experience. So could it be that A.I. will somehow indirectly birth the next generation of trailblazing, genre-spawning photo geniuses to rival Diane Arbus or Joel Peter Witkin? (Yeah, I like the weird ones.)

It’s a nice enough utopian fantasy, but no, it won’t. That’s because photography is like no other visual art; it exists at the intersection of art, engineering, and science — merging the aesthete’s eye with the engineer’s aperture and chemist’s flash powder and dark room potions. Its purpose has never been merely to tickle the eye; it’s also to capture reality. Sure, it’s long been imperfect that way — from Josef Stalin’s primitive Ministry of Truth photo manipulations, to the staged second flag-raising at Iwo Jima, to the past quarter century of ubiquitous Photoshopping. Nevertheless, culturally we still subscribe to the assumption that each photograph, in its core essence, contains at least some kernel of physical truth. That’s why “the camera never lies” truism has long been a binding thread in the fabric of society. A.I. shreds that fabric to lint — forcing a disorienting paradigm shift by completely divorcing photo-real visuals from any real-real subjects for the first time in human history.

As a college undergrad studying culture and media, I was forced to read postmodern theorists like Roland Barthes and John Berger, who wrote at (tortured) length about the meanings of images. I loathed their unintelligibly convoluted and pompous prose, and yet now can’t help think they were prescient in challenging the idea of images as objective windows into reality. If either of those Eurotrash kooks were still living, they’d be having an absolute pseudo-intellectual field day deconstructing A.I.

That’s because A.I. has managed to do what the semioticians couldn’t: shatter our collective perception of the image. In beholding any visual in 2026, none of us can (or should) any longer accept its contents at face value. All bedrock verisimilitude has vanished; Big Tech has robbed from us the ability to believe our own eyes, because A.I. has irreparably altered and redefined photography. And in doing so, it has ushered us all into the bot-slop post-reality era, a diminished future wherein new, pure, honest and truly great photography — as we have understood it for two centuries — simply doesn’t exist.

Unless you count “send nudes” selfies…

R.I.P. Photography
1826-2026

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Today we have a brief follow-up on this series’ previous deep dive into “Extrordinary Educators” — ed-tech platform i-Ready’s fake award for laundering corporate marketing through real teachers and principals. As you may recall, educators selected for this bogus “honor” are flown all-expenses-paid on a luxury junket to Boston, where they are marched in front of cameras to shoot “I love i-Ready” testimonials for use in publisher Curriculum Associates’ marketing.

Indeed, in a recent interview with Indian trade magazine medianews4u.com, Curriculum Associates Chief Marketing Officer Sabine Mullin implicitly confirmed the Epostasy framing of Extraordinary Educators as exploitative — even saying the quiet parts out loud about “using” teachers:

“For us, the most powerful storytelling we have seen is when we have educators actually help us tell our story… Using videos, using real features, using imagery of real teachers”

- Sabine Mullin, i-Ready Chief Marketing Officer

Well it’s that time of year again, with Ms. Mullin’s marketing minions actively posting across social media to audition her new cast of affirmation-hungry ed-shills for the Extraordinary Educators “Class of 2027.” This inspired me to do two things:

1. Introducing: Exasperated Educators

According to Curriculum Associates’ website, since its first Extraordinary Educators class in 2020, just over 300 teachers and principals have been “celebrated” thusly. And while these hand-picked honorees have sung a pretty sycophantic marketing song, what about the other ~800,000 American K-8 math and ELA teachers forced to use i-Ready? You know, the ones who weren’t flown to Beantown for wining, dining, and Insta-Tok close-ups?

To celebrate all the unsung, principled teachers incarcerated in the i-Ready schoolhouse panopticon, Epostasy is proud to present its very own fake award: Exasperated Educators.

In this inaugural Exasperated Educator supercut video, we see but a few drops of the ocean of fury and resentment that teachers post across social media to protest the unproven, ineffective, and cognitively harmful screen-based sham that is i-Ready:

Watch EXASPERATED Educators

2. Apply to Extraordinary Educators

With submissions currently open, and Curriculum Associates still studiously ignoring my emails, I applied to become an Extraordinary Educator. CA doesn’t share who judges this farcical competition or what the scoring criteria are beyond “best in class use of i-Ready,” but we can at least scrutinize the application itself. As you’ll see below, it’s a pitifully thin SurveyMonkey form that bears no resemblance to a legitimate education award, consisting only of:

• Seven (7) questions about teachers’ social media footprints

• Four (4) questions about using i-Ready

• One (1) publicity waiver

• Zero (0) questions about personal teaching philosophy

• Zero (0) questions about building human relationships with kids & families

• Zero (0) professional references or recommendations

• Zero (0) work samples or lessons

So in terms of actual merit, i-Ready’s “Extraordinary Educators” award is essentially the academic version of an “Exquisite Epicurean” cooking trophy — as bestowed by White Castle or ConAgra.

Alas, my Extraordinary Educators application is certain to be rejected, despite all the heartfelt blood, sweat and tears I poured into it. I won’t win because I’m not an i-Ready educator; I’m just a nosey dad whose kid was victimized by a sophisticated ed-tech scam.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping YOU from self-nominating to become an Extraordinary Educator, too. Click here to submit your application by October 30th. If nothing else, it’s a lovely roundabout way to give some feedback to Curriculum Associates, who famously lock down commenting on their social media accounts. So toss your hat in the ring, and maybe we can meet up in Boston Common during the next cushy Extraordinary Educators junket. You’ll just need to smuggle me out some charcuterie and one of those bottomless dry martinis…

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Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its Extraordinary Educators program, including clarification of the program’s goals, how eligibility criteria are determined (including the rationale for prioritizing early-career principals and educators), and whether participants receive any financial compensation, honoraria, or other consideration for their contributions to the company’s blog, podcast, video, or other promotional content, beyond travel, meals, and lodging.

Previously:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

i-Ready Challenge Degradation

In the high-stakes world of i-Ready Challenges, educator dignity is often the first sacrifice. In today’s supercut video, we’re looking at the, um, unfortunate extremes to which local principals and teachers are pushed when districts mandate the ed-tech platform i-Ready by Curriculum Associates. That’s because when schools get judged, scored, and ranked on i-Ready’s meaningless black box metrics, budgetary and professional consequences skyrocket — prompting anxious admin and faculty to resort to outlandish, manipulative stunts to keep their students clocking maximum i-Ready screen time.

Watch the Supercut

So prepare to writhe in empathetic cringe as you watch America’s fine educators subject themselves to demeaning i-Ready promotion campaign gimmicks: getting taped to walls, pelted with water balloons, pied in the face, and even smothered in tattoos. It’s two minutes of farcical epic tragedy — a chilling snapshot of late-stage American Empire collapse, featuring a haunting score of jeering kiddie sadists thrilling to the debasement of their formerly proud role models!

All this, to keep children jacked into cognition-shredding digital snake oil. Aye yi yi…

- John

EPOSTASY Housekeeping Notes:

Coming Next Week: The long-awaited Part 5 of i-Ready i-Reckoning: How i-Ready Extorts Teachers into Obedient Servitude.

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Previously:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

The i-Ready Challenge: A Pointless Distraction

Today’s supercut video reveals how i-Ready by Curriculum Associates forces schools into a cringey new spin on the proverbial Three R’s: Reading, Writing, and Rabid Consumerism!

In our previous supercut, we saw how the “i-Ready Challenge” compels otherwise fine educators to frantically chase unhealthy screen time targets by pumping kids full of sugary treats. Today, we’re looking at the unsavory flip side of that same extrinsic reward coin: i-Ready Challenges that dangle CASH and PRIZES in a desperate attempt to keep children jacked into the i-Ready matrix — purely to boost the school’s cumulative i-Ready metrics in district evaluations.

Watch i-Ready CASH PRIZES Supercut

In the process, i-Ready Challenges teach a terrible lesson to students: that learning is not a pathway to intellectual fulfillment or life skills mastery, but merely a screen-based obstacle to be clicked past on a mad dash to the Dollar Store bauble bin. Indeed, with continuous raffles and lotteries and contests for cash and gift cards, i-Ready Challenges transform schools into tawdry roadside casinos, where kids peck at Chromebooks like grizzled old chain-smokers mindlessly cranking one-armed bandits, yearning for a paltry payday of dingy coins.

To be clear: the caring, committed educators seen in the supercut video are not to blame for this cartoonish state of affairs. The fault lies multiple pay grades higher: the superintendents, school boards, and administrators who license and mandate i-Ready after failing to properly vet it. After swallowing Curriculum Associates’ science-washed sales pitch, many school districts exert crushing pressure on their principals and teachers to increase i-Ready “Stretch Growth®” numbers, leaving educators little choice but to resort to manipulative, anxiety-drenched campaigns like the “i-Ready Challenge.”

The cruel irony, of course, is that i-Ready numbers are actually meaningless: they are borne of a black box algorithm that is proprietary, unauditable, and has never been proven to increase student proficiency or accurately predict outcomes on annual standardized tests. In chasing higher i-Ready numbers, administrators, educators, and students alike are reduced to dogs chasing their tails — an endless circular quest that ultimately accomplishes nothing but squandering precious classroom instruction time.

To borrow from intentional screen time advocate Emily Cherkin, who has long rightly called ed-tech “big tech in a sweater vest” — i-Ready is little more than Fortnight in a Mortarboard, and dangling cash incentives to make its torturous experience more “bearable” to children is truly a kind of desecration of the temple of learning.

But wait, because at some schools, it actually gets worse. How? You’ll see next week…

Watch i-Ready CASH PRIZES Supercut

- John

###

Related:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Los Angeles Unified School District is wasting no time rethinking classroom ed-tech under the leadership of new Superintendent Andrés E. Chait. Just weeks after launching a bold new Parental Consent policy that took a kind of anti-trust knife to the Google Classroom, the nation’s second-largest school district is now taking the truly remarkable step of empowering its roughly 200,000 secondary students (grades 6–12) to log in and formally evaluate its two dominant e-learning platforms: i-Ready and IXL.

Minors are typically given no voice in consequential district policy decisions, but yesterday LAUSD, which is currently conducting comprehensive audits of all its ed-tech vendor contracts, quietly posted a survey for students on its Schoology intranet. Headlined “STUDENTS WE WANT YOUR FEEDBACK!,” the survey asks kids to give their opinions on i-Ready and its closest competitor IXL Learning, both of which are used heavily within the district — and nationwide, with 17 and 11 million U.S. students respectively.

The brief survey opens by inquiring whether respondents have access to a computer and internet at home, before proceeding to ten refreshingly blunt questions about the ed-tech giants’ offerings. LA students are asked to rate the truthfulness of ten positive claims common in i-Ready and IXL marketing, including whether the platforms “help me understand,” “help me improve,” or “make learning fun.” Kids can grade those statements on a four-point scale ranging from “Completely True” to “Not At All True.” Crucially, students are also asked whether the diagnostic tests and screen-based lessons take “too much time.”

This is a survey that goes there; one that could never be authored by a district still fully captured by ed-tech’s magical thinking orthodoxy. i-Ready and IXL were conceived and built by adults, pitched by adults, and purchased by adults — yet this is the first big survey of the kids actually forced to use them. As reported previously in this series, across the Internet, American kids hate i-Ready so intensely and so vocally, publisher Curriculum Associates disables all commenting on its YouTube channels — and has even sicked its legal dogs on children for posting videos criticizing i-Ready.

So what will Los Angeles students have to say? We’ll have to stay tuned for the survey’s results, but speaking as an LAUSD parent who has witnessed tween birthday parties spontaneously devolve into ferocious hate sessions at the very mention of these products — and with spoiler regrets to anyone who hasn’t yet seen the 2025 horror masterpiece WEAPONS — I hereby predict that both i-Ready and IXL had best brace themselves for their very own Aunt Gladys finales:

LAUSD i-Ready and IXL Student Survey Questions

LAUSD i-Ready & IXL Student Evaluation Survey (September 2026)

2.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Complete flyer, announcement, and screenshots of formal survey of 200K Los Angeles Unified grade 6-12 students on the value and effectiveness of i-Ready & IXL Learning.

