Our Experience with I-Ready

> Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce.

For a long time I've been wanting to write an essay about this exact topic. Once you start paying attention, it's everywhere: the automatic upselling attempts at self-service kiosks, the automatic pre-filled tipping inputs in the card payment terminals, and some horribly long forms that require extremely pedantic input filled just correctly, that no human would bother on paper.

I've come to think of this as a kind of automated tyranny. Few real humans would have the heart to keep trying to upsell with such persistence when most of their customers reject the sale. And very few humans would dare to ask every single human to tip a pre-filled amount of 10% or even up in such a bold manner. But because "the machine does it", there's no alternative but to accept it, or to boycott the machines.

My condolences to the author for having to witness their children live through such an experience. It sounds like hell.

Our school district uses this same math software. If one wished to design an experience to instill a hatred of mathematics into children, it would be a pretty solid approach.

We've informed teachers, nicely but firmly, that we will not be doing any of it at home. Some of them have pushed back, but barring any real consequence, I am not going to subject anyone to this counterproductive torment.

Not just I-Ready. This is the majority of educational software.

The stupid repetitive animations. I am sure they sold it to some administrators as being "fun", and "kids are going to love it" because, see, there is a cute penguin doing a 10 second dance. But of course you have to watch the animation after each section and you can't skip ahead.

The kid makes a single mistake, and the "smart adaptive" algorithm throws them back to the preschool school level to "let's start with numbers again", while the kid just clicked the wrong button because the UI is janky and because they are angry with stupid penguin who is getting on their nerves.

Some teachers understand what's going on refuse to use this stuff and print actual paper and pencil tests and homework sheet. But that only works until the standardized tests come, those are all on the computer usually, with the same janky UI.

Guess what, it’s not that great in online masters programs either. Not like that, it sounds like genuine torture, but Canvas is still nearly the least bare-metal minimum you can get. Why? Because a PDF would be more than adequate, but would not collect revenue. So they have a shell over the PDF that makes you slowly flip the pages, etc. PDFs can even do checkboxes and little text tests and things now, so there is no excuse. You just have to pay and pay, and since kids don’t have money, they have to spiritually suffer instead and learn that the world is out to get them like some Upton Sinclair company town.

My kids and the better teachers at their school also hate iReady for generally the same reasons stated in the post. I recommend this article [0], along w/ this related reddit thread [1] (there are countless others)

Worth mentioning: The maker of iReady, Curriculum Associates, is majority-owned by private equity (shocking).

[0] https://archive.ph/hsvbh

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskTeachers/comments/1rdowny/iready...

Yes my kids also hate it. They keep it muted and just watch for the visual indicator that the next section is available. It’s worse than the annual corporate compliance training that many adults have to suffer through. One thing to be optimistic about with LLMs is that even unattended poorly prompted vanilla coding LLMs won’t naturally produce such horrible software. It takes distinct human intervention to make it this bad.

My kids don't seem to have any issues with I-Ready, and I haven't heard any complaints from the other parents in my neighborhood. It's upsetting to hear it's causing issues for others. FWIW, in our district it appears to be used purely to determine where kids are at compared to the benchmark expectations. It may be coloring my views that my kids are both far above grade level according to the software.

I am uncertain of the utility of any mandated screen based technology or app in K-8 education. We keep investing in it and the standard scores keep falling. Teachers are often juggling multiple apps and now have an IT job on top of their work. None of the efficiency or adaptive promises are coming to fruition. Teachers have less time and more stress.

Something is broken. Lets go back to paper and pencil.

We're having conversations about putting everyone's kids through private school in my family now. This version of public education is starting to look like a failed experiment in many ways. The amount of money that goes into this system has become unbelievable relative to its outputs. Everything is about money now. Massive contracts. Multiple layers of entrenched bureaucracy. It's probably not going to fix itself at this point. Too many self-serving actors are involved who work in administration buildings all day. You don't need this much middle management to run an elementary school. If you eliminated all of the bullshit admin and "support" services, you could probably quadruple the salaries of the teachers.

I remember that when I was in school, teachers hated my ever-present netbook laptop and the disinterest I had in their classes. Which were already repetitious and not very exciting to me.

To see it half reversed now - every student must have a laptop and use it, not listen to the teacher - and yet somehow be so much worse is really sad.

For me, the computer was a portal to worlds and experiences and time spent doing things school had no way of offering me. For a kid to grow up hating their laptop because this is what it offers them, when we have so many incredible things sitting just out of their reach, is infuriating.

I'd really like to know how and why the school hasn't responded to the parents' complaints, if they're so frequent and unanimous. Maybe they're locked into a contract?

On the other hand, a while ago I was picking up takeout at a restaurant and a little girl, the daughter of one of the owners, was doing homework and it turned out to be a simple JavaScript-like programming assignment. I helped her learn how to write a for loop to make a fox jump over some obstacles. It was fun! It's not all bad.

YMMV, I guess - we were surprised when our first grader said math was her favorite part of school this year, and she recently asked if she can get i-Ready on her iPad.

> When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

> His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

I’ve been using Claude and https://sprites.dev/ to build bespoke learning exercises for my kids. It’s been remarkably easy to put together games and practice problems with very little guidance and I can tailor the apps to anything they are struggling with in school.

It sounds like it's browser-based so maybe start a project to automate it with tampermonkey or a chrome extension. It could be a fun family project :)

> When we sent our kids to public school,

And there's the problem. Public schools do not want groups of children to go faster than other children because it is inequitable.

By simply teaching first grade content for several years, equity is ensured since it is impossible to get ahead.

The system is working as intended.

It truly boggles the mind how bad public schools can be. When you read something like this or see things in person, it’s genuinely difficult to imagine how a system could do this when staffed with well intentioned humans with brains. And yet. It happens.

For liberals this is a good reminder of why conservatives don’t trust government.