The Techlash is here, and it's coming for i-Ready

The Techlash is gaining strength, writes "Eduwonk" Andrew Rotherham. People are worried about technology in classrooms -- and screen time at home. In Pixar's new Pixar Toy Story, which debuts next month, the toys fight a new "Lilypad" for Bonnie's play time.

There's a lot to be worried about, he writes. But, "we rarely see the best policy made in a panic or when the education issue in question is really a proxy for broader social issues."

Rotherham hopes the techlash will encourage a move to "outcome-based contracting," which ties payment to measurable results. Defining what success looks like "would be progress," he writes. "Actually focusing on results in any kind of consequential way — even just for renewal and adoption decisions — would move the needle" toward efficiency and efficacy. "Perhaps."

Resistance is growing to i-Ready, personalized learning and assessment sofware used by one-third of American students, reports Chalkbeat's Lily Altavena. Critics say it wastes time with repetitive lessons and practice exercises. "Some parents, educators, and researchers are now skeptical that there’s solid evidence to justify having their kids use i-Ready."

Parents in school districts across the country are pressuring school boards to drop i-Ready, she writes. Some are suing Curriculum Associates, the parent company.

In 2022, Johns Hopkins researchers found gains for math students using i-Ready's personalized instruction program, compared to those just using the program's diagnostic assessment, writes Altavena. There were few benefits in reading. There is "not a sufficient evidence base to just blanket adopt i-Ready in school,” said Steven Ross, a JHU education professor who co-authored the study.

But skeptics note that Curriculum Associates paid for the research. There's little independent research of education technology's effectiveness, concludes a 2023 analysis. Only a quarter of the 100 most popular programs in schools had evidence of effectiveness, authors wrote. A 2021 study "analyzed the 124 most-downloaded EdTech mobile apps and reported that most of them were judged to stimulate repetitive, distracting, and meaningless experiences with minimal learning value."

“Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking, ‘Does this actually help students learn?’— or perhaps we never seriously considered this question in the first place," writes ed-tech critic Jared Cooney Horvath in a blog post.

Ryan Moulton, who writes software for a living, saw i-Ready tedium turn his son into a math hater. The program spends so much time repeating directions there's no time to do math, he complains. The software is supposed to adapt to the student's abilities, but his children saw the same easy problems over and over for two years.