Download

Section 1: Welcome & Overview

You have been invited to take part in a conversation.

LAUSD is asking secondary students to share their thoughts on our diagnostics and personalized learning tools (i.e., i-Ready, IXL).

All surveys are voluntary, and no personally identifiable information will be requested from any participant

Section 2: Demographic & Background Questions

1. Region

   Options: East / North / South / West / I don’t know

2. Do you have access to a personal computer device (not issued by school/district) at home?

   Options: Yes/No

3. Do you have access to the internet (not issued by school/district) at home?

   Options: Yes/No

4. What grade are you in?

   Options: 6th / 7th / 8th / 9th / 10th / 11th / 12th

Section 3: i-Ready Inform Assessments

The following statements will ask that you rate what you think about the i-Ready Inform assessments which are online tests that measure your reading and math skills. Students take these tests two to three times each year.

1. The i-Ready Inform assessments help me understand when I need more support with my reading skills.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

2. The i-Ready Inform assessments help me understand when I need more support with my math skills.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

3. The i-Ready Inform assessments take...

   Options: Too much time / Just enough time / Too little time

Section 4: Personalized Instruction Lessons

1. Which personalized learning system do you use in your English and/or math classes?

   Options: i-Ready / IXL

[Questions Below for i-Ready option only]

The following statements will ask that you rate what you think about the Personalized Instruction lessons that you work on each week.

2. The i-Ready Personalized Instruction lessons help me understand which areas I need academic support in.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

3. The i-Ready Personalized Instruction lessons help me understand when I am ready for higher level work.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

4. The i-Ready Personalized Instruction lessons help me improve my reading skills.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

5. The i-Ready Personalized Instruction lessons help me improve my math skills.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

6. i-Ready lessons make learning fun.

   Options: Not at all true / A little true / Mostly true / Completely true

7. The i-Ready Personalized Instruction lessons take...

   Options: Too much time / Just enough time / Too little time

Section 5: Submission / Closing

Thank you for participating in this survey. Review your responses

[Submit]

Thank you. We’ve received your submission.

RELATED:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Hola Epostates! What does it say about a so-called educational platform like i-Ready when its compulsory use transforms otherwise caring, decent, level-headed principals and teachers into stressy schoolhouse Velmas frantically waving Scooby Snacks in pupils’ faces? Nothing good, obviously.

For the blissfully uninitiated, an “i-Ready Challenge” is when an entire school descends into a collective quasi-corporate madness to ensure children are clocking maximum screen time on various i-Ready products. It’s driven by pressure from school district administrators who’ve been sold a dishonest bill of goods from i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates: that there is scientific proof that their product will actually increase scores on the high-stakes annual standardized tests that decide school budgets, ratings, and leadership. This, of course, is the same science-washing lie which is now the basis of a landmark class action false advertising lawsuit against Curriculum Associates filed by plaintiff Center for Educational Progress.

Watch i-Ready Sugar Challenge Supercut

Nevertheless, the i-Ready Challenge remains a fixture in schools all across the country. Unfortunately, given the degree to which kids almost universally despise i-Ready, this puts principals and teachers in a real pickle. Actually no, pickles are too sour. Instead, the i-Ready Challenge puts educators in a dystopian candy store of their own making, desperately bribing kids with enough refined sugar to trigger instant-onset diabetic ketoacidosis. They hold assemblies, pep rallies, and even record social media video exhortations for all the kiddies to hop aboard the i-Ready Sucrose Express. While this may enable yours truly to gleefully edit egregiously juvenile supercuts, it’s also a deeply misguided tragedy on multiple levels.

Educationally, mountains of legitimate, peer-reviewed research1 spanning over half a century have clearly established that using “extrinsic rewards” like sweets usually backfires. By dispensing cheap tangible rewards for completing tedious academic tasks, educators create a transactional environment which depresses kids’ intrinsic interest and enthusiasm for learning. In other words: students focus on the sickly-sweet treat or shiny bauble instead of, you know, mastering squat.

Less discussed however is the health and nutrition angle. In an age of skyrocketing American obesity rates compounded by the same sedentary, screen-based existence Curriculum Associates promulgates, introducing yet more cavity-inducing sugar into kids’ i-Ready-packed days is nothing less than adding fatty insult to cognitive injury.

Watch i-Ready Sugar Challenge Supercut

And all the while, as i-Ready market penetration has continued to rise, American academic achievement continues to plummet — with the latest global PISA scores released just last week showing US kids at quarter-century lows, ranking 13th and 27th in reading and math, respectively.

Given how abundantly clear it is that the i-Ready Challenge in its current form is an abject failure, I’d like to issue a whole new kind of i-Ready Challenge to Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia:

Dear Kelly,

I challenge you to recall i-Ready immediately on public health grounds. If you apply yourself and do a good job, I’ll even send you a Snickers.

Love,

- John

PS - I’d like to repeat my big WELCOME to everyone from Curriculum Associates’ crisis PR agency Heller Communications, who continue to pore over my i-Ready i-Reckoning reports oh so very carefully. I must confess it really hurts my feelsies the way you guys ignore my emails and continue to give me the cold shoulder. I know Epostasy is hardly a prestige NewsCorp outlet (AHEM!), but I’d still love to chat. Drop me a line, huh?

Related:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad of an i-Ready victim based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

For anyone who’s still fuzzy or dubious about whether ed-tech has infected American schools with an all-new flavor of sheer lunacy, today we have a special video treat. I’ve produced a short “supercut” which snaps the issue into focus — using snippets of YouTube motivational videos from scores of real schools.

Watch i-Ready Screen Time Supercut

During my years as a Late Night TV producer, ye olde supercut was among my favorite comedy formats; it’s crazy labor-intensive — requiring deep research, watching oceans of raw video, and untold hours of editing to distill it all down to reveal some cultural zeitgeist moment or unfortunate groupthink trend in a way that eclipses even the best-written satirical commentary. The supercut’s great strength is that it’s impossible to fabricate; it hinges on pure organic volume and the guileless authenticity of real, decent people propelled by forces beyond their control. The viewer isn’t prompted to laugh at the subjects — only the utter absurdity of our shared societal plight.

This is the first of (at least) two Epostasy i-Ready supercuts, and it serves two purposes:

First, it’s a coda to Part 4 of i-Ready i-Reckoning, wherein we explored Curriculum Associates’ panicked and deeply dishonest claims about i-Ready screen time in response to the explosive popular backlash against screen-based learning. Since that installment was published in June, Curriculum Associates has continued to ramp up its obfuscation of i-Ready screen time, with CEO Kelly Sia still silently cowering MIA in her bunker while dispatching (increasingly bedraggled) spokesman Ty Holmes to appear on podcasts to pooh-pooh the reality that i-Ready has always encouraged maximum screen time. (Additionally, an all-new “i-Ready for Families” web page takes the screenwashing to a new level; not a single image of kids on computers is included.)

Second, this supercut is a preview of sorts of the forthcoming Part 5 of i-Ready i-Reckoning, which will explore the pressure cooker environment that i-Ready creates in schools, and the outlandish, submissive theatrics to which it condemns educators who wish to keep their jobs.

Until then, kindly enjoy (for lack of a better word) and spread the word about the i-Ready i-Reckoning Screen Time Supercut.

Watch i-Ready Screen Time Supercut

Thanks, Epostates.

- John

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Howdy, Epostates! So how about that juicy $18 Billion legal settlement imposed on Meta last week? I confess I was too preoccupied sipping celebratory frosty goblets of Schadenfreude to bother churning out hyper-timely #content about it, but suffice it to say that, at long last, the public (and courts!) are awakening to the reality that Meta products are a singular malignancy on humanity. This makes now a dandy time for a shameless plug — er, friendly reminder:

My 2020 kids book “The Liking Tree” remains Earth’s only cautionary fable specifically dedicated to inoculating youth from the inhuman, psyche-shredding abominations that are Facebook & Instagram! With the holidays fast approaching, there’s no time like the present for loading up on copies for all the precious tots in your life who deserve better than drowning in Zuckerborg’s bottomless digital cesspool of narcissism, cruelty, and corporate surveillance. More importantly, it’s a subversively fun read that ain’t all preachy — because what kid wants that?

ORDER "THE LIKING TREE"

Praise for The Liking Tree

ORDER "THE LIKING TREE"

The Story

In this modern parody spin on Shel Silverstein’s beloved classic The Giving Tree, two children befriend a strange tree, and quickly become enchanted by its flattery and dazzling distractions. But time goes by, and as the tree’s selfish, exploitative nature is revealed, the children must decide whether to live by its lonely rules, or walk away and rediscover the joys of real life and true friendship.

DOWNLOAD PDF PREVIEW

The Liking Tree is Part One of “Screen Time Tales,” my series of kid-friendly satirical stories wherein Mother Goose meets Black Mirror.

Thanks for indulging the self-serving promo. Epostasy will return with fresh Big Tech evisceration later this week.

- John

More EPOSTASY Love for Meta:

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) is setting a bold example for school districts everywhere with muscular new efforts to restore analog classroom sanity for its half-million K-12 students. After years of rubber-stamping the tech-fanboy agenda of disgraced former Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, LA’s school board is repenting under parental pressure — pivoting for the 2026-2027 school year with a strict new screen time reduction policy and other corrective steps towards smothering the ed-tech monster in its crib. Impressively, they’re even kicking things off by taking on the industry’s most entrenched player: Google, whose ed-wares dominate in over 90% of US public school districts.

Two weeks ago, my son started 9th grade at a beautifully modernized LAUSD high school. In a sea change, so far he has reported largely screen-free days, with most of his new teachers happily announcing that their classes will be overwhelmingly paper-based this year. It’s not perfect; worthless i-Ready assessments have already been conducted (he refused them), but no take-home Chromebooks have been issued, and last year’s phone bans remain in effect. Kids are socializing and making new friends. The overall improvement is dramatic — if far from complete.

Chopping Apart the Google Classroom

Especially noteworthy is LA Unified’s shiny new “Consent Portal” website, which deftly unbundles Google’s tightly integrated “Workspace for Education” suite of apps — almost like an antitrust breakup — allowing parents to approve or reject screen-based apps in several district-authored granular categories, which replace Google’s catch-all (and legally self-serving) “Additional Services” consent bucket. This finally puts families in the screen time drivers seat, empowered to reject (at least some of) Silicon Valley’s in-class predation.

What follows is a look at how LAUSD’s new Google Consent Form further breaks apart the Google Workspace/Classroom ed-juggernaut: what works, what’s still concerning, and what choices my family ultimately made. (But hey — you do you!)

LAUSD Google Consent Form 2026-2027

1.02MB ∙ PDF file

Download

LAUSD Google Workspace / Classroom Opt-Out Consent Form for Parents (Full Version)

Download

Banning YouTube — Finally

Thankfully, one Google service that Los Angeles parents won’t be able to approve or decline is YouTube, which is now blocked and banned for all LAUSD students. One year ago, I wrote about witnessing YouTube reducing Los Angeles classrooms to sheer anarchic chaos in “OK Google, Make Middle School Suck Even More.” The urgency of blocking YouTube from schools cannot be overstated, and LAUSD’s school board is to be applauded for a step that is guaranteed to pay big achievement dividends.

The LAUSD Google Consent Categories

1. “CORE SERVICES”
   What’s Included: Nine products; mostly Google’s familiar cloud copies of Microsoft Office: Docs, Sheets, Drive, Calendar, Gmail, Sites, Tasks, and Classroom.
   Evaluation: This is the only category which mirrors Google’s own grouping and labeling. It includes just Google Classroom plus the pragmatic software basics; even for parents wanting to limit classroom screen time as much as possible, these apps remain (for now, anyway) legitimate and utilitarian productivity tools that promote necessary computer literacy.

   Verdict: CONSENTED. (Besides, this is the software most of us assumed classroom Chromebooks would be limited to in the first place.)

2. “CURRICULUM & CULTURAL LEARNING”
   What’s Included: Google Books, Google Arts & Culture, and Colab (a tool for writing computer code in the Python programming language).
   Evaluation: The coding app obviously has no analog equivalent, while Books and Arts & Culture are mere digital library collections. Sure, paper versions of the latter two might be preferable, but the content therein is legitimately educational.
   Verdict: CONSENTED.

