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.
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.
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.
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…
- John
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Related:
i-Ready i-Reckoning: Unmasking Curriculum Associates' Ed-Tech Scam
The definitive critical exposé of Curriculum Associates — the shadowy firm that made e-learning platform i-Ready into mandatory misery for 14 million K-8 American students. Covering the i-Ready controversy: the teachers complaining it’s a waste of time that’s bad for…
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
Thank you so much John. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry… It's so important that the world wake up to the harm i-Ready extrinsic (external, having nothing to do with the learning task) motivation is doing to kids' learning. Prizes (and lots of them) to make learning "bearable" are turning kids against learning, as they diminish kids' intrinsic desire to try. I am hopeful that our nation's amazing educators are realizing that they are being played by the EdTech industry.