In interviews, 10 current and former teachers from New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and California described concerns about lost time and administrative demands. Some said i-Ready quizzes students on material they haven’t learned, such as asking a kindergartner “98 minus 17,” while some students said it repeats questions from year to year, and they have no way to skip material they already know. The teachers also said many students don’t take i-Ready seriously and purposely try to get low scores, since the more questions they get wrong, the easier the questions become.
Altair Maine, a high school math and science teacher in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, said i-Ready assessments turn him into a “glorified babysitter” of “kids staring at Chromebooks.” He cuts hands-on lab activities to make time for the tests.
“Everything comes at a cost, and there are only so many hours I get with the students,” Maine said.
In Anchorage, where Petersen tutors children in math, the school district agreed in 2020 to pay $6.75 million for i-Ready over seven years. Petersen is unimpressed with the software, which doesn’t allow students to show their work, and she said many students don’t take it seriously, which makes the data useless.
“They push the volume all the way down, and then they just start pushing buttons until the screen will change for them,” Petersen said. “They’re not learning anything.”
Corey Allen Young, a spokesman for the Anchorage School District, said administrators “observed positive trends” in students’ math proficiency on standardized assessments since purchasing i-Ready. “Based on these outcomes, ASD plans to continue using i-Ready as part of its math instructional program,” he said.
Ty Holmes, chief impact officer for Curriculum Associates, said the company continuously solicits feedback and tries to make changes to address complaints. This fall, the i-Ready benchmark tests will be shorter, he said, and the weekly lessons have become more interactive.
“We look at the feedback, and we try to make adjustments to the product,” he said. “But the reality is, we understand that not everyone — you know, 14 million kids — are going to love every single thing they do at school, but we try to get better every single day.”
From broke to $800 million in revenue
In 2008, Curriculum Associates was in crisis, with just enough cash left to run the business for about 82 days. Since its founding in 1969, the company had produced printed educational workbooks, but its business model of shipping thick binders of worksheets and learning disability assessments from a Massachusetts warehouse was no longer working.
Rob Waldron, who was CEO at the time, came up with a plan that turned Curriculum Associates into a technology company. Curriculum Associates created i-Ready at a moment when schools were adjusting their curricula to meet Common Core standards — academic benchmarks established in the 2010s — and when federal laws like No Child Left Behind meant schools were focused on improving their standardized test scores.
In 2017, the Boston-based investment firm Berkshire Partners bought an ownership stake in Curriculum Associates for an undisclosed but “significant” sum. The private equity outfit praised the i-Ready maker for its “remarkable growth.”
Curriculum Associates had 100 employees in 2008; by the time Waldron left at the end of 2024, the company employed 2,400 people and its annual revenue had risen to nearly $800 million.
I-Ready’s appeal had grown with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which required states to track academic growth in elementary and middle schools and establish consequences for schools whose students did poorly on annual math and reading assessments. Around the same time, Google began pitching Chromebooks to schools; today, about 9 in 10 schools provide a computer or tablet to each child.
Growing backlash to tech in schools
In addition to offering teachers color-coded reports highlighting where children are struggling and how close they are to being at grade level, i-Ready also distributes lesson plans and curriculum materials and recommends that schools purchase teacher training. Curriculum Associates hosts webinars for parents and encourages schools to celebrate strong i-Ready results with banners and parties.
“At the end of the day, it’s about great teachers,” said Sia, the current CEO. “I-Ready is not the most important thing — we are one part. We’re a tool to support educators and help them save time.”
Curriculum Associates’ social media is full of teachers and principals testifying to i-Ready’s value. In a video the company posted in March, an elementary school principal in Virginia credited a 14% jump in math scores on state tests in part to the district using i-Ready data. A teacher in New York praised i-Ready in a video posted in April. “I live in the i-Ready data reports,” the teacher said. “I find that it’s easy to use, easy to understand.”
Jeff Lisciandrello, an education sales consultant, said i-Ready’s advantage over competing software — such as Renaissance STAR, IXL, NWEA MAP Growth and others — was its user-friendly dashboard for principals and administrators.
“That’s a smart business decision because the people who buy things are administrators,” he said. “Teachers generally don’t make the decision to purchase a particular product, especially one like i-Ready.”