3. “RESEARCH & REFERENCE”
   What’s Included: Google Earth, Maps, Translate, and News
   Evaluation: This unfortunate grouping is where things start getting dicey. While Earth, Maps, and Translate are all borderline-magical tech triumphs with legitimate educational value, including Google News is a deal-breaker. That product is an algorithmically-powered third-party content stream, and the quality control for publisher inclusion is virtually non-existent. (I currently have 198 “hidden sources” that I’ve blocked from appearing my Google News feed over the years: fly-by-night purveyors of misinformation, clickbait, tribal rage, salacious gossip, video game drivel, crypto-pumping e-rags, and vacuous search engine content farms.) Consenting to Google News opens the floodgates to in-class gorging on a bottomless buffet of brainrot masquerading as journalism. It’s sheer content distraction.
   Verdict: REJECTED. Students can consult an analog map, globe, or atlas, and instant access to Google Translate is obviously problematic in the context of language classes anyway.

4. “DEVICE EXTENSION & 3RD PARTY APPS”
   What’s Included: Chrome Web Store
   Evaluation: Behold the third rail Trojan Horse! LAUSD claims the Chrome Web Store allows students to install third-party “educational applications necessary to support their learning.” They further assert that students will be limited to apps “reviewed and approved by the District.” No list of apps are provided, nor are the review & approval criteria.
   Verdict: REJECTED. Sorry, but even if presently talking a good digital detox game, a district that recently granted children wide-open web access and still chains them to bogus i-Ready online diagnostics must earn trust. Granting any school board carte blanche to jack your kid into undisclosed new software should be a non-starter for all parents keen to keep the ed-tech vultures at bay.

At this point, in the spectacularly unlikely event you haven’t already dozed off, I feel obliged to apologize, because this is officially the most boring thing I’ve ever had occasion to write. Rescue me Lord, for I am literally reviewing a public school bureaucracy’s liability mitigation website form! And yet my inner subversive nerd can’t help but savor this form’s potentially pivotal role in the epic David vs. Goliath struggle now unfolding across the ed-landscape: We Puny Mortals vs. Silicon Valley. And in Los Angeles, the biggest city of the world’s fourth largest economy, Goliath is now losing.

Google Lies About Ed-Tech

Moreover, Goliath (Googliath?) still hasn’t gotten the memo that parents aren’t buying its pitch anymore. In a “Back to School 2026” update posted just last week on the official Google blog, the tech giant crows deviously about the purported validity of their non-core services.

That, of course, is a steaming crock of e-shit — and precisely why it is incumbent upon parents everywhere to continue holding their districts’ feet to the fire. In Los Angeles, parent group Schools Beyond Screens has done tremendous work helping steer the school board in a new and sensible direction.

LAUSD deserves congratulations on setting important policy precedents in the initial steps towards undoing its ed-tech train wreck. The momentum looks promising, and if you’re one of LAUSD’s one million parents, you can indulge a glimmer of new hope that what remains of your child’s K-12 education might yet still be salvaged.

If you’re not an LAUSD parent, but suddenly wish you were, well then this is your chance to exploit the infamous herd mentality of the American education community. If your school district remains mired in the Ed-Swamp™, attend a school board meeting, and point to Los Angeles Unified as proof it’s still possible to practice time-tested analog learning in a digital world, and that yes, districts can tacitly confess and repent for unleashing a slow-motion cognitive 9/11 on an entire generation of children.

OK, maybe don’t say the last part. It’s mayhaps a tad too impolitic to be productive. (Besides, they already know, and it keeps them awake at night...)

###

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Back-to-School 2026 is upon us! For most sensible humans, that means stocking up on pencils, notebooks, and refilling those Adderall XL scripts for a generation so screen-frazzled, they can’t read anything longer than a TikTwit meme. But for Curriculum Associates, publisher of i-Ready, Back-to-School means it’s a hunky-dory time to stuff its “learning” platform full of — what else? — increased brain-melting VIDEO GAME content.

Mark Bernstein is Curriculum Associates’ National Director of Content & Implementation — a “comedian” spokesman who churns out chirpy-cringey social media videos to promote harmful new i-Ready features or put a rictus grin on its latest lousy software design glitch. (Sometimes, you can almost see Mark’s soul leaving his body!)

Last week found Mr. Bernstein really cutting loose, shooting from the hip selfie-style on the banks of a literal Ed-Swamp to announce, “Big things are coming to i-Ready Pro for the 2026-2027 school year!” Suspiciously though, Mark buried the video game lede behind 30 seconds of snoozy corporate prattle, so I took the liberty of reshuffling his latest masterpiece into 60 seconds of… frankness.

WATCH NOW

Evidently, after several months of Curriculum Associates’ top executives rolling out vacuously performative “thought leadership” essays in which they feign sensitivity to parental outrage over the predatory lobotomyware to which they tether our children for profit, back-to-school is also back-to-business time. And never forget: that business is private equity-backed SCREEN TIME — the more the better as far as Team i-Ready is concerned.

But speaking of more, stay tuned for much more i-Ready i-Reckoning as the school year gets rolling, Epostates. As Dr. Seuss said in one of those “book” thingies that kids used to read, “Oh, the places we’ll go!”

Toodles,

- John

Support EPOSTASY: Buy Post-Tech Swag

Shop Epostasy

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

A New i-Ready Lawsuit

Curriculum Associates, the ed-tech publisher of ubiquitous classroom gerbil wheel i-Ready, is facing a new theatre of legal woes: this time over false advertising claims that its product is educationally legitimate. In a landmark lawsuit filed July 31st in Washington D.C., plaintiff Center for Educational Progress (CEP) cites original reporting from the i-Ready i-Reckoning series in alleging that Curriculum Associates violates the Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by using “innuendo and ambiguity” to “mislead reasonable consumers,” and harms children by squandering unrecoverable instruction time with its “crude screener” product whose proof of efficacy is dishonestly “measured on a loop of its own making.”

Noting that i-Ready is “the most widely deployed K–8 educational-technology product in the United States,” CEP v. Curriculum Associates declares that i-Ready marketing is false and deceptive because “the studies Curriculum Associates markets as proof… draw on Curriculum Associates’ own data” — noting that all such so-called proof is essentially “Curriculum Associates’ test of Curriculum Associates’ lessons,” in which the self-dealing defendant “writes the test, supplies the lessons, generates the data, and grades the result.” This is the same closed-loop evidence system I first revealed as “An Unproven Triumph of Science-Washing” in Part One of this series — which is cited as an exhibit within the lawsuit.

Thomas Briggs, Director of Operations at Center for Educational Progress, framed the lawsuit as a long-overdue reality check for an ed-tech profiteer peddling lies, telling me: “Curriculum Associates sold a product to D.C. schools and D.C. families and students as being a real diagnostic, actually being personalized, and backed by research—and they’ve made a lot of money because of those misleading or false claims. We think that D.C. taxpayers are entitled to damages, and to stop being falsely advertised to.” CEP is a Washington DC 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose declared mission is “protecting consumers, students, families, classroom teachers, and the taxpaying public in the nigh-unregulated educational technology market.”

In its complaint, CEP argues that Curriculum Associates violates Washington D.C.’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA), which guarantees consumers a right to truthful information from merchants, by making multiple deceptive claims in its marketing:

Fake Diagnostic, Fake Personalized Learning, and a “Fidelity” Escape Hatch

1. A “Diagnostic” Fraud: CEP points out that the “i-Ready Diagnostic” is not a true diagnostic at all, declaring the product is analogous to “the difference between a check-engine light and a mechanic’s report. A check-engine light tells you something is wrong. A diagnostic tells you what is wrong. In essence, Curriculum Associates sells the light and calls it the report.”

(Tellingly, in apparent awareness of this liability, Curriculum Associates rebranded “i-Ready Diagnostic” as “i-Ready Inform” in late 2025.)

2. A “Personalized Learning” Fraud: Validating widespread complaints from educators that i-Ready routinely assigns screen-based lessons that are wildly inappropriate for students’ actual mastery levels, CEP documents how i-Ready’s promise of “personalized learning” is in fact “not tailored to any student’s actual skill level” and assigns “the same generic lesson sequences to students with materially different specific skill gaps.”

3. A “Fidelity” Fraud: CEP’s filing highlights Curriculum Associates’ use of popular ed-tech guidelines (see also: IXL, Dreambox, Amplify, et al.) that its product should be used “with fidelity” — meaning students must meet minimum i-Ready screen time thresholds. The suit denounces this as a contractual “escape hatch” which “shifts the risk of underperformance onto students, families, and teachers” — and points to CA’s practice of producing self-authored, science-washed “evidence” which omits negative outcomes by reporting exclusively on test scores of students who clock maximum i-Ready screen time.

CEP v. Curriculum Associates further complains that ed-tech products like i-Ready have essentially been given carte blanche to colonize Washington D.C.’s classrooms because “no federal labeling regime, no FDA-style efficacy review, and no comprehensive state oversight operates to ensure that vendor claims are truthful.” In establishing standing to file suit under the Consumer Protection Procedures Act, the plaintiff asserts, “Curriculum Associates’ deceptive marketing of i-Ready is exactly the kind of conduct CEP was organized to expose, document, and counteract, and the consumers i-Ready harms are the consumers CEP exists to serve.”

The suit is filed on behalf of all District of Columbia School District (DCSD) K-8 students compelled to use i-Ready products — including their parents or caregivers. It seeks a permanent injunction prohibiting Curriculum Associates from “deceptive and unfair trade practices,” and demands the defendant be required to run “corrective advertising” and disclosures on i-Ready products. It also seeks refunds of millions of dollars in i-Ready licensing fees paid by DCSD, and damages of $1500 per violation. With approximately 30,000 K-8 students presently enrolled in DCSD, that could translate into damages exceeding $240 million.

This marks the second suit filed against i-Ready’s publisher in just eight months. The first, class action M.C. v. Curriculum Associates, was filed in Massachusetts federal court in late 2025, and accuses the company of violating child-privacy laws by conducting digital surveillance on minors in their own homes to create “highly intimate academic and psychographic profiles of children.” That case remains active, with CA strenuously denying its allegations, despite i-Ready’s fundamental reality of being an always-on, compulsory, Internet-connected product designed for industrial-scale harvesting of children’s personally identifiable data.

But lawsuits focused on child privacy violations let Curriculum Associates and other ed-tech corporations wield a defense that essentially argues, “mass data collection is just how the interweb works” — asserting that their privacy violations represent but a minuscule, irrelevant side effect of the format of an entire industry. They argue, in effect, “You can’t blame a book publisher for paper cuts — even if we use razor blades for pages.”

CEP v. Curriculum Associates, however, shines a spotlight on the bogus in-house “research” which is the foundation of i-Ready sales and marketing — willful, premeditated, and lavishly funded science-washing efforts borne entirely of internal corporate strategy. It will litigate the actual content of the mendacious, self-authored “evidence” and bought-and-paid-for commissioned studies with which Curriculum Associates has successfully hoodwinked naïve school district procurement officials into signing multi-million dollar contracts.

Moreover, CEP’s lawsuit, while specific to Curriculum Associates and D.C. Public Schools, touches on the core business practices of the entire unregulated ed-tech industry, which plays egregiously fast and loose with unproven pedagogical claims, officiously camouflaged with oceans of meaningless data, while it conducts a vast, reckless cognitive experiment on millions of helpless American children.

Should i-Ready lose the lawsuit, it will set legal precedent that is virtually guaranteed to unleash a tsunami of litigation across the country, condemning Curriculum Associates and its fellow ed-tech charlatans to the same existential reckoning now confronting their kissin’ cousins in Big Social Media.

And won’t that be just peachy to watch? So stay tuned, Epostates — it’s going to be one hell of a school year!

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: This heartfelt love letter was first published on LinkedIn earlier this morning. If you’re a LinkedInmate, kindly consider liking and sharing it there to help subvert their AI-boosting algorithm. Mayhaps together, we can trigger the LinkedIn Apocalypse!

Dearest LinkedInmates,

Do you adore thinking, reading, and prattling ad nauseam about artificial intelligence all day, every day? If so, then boy-howdy is LinkedIn 2026 ever a paradise for you — because this joint sure has pitched one heckuva tent for AI, hasn’t it?

