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.
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
i-Ready i-Reckoning
An ongoing critical investigation by Late Night TV vet John Allen Wooden into ed-tech giant Curriculum Associates and its flagship product i-Ready, which is mandatory for 14 million American primary school students.“i-Ready i-Reckon…
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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
Thank you John. The world's most obvious negative feedback loop: iReady uses video games to encourage the learning of kids who supposedly lack self-motivation but using video games as an extrinsic reward hurts kids' intrinsic desire to learn. So iReady will claim that even more video games are needed to convince kids to do even the smallest amount of math.
Research clearly shows that extrinsic rewards hurt intrinsic motivation if used over time. Kids should be motivated to learn by the encouragement of a caring teacher and when kids complete the task they will gain intrinsic motivation.
‼️🙈 truth is stranger than fiction