At school board meetings, administrators often present i-Ready scores to show students’ progress, sometimes hailing it as a tool for accountability. In March, Sharon Ofek, a superintendent in Carmel, California, praised the software’s math lessons for teaching problem-solving skills rather than memorization of formulas. Rita Patel, a Carmel board member, responded, “I’m glad we’re starting them young.”
Some teachers feel ‘handcuffed’
In 2023, Jonathan Kryk, a language arts and social studies teacher at a K-8 charter school in Spring Hill, Florida, found out Curriculum Associates had selected him as an “Extraordinary Educator.” He thought it was “an amazing honor, because that’s how they market it,” he said.
Kryk accepted a free trip to Boston, where Curriculum Associates offered professional development to 30 teachers from across the country who demonstrated “best-in-class use of i-Ready.” The company quoted Kryk endorsing i-Ready on its website, in a podcast and in a news release.
But after the trip, Kryk changed his mind. The more he used i-Ready, he said, the more he saw how its results didn’t predict students’ success. Some students grew discouraged after acing i-Ready only to fail state standardized tests, and he said middle school students resisted using the software, which displayed childish cartoons to help them sound out words.
Even though his district required teachers to use i-Ready, he stopped and switched to small-group instruction and other materials provided by the state. He said the share of his seventh graders passing state reading tests more than doubled. But district administrators continued to send email reminders to use i-Ready, he said.
“Teachers aren’t being allowed to teach,” Kryk said. “When a teacher is essentially handcuffed to a certain program — even if the program isn’t working, or that child has been using that program from kindergarten to, say, seventh grade — you don’t have that authority to make that instructional decision that maybe I should use something else to help this child.”
The Hernando County School District, where Kryk teaches, disagrees with his assessment of i-Ready and plans to continue using it. The software “provides teachers with the necessary data and resources to differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of all students,” Aaron Ellerman, the district’s communications director, said in a statement.
Criticism of i-Ready is a frequent topic on Reddit and TikTok, where teachers describe how i-Ready’s larger benchmark assessments, which students take three times a year, eat up 40 hours of instruction time, or say that pressure related to the software is driving them to quit.
Amid these concerns, some researchers have questioned whether the software works.
Patrick Graff, an education policy researcher at the American Federation for Children, a nonprofit that promotes funding for children to attend private schools, wrote a thread on X in March that called the existing studies on i-Ready “weak and full of measurement tricks to make their product look better.” Some studies rely on the software’s own benchmark assessment to measure student outcomes and exclude students who don’t use the software as intended, for example by hitting random buttons.
“We should just have a higher bar before experimenting on children at this scale,” Graff wrote.
Curriculum Associates rejected Graff’s critique, defended its research as meeting “rigorous” industry standards and said the school districts it works with have seen benefits.
“There’s loads of public data on improvements in big, big districts across the country where we’re a part of — test scores trending positively and faster than their peers,” said Sia, the CEO.
In 2022, a study the company paid for at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Research and Reform in Education found an advantage among students in one district who used i-Ready lessons for math, but the same researchers found mixed results in a study that measured reading scores. The researchers cautioned that the studies don’t tell a full story; they didn’t get a chance to interview teachers about how they used i-Ready and its data.
Some of i-Ready’s defenders also said it can be hard to know what role the software plays in students’ growth. Katherine Cox, an Orlando-based education technology consultant, has coached teachers on using data from i-Ready to inform their instruction. Some teachers then saw their students’ state test scores in math rise over 20%.
“How do you say that that’s because of i-Ready,” Cox said, “versus the fact that they had better instruction, or maybe added some other pieces into their instruction that also made it better? It would almost have to be in a lab, which is impossible to do.”
Curriculum Associates has not done a randomized controlled trial — considered the gold standard of scientific research — to prove i-Ready’s effectiveness. It would be too expensive and would rely on a school district volunteering as a test case, company leaders said, so they don’t plan to do one.
Opting out in Los Angeles
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.
“I could see this being a great screening tool,” David Cisneros, Curriculum Associates’ director of Spanish content and implementation, told the three dozen people who attended the session.
But in some districts, teachers and parents are seeking less technology, not more.
One week after the summit, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board voted to audit i-Ready, which the district signed a $20 million, five-year contract for in 2023.
For months, Los Angeles parents had complained about i-Ready at school board meetings. They saw it as the reason that the district had assigned iPads to elementary school students, who often brought them home to complete lessons.
“I don’t understand why they would need an iPad to do math and reading,” said Bridie Lee, the mother of a third grader.