If your LinkedIn feed is anything like mine, it’s a cartoonish AI circus of pontificating clowns and carnival barkers squawking “artificial intelligence this” and “agentic large language model that.” This stampeding herd of incessantly “grateful” boosters, hangers-on, and chatbot wannabes seems organic — but is it really?

The charitable explanation is that LinkedIn’s core user base (performative groupthink corporate dingdongs) has indeed once again pivoted en masse towards The Emperor’s Newest Shiny Object. This is their moth-like way, after all, desperate to seem professionally desirable by radiating gushing enthusiasm tinged with future-forward savvy.

Anyone who has suffered LinkedIn long enough has seen this show umpteen times before, whenever Big Tech rolls out some faddish new scam: Google Glass, NFTs, meme coins, VR, ed-tech, the metaverse, and literally anything sprung from the sociopathic mind of serial predatory huckster Mark Zuckerborg. Every time, the same gullible nitwits and sycophants start dutifully banging their LinkedIn bandwagon bongos.

A less charitable (but more likely) explanation is that after pegging any and all rational users as tech apostates, LinkedIn’s algorithm mercilessly bombards us with vacuous drivel about artificial intelligence — purely to trigger us. After all, “engagement” is best driven by negative emotions, which is why the entire social media industry (including khakis-clad LinkedIn) has long “optimized” content feeds to press our buttons and incite knee-jerk annoyance and tribal discord. In essence, the social algorithm produces our own private Clockwork Orange struggle sessions.

But herdthink and algorithmic stalking, even working in tandem, can’t explain the enormous scale of LinkedIn’s current AI orgy. No, it’s too next-level — totally eclipsing all previous myopic lemming swarms on this platform. To wit, there’s more going on here than meets the glowing killbot eye.

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft — a top five Big Tech corporation with a $3 trillion valuation. Microsoft runs 400+ data centers, holds a $14 billion stake in OpenAI, and integrates its “Copilot” AI product anywhere and everywhere it possibly can.

Now I’ve never been one to indulge tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. They typically focus on government, and presume politicians are disciplined adults rather than the obtuse, gossiping teenyboppers of whom Benjamin Franklin famously snarked, “three can keep a secret — if two of them are dead.”

When it comes to Big Tech however, there’s no need to theorize when their global AI domination strategies are splashed across the pages of cheerleader trade rags like TechCrunch and VentureBeat — and proudly enshrined within corporate annual reports and IPO filings. Indeed, that’s just Silicon Valley Oligarchy bidness as usual.

But while hubristically transparent about their omnipotent end game, Big Tech still guards the contents of its algorithms like Fort Knox for a reason: they are its levers of mass human cognitive manipulation and psychological control — the brainwashing secret sauce for reaping historically obscene profits by entombing us worthless insects in its worldwide digital ant farm.

If you don’t believe that LinkedIn has specifically tweaked its recommendation algorithm for Big Daddy Microsoft as part of a larger communications strategy to normalize artificial intelligence through ubiquitous AI-glazing babble, then I have several lovely Bay Area bridges to sell you. And that is why your LinkedIn feed looks like a marathon circle jerk at Sam Altman’s house. Because when everyone sees that the only posts getting algorithmic love are all AI, AI, and yet more AI, they drop trou and join the tedious me-too party.

And for the record — I’m not blaming LinkedIn employees. That wouldn’t be fair to their memories, after their AI overlords long ago reduced 93% of them into cherry Soylent Green smoothies.

But I, for one, refuse to stoop so low as to ramble gratuitously about artificial intelligence in some cheap, desperate attempt to game LinkedIn’s AI-optimized algorithm to send eyeballs my way. No sir, I would never pack my exquisitely crafted non-AI prose with search-optimized AI gobbledygook about artificial intelligence, also known as “A.I.” — and not to be confused with AI: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film about AI). No, because that would be artificially non-intelligent, whereas I strive always for non-artificial intelligence. Anyhoo, isn’t this a great 100% AI-free read — replete — with — em — dashes — galore? Artificial intelligence wunderkind ClaudeGPT couldn’t grok it better even if it was using its artificial intelligence LLM self. As if! (a.k.a. “AI”)

So yeah, if you’re reading this on LinkedIn, we’ve both been played as infinitesimally useful cogs in the Microsoft machine — clicking and talking and writing and texting and yammering artificial intelligence blabbity-blab like the dutiful little AI-validating meat puppets we are.

But I will NEVER do it again.

Unless this blows big and scores 69 gazillion likes, of course. Then I’ll dutifully chug my frothy stein of LinkedIn AI Kool-Aid each and every day.

In the meantime, keep it real for as long as you can, LinkedInmates. Question everything Microsoft feeds you here. Because the actual LinkedIn product has always been you and me — and make no mistake: we’re being methodically fattened up to swallow whatever putrid new e-grift they're bottling next.

Cheers!

Your Transactional LinkedIn Cubicle Pal,

- John

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

For sales people in the education technology (“ed-tech”) biz, there is no juicier quarry than the gullible superintendent of a big city school district. With czar-like dominion over multi-billion dollar budgets and the pedagogical vision for hundreds of thousands of students, an urban superintendent — when expertly seduced at a swanky education conference or private executive retreat — is the ultimate fast track to inking sweet eight-figure procurement contracts.

And so it was with Alberto Carvalho, who from 2008-2026 served as the immaculately manicured Superintendent for not one, but two of America’s top five school districts. During his reigns at Miami-Dade and LAUSD, Carvalho aggressively cultivated a pro-tech “digital innovator” personal brand that netted him five “Superintendent of the Year” honors and multiple trips to the White House. But last month it all came crashing down, when Carvalho resigned from LA Unified in disgrace following FBI raids on his home and office to investigate unseemly financial dealings with AllHere, an AI ed-tech vendor.

Carvalho may be the most prominent administrator brought low by dicey entanglements with Big Tech, but he will almost certainly not be the last. That’s because today’s superintendents dwell in a professional landscape I do hereby dub “The Ed-Swamp™” — an ethically brackish bog where glitzy private conferences and summits serve as lily pads for Silicon Valley sales toads, who croak sweet ed-tech nothings into superintendents’ ears while locking in unfettered predatory access to America’s children.

Super Supremacy

The public doesn’t give much thought to school superintendents; we know they’re major bureaucrats and, um, yawn. But we should, because a big city super’s power actually eclipses that of most mayors — and more than a few governors. At Los Angeles Unified, America’s second-largest district, Alberto Carvalho controlled an annual budget of around $20 billion. That’s more than the entire annual state-wide operating budgets of New Hampshire, Idaho, and both Dakotas — combined.

During Carvalho’s tenures at Miami-Dade (2008-2022) and Los Angeles Unified (2022-2026), the Superintendent became a veritable ed-tech zealot — spending lavishly in tireless pursuit of his vision to replace books, paper and chalkboards with screens. Unfortunately for the 2 million children enrolled under his watch, Carvalho succeeded, making chaos-sowing 1:1 devices and unproven e-learning slopware like i-Ready standard in classrooms. But as a suave public education celebrity, Carvalho’s influence extended far beyond Miami and LA; he’s been an influential poster boy for normalizing screen-based schools for a generation of American kids.

Before his June 21st resignation from LAUSD, Carvalho had been in limbo for four months, banished by the seven-member School Board to an ignominious paid leave while it initiated a review of all his ed-tech contracts. It was a head-spinning turn of events for the superintendent, who for years had enjoyed slavish board support, with swift rubber-stamp approvals of his budgets and a unanimous vote to extend his contract just weeks prior. But the FBI dragnet instantly rendered Carvalho a radioactive pariah; he received nary a word of post-raid public support from LAUSD.

That’s because school board members, after all, are publicly elected officials — and like all craven politicos, their true priority is ensuring they get reelected. (In Los Angeles, a school board seat pulls a starting base salary of $127,000, plus a veritable buffet of juicy taxpayer-funded health and retirement benefits.) So when a board’s hand-selected Superintendent is investigated for malfeasance under their supposed oversight, they will more often than not promptly toss the accused under the school bus. While Carvalho has still not been charged with any crime, and publicly voiced his desire to return to work, the LA Times reported the board had recently threatened termination — effectively forcing his resignation.

But in a much more ominous development for Big Ed-Tech, the day after Carvalho’s resignation, that same previously submissive board unanimously approved a new policy strictly limiting in-school screen time. This represents a very public repudiation of Carvalho’s entire tech-driven philosophy, tenure, and legacy. The new LAUSD policy, while woefully inadequate (more on that another day), acknowledges the inherently harmful nature of screens on child health and cognition, and represents the first phase of a profound course correction away from granting the ed-tech industry carte blanche to demolish analog schooling.

Compounded by a growing movement of parents demanding tech be purged from classrooms, increased scrutiny of ed-tech’s self-authored science-washing, and the new US Surgeon General advisory on the harms of digital devices, the Carvalho era of peak screen orgy classrooms now appears squarely in the review mirror.

An Ed-Swamp Most Slimy

America’s Superintendents weren’t born with ed-tech religion. They get converted. And a primary vector of conversion is via education conferences and private retreats, which unbeknownst to the general public, today bear zero resemblance to the quaint, tweed-swathed academic powwows of our yesteryear imaginations.

Today we have an Ed-Conference Industrial Complex, a multi-billion dollar sector dominated by a motley crew of venture capitalists, B2B events conglomerates, and Big Tech fronts. In their hands, education conferences have mutated into glorified corporate bordellos, where big-budget superintendents are lured with ego-stroking VIP invitations and luxury perks, then pimped to the highest corporate bidders.

Now you may be thinking, “But all conferences are big palm-greasing hustles; that’s just how American business gets done.” Fair enough; conferences have a legitimate role to play, and not every large transaction between the private and public sectors should set off conspiratorial, anti-capitalist alarm bells. School districts must spend heavily to function, and so superintendents are obligated to find reliable providers of necessary goods and services. Books and pencils won’t buy themselves. (Or get bought at all in the 2020s.)

That may all be true, but another unfortunate truism of American capitalism is that big money attracts big shadiness. And according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the public school sector ranks firmly as a Top 10 U.S. industry by revenue — well above airlines, fast food, and automotive. So perhaps that’s why, as you’ll see, many major education conferences stand out as, well, remarkably sleazy — even by present-day lawless kakistocracy standards.

Perhaps the most stunning recurring theme in modern education events marketing is the flagrant direct sale of access. Ed-conference organizers corral school superintendents like chunky, wriggling koi in a Four Seasons lobby fountain, then brazenly auction harpoon guns to “partners,” who — shocker! — are overwhelmingly ed-tech vendors, snaring facetime with supers in VIP rooms, golf carts, and posh restaurants.

If that sounds like hyperbole to you, take a peek at just three of the dozens of big conferences on the Superintendent Circuit:

1. National Superintendents Forum (NSF)

Produced by: RTM Business Group, LLC.

Held four times per year at luxury waterfront hotels and golf resorts replete with spas and fine dining, the National Superintendent Forum strictly limits attendance to vetted top-tier administrators who control enormous budgets. For their upcoming September 2026 gathering, they promise that paid “partners” will enjoy “Guaranteed 1:1 Meetings” with 80+ superintendents in attendance. The 23 publicly listed superintendent speakers currently preside collectively over 400,000 to 500,000 students. RTM pays travel and accommodation costs for all invited speakers, and does not release lists of its sponsor “partners.”

2. District Administration Leadership Institute (DALI)

Produced By: District Administration

The exhaustingly named District Administration Leadership Institute is the event-hosting arm of powerhouse K-12 trade rag District Administration, a glossy print magazine and daily digital newsletter delivered free of charge to every superintendent in America. Its year-round circuit of private summits, held at tony resort destinations, sells “partners” facetime with “a captive audience” of superintendents and other budget-controlling decision-makers. DALI advertises its summits to qualified superintendents with complimentary lodging, all meals provided, and up to $400 in direct travel reimbursement. In exchange, “partners” get to schmooze, nosh filet mignon, hit the golf links, or hang commando in the sauna with superintendents like Alberto Carvalho — a former DALI fixture.

3. National Conference on Education (NCE)

Produced by: School Superintendents Association (AASA)

Widely regarded as the top annual convention for superintendents, the National Conference on Education draws over 4,000 K–12 system leaders from all 50 states. With its traditional trade-show format of corporate vendor booths in a sprawling exhibit hall, NCE may seem ostensibly less unctuous than NSF and DALI.

Nonetheless, NCA also promises corporate sponsors “access to education decision makers” with “enormous buying power.” Far worse, AASA even sells an Orwellian “Digital Retargeting” package — powered by digital tracking cookies dropped on Superintendents’ personal devices by the event’s website — that enables sales vultures to circle their carrion indefinitely after the event ends, delivering targeted programmatic advertisements “day in and day out, as they browse the web on popular sites they use every single day!” (Imagine your TikTwit feed smothered in ads for Digi-Smartz® and e-Lurnr.ai®.)

The Banality of Conspicuous Grifting

The role of the Ed-Conference Industrial Complex in ed-tech’s conquering of American classrooms cannot be overstated. These events aren’t outliers. They are the Ed-Swamp norm in the 21st century, when high-profile superintendents can literally attend a different luxury networking event almost every month on the dime of ed-tech “partners.” Alberto Carvalho was a regular at these and many other conferences, including Global Silicon Valley (ASU+GSV), where his Big Tech sycophancy was routinely on vivid display — despite his also being fundamentally a tech rube.

In fairness to Carvalho, for all his complicity in Silicon Valley’s assault on Gen-Z cognition, he’s just the lavishly hair-sprayed tip of the iceberg, and hardly the first Superintendent to get fatally puppeteered by the ed-tech industry. In 2014, his LAUSD predecessor John Deasy also resigned in disgrace due to a federal investigation into his disastrous 1:1 iPad procurement program. In 2019, Metro Nashville Public Schools terminated the contract of Superintendent Shawn Joseph for improperly steering public money to multiple ed-tech companies via no-bid contracts. Two years later, Pittsburgh Superintendent Anthony Hamlet was forced out after an ethics probe highlighted major ed-tech conflicts of interest, including pocketing ed-conference honorariums and accepting a private jet trip to Cuba from an ed-tech vendor.

And as far back as 2017, a New York Times exposé by Natasha Singer and Danielle Ivory explored how ed-tech companies cozy up to superintendents at closed-door luxury ed-conferences hosted by ERDI, an RTM competitor. Baltimore Superintendent S. Dallas Dance was revealed, among others, to have extensive ethically dubious dealings at these events with various ed-tech companies, including i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates. The NYT investigation ultimately led to Dance’s indictment and 2018 prison sentence for perjury.

After that Times exposé sent shockwaves through the Ed-Swamp, event producers like ERDI, RTM and DALI discontinued cutting personal “honorarium” checks to superintendents for attendance, and rebranded their 1:1 sales pitch rooms as “research and development” and “partnership” opportunities. But despite these cosmetic ethical overhauls, the core “captive audience” business model of the Ed-Conference Industrial Complex remains intact. Indeed, ed-conference producers have cemented their role as laundering intermediaries: after collecting sponsor fees, the event organizers fund the superintendents’ luxury lodging and travel stipends, providing the administrators a “third-party scholarship” legal shield from pesky procurement watchdogs and grand jury probes.

Today, the nakedly unethical canoodling of American superintendents and the ed-tech industry remains an epic scandal hiding in plain sight. Vanishingly few Superintendents are 100% clean — including yours, wherever you live. Most have phones filled with Ed-Swamp “partner” contacts from Google, IXL, Curriculum Associates, PowerSchool, etc. — and very few, if subjected to the same US Department of Justice proctoscopy given Carvalho, could possibly emerge unscathed.

As for Carvalho, the Ed-Tech Icarus? However disastrous his tenures, his underlying commitment to the ideals of education and public service were admirable. He worked hard, too — unfortunately at doing exactly the wrong things. But it makes one wonder: what truly great things might Carvalho have accomplished for city kids had he never been bewitched by Silicon Valley’s snake oil sirens? We’ll never know — and as things stand, history will not be kind; Alberto Carvalho will be remembered as ed-tech’s #1 patsy — the guy who championed exiling books from schools and shackling children to glowing rectangles instead of teaching them like human beings.

But don’t worry too much about Alberto. Given his decades of fruitful frolicking in the Ed-Swamp, and the shameless revolving door relationship between public education administration and Silicon Valley, we can probably expect news of a lucrative new ed-tech gig for Carvalho in three… two… one…

###

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

As all sensible people know, Los Angeles California is the most patriotic city in America. Ruby-red Tulsa? Royal-blue Boston? Barney-purple Omaha? Compared to LA, they’re all borderline traitorous Mexicos that should be immediately deported. And how do we know this? Simple — because each and every July 4th, the City of Angels’ fireworks make everyone else’s fireworks look like an insultingly pathetic patriotic fail. Indeed, only the citizens of mighty Tinseltown give perfect, magnificent America the million-megaton explosive fealty it so richly deserves!

In recent years, a silly narrative has emerged — driven largely by testosterone-poisoned tribal blowhards — that Los Angeles is some alien, un-American place. They use “Hollywood” as a sneering pejorative, and would have you believe it’s ground zero for America hatred — a foreign hellhole where legions of pinko Commies shit on the Constitution and wipe their bleached assholes with Old Glory. (Or is it the other way around? I always get confused.)

Either way, this is absurd. After all, we Americans wouldn’t even know how to America if not for Los Angeles. For over a century, Hollywood has tirelessly, lovingly shaped our collective nationalistic identity of “USA #1” with a veritable cinematic river of narcissistic jingoism. Perhaps you’ve seen Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, True Grit, The Right Stuff, Top Gun, Red Dawn, Air Force One, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan — need I go on? Why, to even question LA’s Americana bona fides is to basically hock big, glistening loogies right in the faces of John Wayne, Charlie Heston, and failed mayoral savior Spencer Pratt!

Sure, people who live in embarrassingly less American places like Vermont, Texas, Oregon or West Dakota make futile attempts at patriotic bragging rights. They’ll tell you how their Wal-Mart parking lot has more Ford F150s rocking star-spangled truck nuts, or how their Hobby Lobby always sells out of Ted Nugent garden gnomes, or how their town won tri-state hootenanny gold for barbecued beef pizzle. Well sorry folks, but speaking in my inestimable authority as an All-American Straight White Cis-Male, that’s all pussy stuff. Because there’s only one metric of love of country that truly matters, and it’s measured in TNT kilotons, blinding explosions, and millions of foofy kick-me dogs cowering under beds in primal terror. That’s right: FIREWORKS.

Now I’m not just talking about the large city-produced fireworks displays. Everyone knows that the NYC Macy’s show has long been America’s biggest, and that “America 250” will see Big Daddy Donny launch everything short of a hydrogen bomb to paint Washington DC’s sky gold with his own bloated grimace. No, I’m talking about grassroots We the People fireworks — regular folks getting our rockets-red-glare freak on with personal bombs-bursting-in-air. And on that front, Los Angeles is second to none.

I’ll confess that as an adult transplant to Los Angeles, I long struggled to accept that I’d been born and raised in patriotically inferior locales — the kinds of places where people call themselves Americans, but have never even worked craft services on a Fran Drescher show. But then one fateful July 4th evening some years ago, I hiked up a 1500 ft. summit in the Hollywood Hills — to a dusty plateau with sweeping 360 degree views of the entire Los Angeles basin, from the Pacific Ocean to the jagged peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. And it was there I finally accepted the undeniable truth of LA’s utter supremacy — because for miles and miles in every direction, there is a spectacular, uninterrupted tableau of booming patrio-passion.

Sure, there are some big municipal shows in the mix, from Santa Monica to Burbank, Tarzana to Pasadena — any one of which already eclipses most towns’ feeble displays of glorified sparklers. But far more impressive than any military-grade mortars — and proof positive of LA’s über-Americatasticness — are the gazillion low-altitude consumer-grade fireworks set off by regular Angelenos. They begin several days in advance, with scattered soft booms and sizzles starting at sunset, building to a thunderous crescendo around 10pm on Independence Day.

Alas, these private fireworks are all illegal — because California is also a finger-wagging nanny state that plasters cancer warning signs everywhere from fresh produce bins to the gates of Disneyland. But proud Angelenos, like our 18th century teabagging forefathers, will not be tread upon by tyrannical government overlords. Instead, we bravely light the fuse on our hulking American love cannon.

And when we do, LA’s sparkling urban grid, that vast iconic backdrop to every teen car makeout scene you’ve ever watched, is transformed into a 4000 square mile carpet of patriotic fervor, shimmering and undulating with continuous multicolor eruptions like some epic hallucination, and blanketing an entire mega-metropolis in a sulfurous cloud of burnt gunpowder — that glorious perfume of revolutionary battlefields littered with the vanquished carcasses of redcoat Limey scum.

How much hotter does LA’s patriotism burn than literally everywhere else? So damned hot, we blow up enough shit to render our own air unbreathable. How’s that for ultimate nationalistic sacrifice? And yes, we know it’s not safe. We even know it could trigger another inferno that burns down half the city. Nevertheless, we persist. Because Los Angeles loves America more than you do.

Or then again, mayhaps we’re just a pack of sociopathic pyros…

###

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

If there was ever any doubt that Big Tech’s PR problem is swelling like an engorged tick, one need look only to last weekend’s $312 million global debut of Disney’s Toy Story 5, directed by Andrew Stanton. That film’s marketing campaign — which featured beloved franchise stalwarts Woody, Jessie, and Buzz cowering in fear behind a villainous tablet computer named Lilypad — resonated so deeply around the world, it propelled the sequel to a stunning blockbuster launch, securing the biggest three-day cash haul in the 31-year history of the Toy Story franchise.

This isn’t a movie review. I’ll leave the opining on filmmaking to the showbiz fanboys. No, this is an acknowledgment of a remarkable cultural watershed moment — when a film’s mere theme propelled it to the top of the charts by offering a catharsis for the screen-induced digital malaise that grips our species. TS5’s tagline is “The Battle for Playtime Begins,” and indeed, its success represents an ominous societal artillery shot across the bows of Big Tech’s armada. Silicon Valley would do well to pay attention.

Because when is a kids summer movie not just a movie? When it makes its central villain a transparent personification of the most lucrative and omnipotent industry of its era. Imagine if in 1937, Snow White’s sadistic nemesis wasn’t a wicked queen, but a shiny simulacrum of US Steel’s Andrew Carnegie. Or imagine if in 1942, Bambi’s mother had been mowed down by a steam locomotive, prompting Thumper and Flower to join the fawn’s epic struggle against the Pennsylvania Railroad. Those films would have bombed and been promptly forgotten — all for lack of credulous villains. Their yesteryear audiences didn’t perceive the biggest industries of their times to be rapacious, immoral cabals; they saw them as legitimate engines of economic and societal prosperity. Flawed perhaps, but certainly not inherently villainous.

For audiences in the screen-addled 2020s however, there’s no need to imagine Big Tech’s villainous intent and outcomes — because we see it in our own lives each and every day. We see ourselves tracked Big Brother-style and monetized like chattel via overpriced and rapidly obsolescent gizmos, our nations torn asunder by tech-induced tribal rage. And yes, we see our own children in Toy Story 5, subsisting in a version of childhood that has been eviscerated and warped by Big Tech into something heartbreakingly hollow and inhuman.

Of course, Disney has waded in tech-averse waters before. You might say 2008’s WALL-E was the progenitor of TS5. Also directed by Andrew Stanton, that dialogue-free tableau of a tech-saturated future dystopia is already proving eerily prophetic, with its depiction of humanity devolved into a race of grotesque, larval screen zombies tended by robotic AI minders. But where WALL-E felt like distant sci-fi fantasy in 2008, Toy Story 5 bows as a reflection of our grim, lived reality in 2026.

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So how does the 30 year-old Toy Story franchise actually handle Big Tech? Not with kid gloves. Out of the gate, toy-loving child protagonist Bonnie is contrasted with twin antisocial screen junkie brats who live across the street. When friendless Bonnie’s parents, desperate to alleviate her aching solitude, relent and buy her the “Lilypad” tablet which is de rigueur for her age group, she’s transformed overnight into a toy-rejecting, hypnotized dopamine addict, prompting Wallace Shawn’s dinosaur character “Rex” to moan, “Extinction – not again!”

Overall, Toy Story 5 serves up a devastating (and painfully accurate) portrayal of contemporary screen-based childhood. The camera pans across entire neighborhoods where seemingly every window frames a shut-in, catatonic child bathed in blue screen light. Play dates and sleepovers are likewise played as the bleak affairs they’ve become, with kids tapping wordlessly at tablets in parallel. This isn’t a post-apocalyptic fantasy; it’s banality-as-horror cinéma vérité. Or as Tom Hanks’ “Woody” laments, “Toys are for play, but tech is for… everything” — eliciting a groan from TS5’s heroine, Jessie.

Mind you, Pixar does hedge its critique — perhaps self-conscious of its own Big Tech roots and having pioneered the CGI that decimated the art of analog 2D animation. In the process, TS5 pulls a few punches. Yes, Lilypad is largely depicted as a smug, duplicitous, hubristic monster intent on devouring every moment of Bonnie’s attention (a faithful representation of Silicon Valley product development and business practices!), but Pixar abstains from taking this tech-bashing polemic to its logical conclusion.

Given Big Tech’s outsize destructive role in contemporary childhood, some of us would prefer that Lilypad’s character arc more resemble that of Lotso, the villainous purple teddy bear of Toy Story 3, who remains incorrigibly horrible until the bitter end. While Lotso gets deliciously dark karmic justice via crucifixion to the radiator of a garbage truck, doomed to choke on diesel exhaust and insects for eternity, Lilypad is granted a reprieve — and even a seat at the dollhouse table. Towards the end, Lilypad accepts how damaging her impact on Bonnie has been, and in a not-so-kiddy-appropriate twist, the guilt-racked device attempts suicide by hurling herself into a donation box. This ultimate penance earns her partial redemption; Lilypad then helps in the quest to land Bonnie an IRL friend, and is admitted to a lower tier of the toys’ inner circle, with Woody declaring her “one of us.”

It feels like Pixar is strategically tempering its inclination to go scorched earth, lest it alienate the millions of ticket-buying parents who feel helpless and overwhelmed by the domination of tech in their families’ lives. That’s a bridge too nuanced in my book, but it’s grounded in a certain pragmatic empathy that is, at least, forgivably humanistic.

Less forgivable is the Toy Story 5 product line brought to us by Disney’s consumer products group, a division so shameless, it sells 10 cents worth of pipe cleaners, googly eye stickers, and a flimsy plastic spork as a $40 “Forky” toy. I’m guessing TS5’s Director Andrew Stanton, with his impressive track record of thoughtfully tech-averse narratives, was plenty chagrined to learn that Disney granted some truly cringe-inducing licenses for his latest installment. The official $50 Lilypad iPad case by Belkin literally wraps unhealthy screen time in a cutesy TS5 package, and in a supernova of irony, a $30 electronic Lilypad toy for toddlers, replete with texting and apps, is produced and sold by Leapfrog — the exact company that Lilypad is parodying in the film. Talk about perverse cultural appropriation.

Hypocritical merchandising and minor hedging notwithstanding, TS5’s strident POV remains crystal clear. Online, some loud voices (mostly ones on Big Tech’s payroll) will complain it’s heavy-handed. Perhaps, but as of this writing, it’s a winning and in-demand message, with TS5’s daily take still surging on BoxOfficeMojo, positioning it to win the summer kids box office — and perhaps the adult one, too.

Toy Story 5’s huge success represents a mass cultural repudiation of Big Tech’s impact on kids. It’s a proverbial analog beer truck in the digital desert, the cinematic equivalent of the furious anti-tech boos confronting AI-boosting speakers at college commencement ceremonies. Indeed, you might even say that for Silicon Valley, Toy Story 5 is its Walter Cronkite on Vietnam moment: an inflection point, a fundamental and inexorable shift in public opinion — the furious awakening to the reality that we’ve all been duped by dishonest, borderline sociopathic actors. Toy Story 5 is breaking box office records not simply because audiences are buying tickets for a movie; it is because they are voting with their wallets for a version of childhood that still goes “to infinity and beyond” — and requires no stupefying glowing rectangles to get there.

By cracking the code on how to monetize public loathing of Big Tech, Toy Story 5 is making a killing. And where there are mega-profits, mega-imitation is sure to follow. So buckle up, Silicon Valley. Your visit to Sid’s bedroom has only just begun.

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

MORE BIG TECH LOVE:

Note: An alternate version of this essay was first published on UnHerd.

In today’s America, a country cleaved in two by a politics of tribal binary thinking, it sometimes seems a divine act of God is required for any issue to realize overwhelming popular consensus. So there must be a Nor’easter blanketing Satan’s lake of fire in 12 inches of powder, because on the subject of ejecting screens from schools, Americans of all stripes haven’t been this united for a quarter century — since back when both tribes lusted for Osama bin Laden’s head on a spike.

Indeed, with remarkable bipartisan unanimity, the movement to purge phones from classrooms continues to gather momentum, jumpstarted back in 2024 with pols as polar opposite as Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Glen Youngkin (R-VA) both signing restrictive bans just weeks apart. Fast-forward to 2026, and according to Ballotpedia, 41 US states have taken formal action to limit in-school phone use by K-12 students – and nearly half have embraced public school “bell-to-bell” bans prohibiting phone use throughout the entire school day. So far this year, four states have enacted such policies, and restrictive bills are pending in five more. A 2026 Brookings Institute survey found that 98% of American students now face some level of school phone restrictions, with 55% having all-day bans.

With this no-phones-in-schools train reaching critical velocity, many assume the debate is settled. But alas, one truism of American culture is that even on matters of wide public consensus, there’s a second-guessing phase, when contrarians slither out of the woodwork to peddle cynical, myopic, or self-serving polemics.

A Withering Opposition

School phone ban naysayers may be a fast-shrinking minority, but the surviving die-hards all cling white-knuckled to a few laughably weak arguments. First, a Conspicuous Empathy Brigade insists that screen-deprived students’ academic achievement will suffer due to poor morale. They cite one Texas teenager’s August 2025 petition that garnered over 150,000 online signatures, or a 2026 Pew Research survey indicating 73% of teens oppose full-day bell-to-bell phone bans. (In related news, 73% of kindergarteners oppose asparagus.) Second, Forbidden Fruit Catastrophizers insist that phone ban policies merely make kids “want them more,” resulting in bigger screen time binges at home. My late uncle used similar logic to justify his morning mug of Schlitz.

Third come the clinically paranoid Safetyists, who insist that their 24/7 electronic hovering and smothering is the only thing preventing certain death for little Connor or Sophia. Safetyist parents invariably invoke mass shootings as the nightmare scenario to justify why kids must have phones at school. Because military history is clear: nothing repels war zone bullets so effectively as a panicked phone call from mommy, shrieking “ARE YOU OK???”

But perhaps the most corrosive recent second-guessing of phone bans came courtesy of The New York Times. Earlier this year, the Times published the widely-cited “A Blow to the Phone-Free Classroom,” which framed the popular tactic of deploying lockable “Yondr” pouches to enforce school phone bans as a misguided boondoggle. Beneath a heavily Photoshopped illustration of a Yondr bag minced to shreds, the Times painted a grim portrait of a typical pouch: “students destroyed them — leaving them littered in the cafeteria, in bathrooms and on the blacktop — the school was left to pick up the tab.”

The article was co-written by NYT “internet culture” reporters Madison Kircher and Callie Holterman, whose beat hinges on stoking hunger for vacuous online ephemera — and whose recent crackerjack bylines include “What’s With All the A.I. Videos of Cheating Fruit” and “Hey, ChatGPT: Where Should I Go to College?” Their framing characterized the phone ban pouches as a costly “failure” and “an inadequate Band-Aid” — even shoehorning in a decades-old tidbit on “vigorous complaints” about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2007 cell phone ban. This flimsy journalistic narrative was built atop one Los Angeles teen’s anecdotal experience at Van Nuys High School.

Since my kid attends a similar-sized middle school in the same district as Van Nuys, the Grey Lady’s Yondr takedown made me wonder if, despite a year-old phone ban, our school might remain a screen-choked hellscape, where dopamine junkie teens go Edward Scissorhands on their Yondr pouches, and doomscroll openly with impunity. So one recent morning I broke with Los Angeles school drop-off protocol by daring to emerge from my vehicle and see the policy in action for myself.

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Yondr Works A-OK, Thanks!

What I witnessed at my kid’s diverse school of 1500 students was a picture of efficiency, not chaos. Aides monitor as tweens pass through Yondr processing stations: slipping their device(s) into the thick neoprene pouches, then locking them with table-mounted magnets before being granted admission to campus. (The process is reversed after the last bell.)

As coincidence would have it, my son forgot his Yondr bag on the morning I accompanied him to the gate. He’s among the last in his cohort to not have a phone, but he does have a cellular Apple watch, which must also get Yondr’ed per the phone ban policy. So when he told a friendly aide named Brian he’d forgotten his pouch, Brian simply stowed the device in a ziplock bag and issued a ticket for end-of-day retrieval.

Brian has worked that gate daily since the ban went into effect early last year, putting him literally on the front line of the screen time battle, so he’s seen plenty of creative efforts by kids to thwart it — from forged parental notes, to second dummy “burner” phones brought as props for phone ban theatre. Nevertheless, he offered a positive take on both the ban and the pouches. “It really does make a difference,” he said, “We don’t really see kids with their phones out anymore.” Still, he acknowledged flaws in the system. “A lot of kids say they don’t have a phone, and I’m not going to be able to check every kid.”

But Brian pointed to key implementation rules that successfully keep most kids in compliance for fear of upsetting mom and dad. First is a strict phone confiscation policy. “They know that if they get caught, they’re going to have to give it up so a parent can come pick it up,” he explained. Second is monetary consequences; contrary to the Times’ claim that LA schools “pick up the tab” for student vandalism; at our school, damaging a pouch results in a $40 fine for the parents.

Around the corner at the school’s more heavily trafficked north gate, three more aides stood behind folding tables at a larger Yondr station just inside the chain-link fence. One of them, an amiable young woman named Tory, readily admitted the Yondr pouches aren’t perfect. “There’s good and bad things about everything,” she said, “but this has been pretty good.” Tory went on to describe a sea change in how kids at my son’s school interact post-ban. “We’re seeing a lot less internet drama, cyberbullying — the problems that the phones were causing have gone down like 90%.” After pausing to help a girl whose Yondr pouch’s clasp had bent, Tory added, “the fights have also gone down because kids aren’t recording them and doing it for clout.”

That’s no small difference. At this same school just two years ago, it had become routine for student social media beefs hatched on personal phones during class to explode into physical violence between periods. Scores of kids would surround the melee to record with their phones and post the footage to social media in a mad dash for likes and followers. As a parent, I’d seen (and saved) one of the videos; it looked like a prison yard riot. See for yourself. That scene has not been repeated even once since the phone ban took effect last February.

Ascendant Humanity FTW

But it’s the change in the mundane, everyday rhythms of school that are most obvious. Last year, pre-ban on the same campus, I witnessed a lunch period that was eerily quiet and antisocial, with sedentary kids glued to their phones, wordlessly shoveling food into their mouths. Last month however, I saw a school transformed. During lunch on a sunny California spring day, kids gathered at tables in animated clusters, chatting, telling jokes, and playing with their food. On the fields adjacent the cafeteria pavilion, young teens chased each other, tossed balls, did cartwheels, and trash-talked. A quirky boy wandering solo with a grimy orange traffic cone atop his head approached me and asked with a smile, “Do you like my hat, sir?” Yes, the otherwise idyllic scene was still marred by scattered Chromebooks, but overall it felt like passing through a time portal to pre-iPhone America — with nary a shredded Yondr littered across the cafeteria or blacktop.

My conclusion was that lockable pouches and other restrictions aren’t perfect, and kids can be counted on to stress-test and break rules. But solutions like Yondr largely achieve the desired effect by serving as tangible reminders of the ban — especially when principals implement them bravely, with actual teeth and consequences that put parents on the hook, too.

Rachel Alonzo, a parent in Jacksonville, Fla., notes that while her two sons already had “pretty healthy relationships” with screens, she approves of the strict school phone bans enacted in their county three years ago — despite having had to collect phones at the school office on the three occasions her boys got caught using them in class. “They enforce it. They mean business,” she said of her sons’ schools, adding, “but rules are rules, you know. They exist for a reason. I’m in full support of that.”

Alonzo and others like her who like the school phone bans are in luck, because at this point, it’s looking like they’re here to stay. The 2026 Brookings Institute study found that over 90% of adults and nearly 80% of teens now support (at least some) restrictions, and other recent surveys from both Pew and Rand show large year-over-year increases in public support for school phone bans. More importantly, the bans are actually making an impact, with schools themselves reporting increased student well-being, higher attendance rates, and fewer fights. Perhaps most interesting, many schools with phone bans are now reporting huge surges in library book checkouts — because apparently, in the absence of screens, kids can still find paper stimulating.

Well Begun is Half Done

Unfortunately, even while the evidence of behavioral and social benefits of school phone bans piles up, there’s been no accompanying bump in academic achievement — with American scores remaining dismal relative to other developed nations. Indeed, in the largest study to date, hot off the presses from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a survey of 40,000 schools with active bans shows big increases in overall student well-being by year two of phone bans, but also indicates “close to zero” impact on test scores.

Wielding this data, the usual suspects will argue that phone bans are but a pointless moral panic. But standardized testing is a crude measurement tool even when done well, and there is no clinical metric through which to measure the return of a child’s soul.

The NBER study confirms what many parents and teachers already know: when it comes to academic achievement, phones are only half the problem – and the lesser half at that. When phones are banned, students’ gazes merely shift to “digital distractions that are not blocked, such as accessing video or social media sites on laptops”. Indeed, because the core obstacle to learning isn’t the form factor or the owner of the device, it’s the screens and internet themselves, which remain entrenched.

By evicting “private” screens from schools, the phone bans have succeeded in restoring the cafeterias and hallways and playgrounds to healthy, human-centric settings. But back in the classrooms, state-issued screens wrapped in a false cloak of educational legitimacy remain atop every desk — merely consolidating all the dopamine-spiking distractions onto Chromebooks and iPads running unproven, ineffective ed-tech platforms like the widely loathed i-Ready.

So yes, the school phone bans are popular — and they’re working — but they’re not a magic cure. If screens are a cancer on American education, you might say phone bans were the first round of chemo that halted the tumor’s growth. But for any true rebound in academic achievement, we’ll need radical resection surgery on the Chromebooks and iPads, followed by a blast of radiation targeting endless online standardized tests. Then, and only then, can we expect to see the malignancy of imploding youth cognition put into long-term remission.

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

PART 4

Curriculum Associates (CA), the previously low-profile, billion-dollar ed-tech behemoth, is having a no-good, terrible 2026 — and it’s poised to get a whole lot worse. CA’s ubiquitous online learning platform i-Ready®, which is compulsory for 14 million American kids, is facing a remarkable wellspring of loathing from parents, students, and teachers across the country. But Curriculum Associates’ problems run much, much deeper than mere consumer subjectivity; they now face an outright existential threat borne of the inescapable reality that their flagship product is harmful to the health of the same human children it purports to educate.

By now, even mentioning the ever-growing mountain of scientific evidence linking screens with physiological harm to kids seems about as edifying as a reminder that the sun will rise tomorrow. Americans have grown so numb to revelations of childhood maladies caused by screens — from depression to anxiety to profound cognitive deficits — we’d likely just shrug at news they give kids rickets and hammer toe, too.

And yet, any ethical business, upon learning its product had been definitively linked to even one serious health threat, would promptly issue a consumer warning or recall. Curriculum Associates, on the other hand, now reveals its private-equity true colors — prioritizing the protection of its primary revenue stream over the health of children. Throughout the spring of 2026, CA has unfurled a cynical public relations campaign that mixes deceptive word salad and outright lies about its own history to portray i-Ready screen time as non-harmful and “limited.”

A Sly Public Health Nuisance

While the issue of screen time harm may have exploded into the popular consciousness only recently, it is hardly a new concern. Fully a decade ago, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras was among the first to sound the alarm with his best-selling book Glow Kids, in which the neuropsychologist presciently connected the dots between screens, dopamine addiction, and disastrous child mental health and cognitive development outcomes.

Doubtlessly aware of Glow Kids or the slow, steady drumbeat of warnings that followed, Curriculum Associates — as a savvy, liability-averse corporation keen to preserve plausible deniability — has long strenuously avoided any explicit public defenses of i-Ready’s screen-based format. Since the product’s launch in 2012, all educator or parental concerns about screen time were met with politician-worthy pivots to ed-tech blather. CA would stress “high-fidelity implementation” — pointing to outlier studies drawing distinctions between “passive” screen time and “active engagement.” In fact, Archive.org historical searches of curriculumassociates.com establish that the term “screen time” never once appeared on the website until 2026.

The i-Ready Screen Time Spin Begins

While i-Ready’s overall experiential and pedagogical lousiness have long sparked online vitriol from the students and teachers forced to use it, 2026 has seen the fury spread to a vastly larger community: families. After Part One of this series was published by UnHerd in late February 2026, Curriculum Associates was besieged by parental and teacher anger across social media. On X.com, the firehose of pent-up bile directed at i-Ready was so intense, Curriculum Associates effectively surrendered, publishing its last original post on that platform on March 10^th.

Two days later, Curriculum Associates commenced a rapid-fire defensive volley of PR damage control content to stanch the bleeding — all packed with a freshly-minted product vocabulary to whitewash i-Ready screen time as “limited,” “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful.” An all-new screen time section materialized on its website, featuring top executives contributing a succession of ponderously disingenuous essays. The new framing even makes a conspicuous cameo towards the end of a new testimonial from an i-Ready “Extraordinary Educator” — the fake awards program CA created to launder corporate marketing through real teachers.

“They’re in crisis mode,” said Drew Kerr, a prominent Communications Consultant in New York City who maintains The Red List, a compendium of corporate publicity crises. “When you see this kind of shift, obviously they are course-correcting,” he said. “They realize that every single word they say is now being hyper-scrutinized… They’re trying to tiptoe very, very carefully.”

Kelly Sia, Chief Evasiveness Officer

For typical billion-dollar corporations, the CEO would serve as the face of this type of urgent crisis response. Unfortunately for Curriculum Associates, Kelly Sia, who ascended to the CEO role via internal promotion in 2025, demonstrates a near-total aversion or inability to represent the company publicly.

To date, Ms. Sia’s entire professional history of recorded public interviews appears limited to vacuous chit-chats on two podcasts — one hosted by her corporate underling, and the other by her private Executive Coach. (When Sia and I were booked opposite one another for NBC News TV interviews last month, she cancelled at the last minute.) Sia’s contribution to the i-Ready damage control effort so far appears limited to two April 2026 LinkedIn posts, wherein she floated the new “purposeful” semantic reframing, and was lavished with praise by sycophantic employee commenters.

Drew Kerr notes that kind of executive evasion is rarely effective. “There’s a theory that you can put your head in the sand, like an ostrich, and hope it will go away,” he said. “It’s a very dumb PR strategy.” Of Sia’s conspicuous invisibility during a corporate publicity crisis, Kerr added, “If a CEO has been off the radar for this long, it means either they are not taking it seriously, or the board does not trust them, and there’s questions about their status, or their ability to speak.”

Sia’s only public speaking appearance of 2026 thus far was a closed-door breakout session about “leadership” at the Women Leading Ed Summit in North Carolina. Curriculum Associates was the title sponsor of that three-day event, and no recordings or transcripts of Sia’s remarks were released.

I emailed CA repeatedly to request comment on whether the company’s corporate board, Chairman Rob Waldron, and private equity backers Berkshire Partners and Permira remain confident in Ms. Sia’s ability to serve as CEO. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

Ty Holmes, Chief Indemnity Officer

In the ensuing leadership vacuum, it has fallen to subordinates, especially Tyrone Holmes — Curriculum Associates’ Chief Impact Officer and longtime head of internal anti-racism efforts — to carry Sia’s “purposeful” screen time water as the handsome public face of i-Ready damage control.

So far this spring, Holmes has taken Sia’s place in interviews for NBC News and education site Chalkbeat, a Global Silicon Valley panel, and dispensed “purposeful” screen time spin on an Edtech Insiders webinar.

Back at Curriculum Associates HQ, Ty Holmes also recently narrated a gauzy new video, “i-Ready in the Classroom: Purposeful Instruction for Every Student,” and penned a saccharine blog essay entitled “The Screen Time Question I Can’t Stop Asking as a Father and an EdTech Exec.” Writing of “watching my own children grow up in a world where screens are everywhere” Holmes repeatedly invokes “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful” to insist that i-Ready screen time can “get it right.” Throughout the missive’s 1000 words, he performs impressive linguistic somersaults to avoid mentioning whether his own children actually use i-Ready or other screen-based ed-tech. When I requested clarification and invited Holmes to speak with me via LinkedIn, he immediately blocked me.

Of course, some Big Tech executives famously admit to hypocritically curtailing their own kids’ exposure to the products they produce. I inquired via repeated emails whether the children of Mr. Holmes or any other C-suite executives have been compelled to use i-Ready as part of their regular schooling, and if so, whether they might be available to share their opinions of the platform publicly (as my son did). Curriculum Associates did not respond.

“Purposeful” Meaninglessness

For the past 14 years, CA’s core pitch to school district procurement officers has been that i-Ready is “data-based.” They promise the product can boost standardized test scores by analyzing millions of students’ intimate personal details — data so granular and voluminous, it can only realistically be harvested one way: via internet-connected screens. (The pitch is bolstered with reams of internally-authored “research and evidence” marketing collateral, and the paid endorsement of controversial pseudoscience ed-guru John Hattie.)

But suddenly, in the face of overwhelming science indicating that screen time is inherently harmful and essentially irredeemable, Curriculum Associates has frantically pivoted away from cold, clinical, data-centric verbiage — now promoting i-Ready screen time with those fuzzy, emotional, and profoundly unscientific tautologies: “purposeful,” “meaningful,” and “intentional.”

PR crisis management expert Drew Kerr has seen this playbook before. “When a company starts changing its language like that, it’s obvious that the lawyers are all over this,” he said. “But lawyers also know nothing about communications. It's like somebody showing up at the ball and not realizing that their tie is really ugly. They don't realize that the things they're saying are very obvious gobbledygook legalese.”

I reached out to CA repeatedly to inquire what metrics or peer-reviewed studies it uses to quantify whether i-Ready screen time is “purposeful” or “meaningful” — and whether their product road map includes plans to add any handy new color-coded dashboard charts to track students’ levels of “purposefulness” or “meaningfulness” within i-Ready. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

That’s unsurprising, because of course there is no science of purposefulness, metric of meaningfulness, or diagnostic of intentionality. Rather, this is textbook corporate reputation triage; invent a new brand lexicon to evade substantive dialogue about the fact that your business model and/or product has been revealed as literally toxic. Then you can (at least attempt to) steer the narrative, reframing your business and some diminished variant of your product as parts of a solution, rather than the original root cause. Think yummy fruity nicotine vape pens by RJ Reynolds or Philip Morris.

Sadly for Curriculum Associates’ nearly 3,000 employees, it’s a strategy borne of reluctant acceptance that your business has crossed the Rubicon; the gravy days are past and nothing will ever be as it was, but if you make enough concessions and talk a good game, your grievous corporate wounds might not be fatal. Sure, you can probably forget about profit sharing, dividends, and juicy year-end bonuses until perhaps-forever, but hopefully the base pay and cushy PPO health plan remain intact.

And so we see the empty new mantra of “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful” saturating i-Ready’s crisis response like a plaintive, desperate chant.

With “purposeful” screen time, i-Ready’s publisher is deploying a classic spin doctor rebranding technique: when cigarettes were first revealed to cause lung cancer, tobacco companies quickly became fluent in “all-natural” and “low-tar.” When consumers were repulsed by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), big agriculture rechristened them as “bioengineered.” When Olestra-drenched WOW! potato chips gave millions explosive “anal leakage,” Frito-Lay discovered — oh wait, no, they promptly yanked that poison off the market. Today, i-Ready is to children’s brains what WOW! potato chips were to '90s snackers’ undies: a real shit-show.

Gaslighting With “Limited” Screen Time Lies

Vastly more egregious than CA’s college poetry seminar spin on screens themselves is their blatantly revisionist take on the “time” part of “screen time,” which in 2026 suddenly asserts that “limited” use of i-Ready is “what we’ve believed all along.”

But any i-Ready parent or teacher (and the Internet Archive) can confirm that for many years, all Curriculum Associates documentation called for strict student “Time-on-Task” tracking — demanding a hard usage floor of “45 minutes or more per week, per subject” to ensure “implementation fidelity.” But suddenly, in 2026, when every minute of screen time now represents a severe corporate liability? Curriculum Associates shamelessly attempts to reduce the screen time floor by 50%, stressing just 30 minutes will suffice — a jaw-dropping switcheroo that verges on fraud.

Indeed, Curriculum Associates’ self-published 2021 research brief, “Impact of Time and Lesson Pass Rates on Student Learning Gains” neatly exposes the bald-faced lie that the company has “always” prioritized “limited” i-Ready usage. It documents that in one study — spanning just one of i-Ready’s 14 years — over 1.1 million K-8 students were subjected to 50+ minutes of screen time per subject, per week, including a staggering sub-cohort of 410,168 Kindergarteners, 1st graders, and 2nd graders.

The brief, which Curriculum Associates routinely cites to encourage adoption of its oh-so-tellingly titled “Stretch Growth®” goals, concludes with an implicit exhortation to administrators to blow, er, stretch past the nominal 49-minute guidance.

Unsurprisingly, as detailed in Part One of this series, at districts whose hoodwinked superintendents guzzle the “Stretch Growth®” Kool-Aid, i-Ready usage often skyrockets into hours, each and every day.

Time for Video Games, Too

But in the Spring 2026 scramble to sanitize all i-Ready collateral to reflect the bogus new “limited” screen time narrative, CA also overlooked its “Family Center.” This longstanding guide for parents on how best to jack the kiddies into i-Ready at home, invokes the platform’s integrated arcade of infantile “learning” video games, and explicitly tells moms and dads to assign 20 additional weekly minutes of video gaming.

Minimum 45 Min. Math + 45 Min. English + 20 Min. Games ≠ 30 Mins

The Proof is in the Product

But whatever Curriculum Associates’ contradictory written screen time limits, just one glance at the product itself makes the company’s gaslighting laughably obvious. i-Ready’s student dashboard interface is dominated by an oversized circular gauge guiding kids not towards 30 or 45 minutes, but a full 60+. YouTube abounds with videos of teachers pressured to deliver over one hour per student, and frustrated kids toiling towards onerous “Time-on-Task” mandates — even in excess of four hours.

For all CA’s historical emphasis on maximizing the screen time they now attempt to conceal, many experts were never sold. Justin Reich, Director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and author of Failure to Disrupt, told me “I don't think there's great evidence from i-Ready that when people use it for the recommended amount of time, they get the results that they want.” Asked whether school administrators should have faith in i-Ready’s own measurements of student progress, he replied “I don't have a lot of confidence in any organization that says, ‘We've built a thing and looking at our own internal metrics, it's working great.’ Of course they're going to say that.”

The i-Ready Backlash Gets Real

Stepping into Curriculum Associates’ sensible shoes for a moment, given the magnitude of their current inescapable catch-22, the temptation to bend the truth is understandable. After all, people panic. (And in America, corporations are people, too!) But to do so in 2026, after generating a 14-year paper trail that you’ve actively distributed to millions, and which remains instantly accessible at the click of a mouse? That represents a level of professional ineptitude and mendacious stupidity that almost defies imagination.

But Curriculum Associates has good reason to be panicking. After a smooth, quiet rise to colonize America’s classrooms and plug millions of children into the i-Ready matrix, the company now finds itself facing a litany of existential threats.

A 2025 federal class-action privacy lawsuit filed against CA in Massachusetts continues to move forward; in February the company smeared the plaintiffs as zealots on an “ideologically motivated crusade” in an unsuccessful motion to have the case dismissed. With blood in the legal waters, Curriculum Associates knows more lawsuits are likely to follow — and they won’t be limited to boring privacy concerns.

As parents across America storm school board meetings demanding i-Ready be purged, Curriculum Associates’ most lucrative contracts are in jeopardy. In April, bowing to pressure from parent group Schools Beyond Screens, Los Angeles Unified — perhaps CA’s largest customer as the country’s second largest district — voted unanimously that i-Ready would no longer be used for grades K-2 (23% of students) as it reviews all its ed-tech contracts. Soon after, Washoe County School District, Nevada’s second largest, radically scaled back a planned three-year i-Ready contract renewal to just one year. Local news reported the board only refrained from scrapping the platform altogether because it would be “chaotic because they do not have a replacement available.” Given the education community’s well-documented herd mentality, more big i-Ready financial dominos are poised to fall.

Noting Curriculum Associates’ private equity backing, Drew Kerr believes any subsequent revenue hits would spell trouble for the company’s leadership. “Some drastic action will be taken, because private equity doesn’t want to see their investment tanking,” he said. “The CEO’s head might roll, too.”

i-Ready Regulation?

And yet all that market-driven peril may end up paling in comparison to what could be coming legislatively. In May 2026, the otherwise Big Tech-smitten Trump Administration produced a document that doubtless landed at i-Ready HQ like a bag of those WOW! Doritos.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use explicitly categorized the exact hardware delivery methods utilized by i-Ready as a vector of cognitive and behavioral harm to minors, and advised schools to return to physical, pen-and-paper curricula. In its introduction, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. implores Americans, “Let’s turn our screens off and our brains and bodies on, so that we can live real life.”

In light of the Federal government’s new official stance on screens, and given the overwhelming bipartisan popularity of school phone ban legislation, it’s not hard to imagine lawmakers’ regulatory attention soon pivoting to ed-tech. With i-Ready’s massive market share and singular detestability, Curriculum Associates knows it could well end up being first in the proverbial barrel.

I reached out to Curriculum Associates repeatedly to inquire whether they will add a prominent public health warning label to i-Ready’s user interface, or issue a full product recall — particularly for their millions of K-2 users, whom the Surgeon General’s office notes are at the most acute risk. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

End Game

Whatever “purposeful” and “limited” screen time lies Curriculum Associates deploys to distract from the insurmountable paradox that i-Ready “learning” harms children’s cognition by sheer virtue of being screen-based, many teachers aren’t buying it; they’ve seen the effects of digital learning’s rise first-hand, every day.

“Mr. J,” a 20+ year veteran second grade teacher in West Virginia, told me he has seen dramatic negative changes in his students over the years that i-Ready screens have taken over his classroom. “They have less ability to communicate, to interact, to learn from one another, to teach one another, to care about one another or have empathy,” he said. “Their worlds get smaller and smaller so that everything's on that screen. That is disgusting and it scares me. And it's definitely the opposite of the reason I went into education.”

That could change soon. The US Surgeon General’s screen time advisory may be the catalyst for finally scrutinizing ed-tech not through an educational efficacy lens, but a public health one. And in that light, it’s not hard to discern a future when i-Ready is no more — shelved alongside lawn darts and thalidomide in the museum of child-focused catastrophes.

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POSTSCRIPT: Here’s wishing a warm welcome to my three new subscribers from Heller Communications — the OG mack-daddies of high-stakes corporate reputation triage! Heller has previously spun sunny, humanizing PR narratives for such upstanding convicted felons as the Oxycontin-peddling Sackler Family, crypto-cretin Sam Bankman-Fried, and even snuggly old Harvey Weinstein himself! Substack analytics reveal Heller employees are super-engaged with the i-Ready i-Reckoning series. I reached out to these subscribers to inquire whether their firm has been retained by Curriculum Associates or its private equity investors. Heller Communications did not respond.

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i-Ready i-Reckoning: The Epostasy Investigative Series

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4: (You’re soaking in it now, Madge.)

Part 5:

Part 6: Coming Soon

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Greetings Epostates! The latest installment of i-Ready i-Reckoning will drop in a matter of days, but in the meantime, here’s some more quality coverage of everyone’s least-favorite ed-tech snake oil — this time courtesy of NBC News.

My son Ward and I spoke with Liz Kreutz of NBC News Now for her broadcast report on the furious backlash from students, parents and teachers against i-Ready. I didn’t expect a legacy media channel to include a comment denouncing i-Ready as “simplistic, short-form brain rot,” but hey — when something walks like a duck and talks like duck…

Earlier this month, NBC’s Tyler Kingkade also spoke with Ward and me for his terrific long-form piece, “The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury,” in which he confirmed many elements of my own investigation, and covered important new ground.

In particular, Kingkade’s glimpse into i-Ready’s dystopian product road map is especially chilling:

Last month in San Diego, at a major conference on digital learning called the ASU+GSV Summit, Curriculum Associates previewed i-Ready’s latest feature: an AI tool that asks students to read aloud to the computer so the software can record and analyze their voices.

The feature, which is still being piloted, generates a report highlighting words a child struggled to pronounce. Teachers can listen to the recording and identify students who need one-on-one help.

Ponder that for a moment. With i-Ready’s forthcoming AI child voice analysis feature, Curriculum Associates will attempt to usurp yet another core human element of teaching: kids reading aloud in groups. Instead, CA would have children read alone to screens while hoovering up their voices — profoundly intimate biometrics — into the ravenous maw of proprietary i-Ready artificial intelligence, where they can be owned, cloned, tracked, and otherwise monetized. All because AI can supposedly hear a kid stuttering or struggling with vocabulary better than a teacher? The sheer predatory hubris of it is stunningly repugnant!

The Face to Launch a Thousand Contract Cancellations

About a year ago, this handsome young fellow (and a booing posse of his besties) told me in our back yard how i-Ready makes him miserable. Now he’s returning the favor!

My wife and I were extremely reticent when NBC News requested that our 14 year-old son Ward be included in their coverage of the i-Ready revolt. The Internet is a caustic cesspool, and our kids aren’t allowed to use social media, so we initially agreed only to a brief written interview. But as the inspiration for my little crusade, Ward felt invested, and insisted he wanted to share his experience — hoping it might help spare his beloved preschool cousins Finn and Rya from the ed-tech tedium that he and his friends have endured. And so we reluctantly consented to cameras, but warned him that trolls might come out of the woodwork. He replied, “what do I care what a bunch of online haters say?” As it turns out, so far anyway, our fears were unfounded, and the response from the online mob has been almost 100% positive.

More importantly, Ward’s voice and face as a Los Angeles Unified student in the national news is already having exactly the impact he’d hoped for. Over the weekend, LAUSD announced an all-new i-Ready policy that will radically slash use of the program, limiting it to “students performing below grade level.” That’s nowhere near enough — especially since said performance levels are based on i-Ready’s own junk metrics — but it’s a huge step in the right direction, liberating tens of thousands of kids from i-Ready, and dooming Curriculum Associates’ LAUSD contract in its present $20 million form. Huzzah!

We’re proud of you, Ward!

And on that cheery note, I bid you adieu, Epostates…

- JAW

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Greetings Epostates! Just a quick update to let you know that a PODCAST VERSION of the i-Ready i-Reckoning series is imminent — and it will be packed full of savory ear-exclusive morsels and interviews that go deeper into the story of how Curriculum Associates conquered America’s classrooms. So if you’re an aural glutton like me, belly up to your favorite podcast trough and subscribe today. Here’s the trailer:

[ Stream @ Apple | iHeart | Podchaser | Spotify | YouTube ]

I’d only intended for i-Ready i-Reckoning to be a written series, but as a producer, I just can’t resist the urge to over-complicate and re-package. I hope you’ll enjoy. It is my first-ever podcast however, so please forgive the mortifyingly rough edges…

10-4,

- John Allen Wooden

i-Ready i-Reckoning: