Is your child learning the 3 Rs? GHAPS assures us that they are on the cutting edge, introducing K-8 students to Curriculum Associates i-Ready, the online common core aligned math and reading tool. The first I heard about this was at the last school board meeting.
The long and short of it is, I tried to learn something about this from Mary Jane Evink, our Curriculum Director. I asked her in an email to tell me something about it (her email replies before COVID were loquacious). This time she merely sent me a link to i-Ready and explained that the District is only using it as a Diagnostic tool, not also for its series of lesson programs. The link she sent is basically marketing material. I followed up that email with a series of questions generally about student and teacher involvement that Mrs. Evink was happy to answer in person (from my experience with her, gaslight). Naively, I thought she might commit herself, as she did in the past, to written answers. I pressed on with another email to which she replied, “My emails are public record. They are used out of context when shared with the public.” That struck me as rather evasive, so I realized that I was on my own to answer my questions, presumably out of context.
So what is this i-Ready Diagnostic? Curriculum Associates calls it an “adaptive Diagnostic for reading and mathematics [that] pinpoints student need down to the sub-skill level, and [provides] ongoing progress monitoring [to] show whether students are on track to achieve end-of-year targets.” Curriculum Associates claims it does this by giving “[e]ach item a student sees is individualized based on their answer to the previous question. For example, a series of correct answers will result in slightly harder questions, while a series of incorrect answers will yield slightly easier questions.” I-Ready says the purpose of this is not to give your student a score or grade, but instead to determine how best to support your student’s learning.” I guess its like Goldilocks tasting three different bowls of porridge, finding the one that is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.
This assessment is taken by students on a computer three times a year. The purported purpose is to individualize instruction, sort of like special education, and target intervention. The assessments categorize students based on their score into particular skills they should learn, not what they actually individually understand and need to learn. In fact, the teacher does not see the problems or the students correct or incorrect answers that would help the teacher assess the areas of the students understanding and learning. From what I can gather, the real ultimate goal is for Curriculum Associates to recommend an endless series of lessons, and that takes data. Florida is one state heavily relying on i-Ready, and where many parents express concerns about the program and the data collected on children.
Turning homeward, i-Ready markets that it is “Built for Michigan standards', “Backed by Research”, and “Recognized by the NCII (National Center on Intensive Intervention”, and offers “equity in learning.” Yes, you read that right, learning is not simply about academic knowledge, it is also about “equity.” I feared and suspected that as soon as I heard about its alignment to the whole child approach. I-Ready claims:
“i-Ready strives to help every learner access grade-level work and ultimately succeed at grade level. By providing high-quality, engaging, culturally relevant, and inclusive content along with assessment tools for setting high expectations, i-Ready can help schools create a learning environment in which every student succeeds.”
I-Ready adds that they have made a “commitment to equitable experiences for all students”, elaborating: “[w]hile this work will support change in classrooms across the country, we believe it is critical to providing increasingly equitable experiences for all students who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).” So if you were suspicious that i-Ready is “woke”, i Ready expressly confirms that it is. I think you can just imagine what the programs put in front of your child's face look like. My guess is it will look like no country for white men.
Getting back to one of the questions I had asked Mrs. Evink, and she ducked, namely, “[a]re there any peer reviewed academic studies published about the assessment?” Notably, in November 2016, the John Hopkins School of Education found that “[t]he lack of a research base on i-Ready ...as means for improving student learning is both surprising and disappointing given their widespread use as well as their cost.” According to John Hopkins, there are three types of peer reviewed studies, content validity, criterion-related validity, and construct validity. Relevant to this discussion, infra, “content validity, … establishes the alignment between the test questions and the content it is intended to assess (e.g. this can be established by comparing i-Ready and MAP assessments to state standards). … Researchers often use a benchmark of 0.70 to indicate 'strong correlation.'”
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but in 2016-2017, i-Ready compiled its own research with Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP) to claim it met the content validity study. Specifically, i-Ready asserted that “Research conducted in partnership with the Educational Research Institute of America, using a large sample, found the i-Ready Diagnostic is highly correlated with the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP) 3–8 assessment in the areas of English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics.” I-Ready claims that its research with ERIA shows its reading benchmark is 83 and its math benchmark is 88.
Proof that it works! Or maybe not. As Johns Hopkins University research fellows Alanna Bjorklund-Young and Carey Borkoski wrote in a 2016 paper on i-Ready’s research claims, that when “parties associated with the publishers of the assessments have authored the studies, (it) inevitably calls objectivity into question.” That's like Norfolk Southern testing the water and telling the residents of Palestine, Ohio its safe to drink.
Another question I had for Mrs. Evink concerned the “whole child” approach. Mrs. Evink expressed her fandom of the whole child approach at the last Board meeting. But I have discovered that the whole child approach is supported by social emotional learning which is grounded in a focus on equity. With i-Ready's commitment to equity, it is safe to assume that it fits the whole child approach to education.
I realize that I sound critical of i-Ready, but apparently, I am not alone. In fact, there must be quite a bit of criticism about i-Ready because it created its own web post called “Is i-Ready Dangerous?”, to which it affirmatively answered, no. In any event, here is a sampling of i-Ready criticism worth considering:
In a recent edition of the Manatee Florida Harold-Tribune, in an article titled Wary of i-Ready, the author comments: “[d]espite those impressive statistics, critics statewide see the program as a harbinger of a dystopian education future, in which teachers are replaced with computers and 'learning' consists entirely of staring slack-jawed at a screen.” The article also says, "It is crap,' said Manatee County education activist Bridget Mendel, who regularly calls on school districts to spend money on reading specialists rather than computer programs.”
I also found Nancy Bailey's Education Website where she observes:
“Many school districts use Curriculum Associates i-Ready in their classrooms for reading and math, but there appears to be program murkiness. There’s concern that teachers might rely on i Ready data for grading rather than their professional expertise. I-Ready provides teachers with data reports of student results, but teachers never see the child’s online responses. They don’t see the correct or incorrect answers. Grading has always involved teachers examining student work and evaluating their progress, but if teachers don’t have access to actual work, they end up relying on i-Ready's conclusions. This raises transparency issues.” Mrs. Bailey continues:
“I-Ready marketers also claim i Ready is not about replacing teachers, but if teachers only rely on i-Ready, it removes a teacher’s judgment. Teachers might use the nontransparent program’s results, use the data for grading, instead of their own knowledge about the student, especially when they face overcrowded classrooms, a reality during the pandemic. Also, if teachers advertise a data-rich classroom, parents might focus more on the data from i-Ready, not the teacher’s personal observations and feedback. Teachers wind up taking a backseat to i Ready.”
I have no doubt teachers will publicly tell you that this program is nothing more than a tool for learning and has nothing to do with shaping children to think a certain way. No doubt that is what Mrs. Evink would have told me. I am not so sure and encourage you to investigate for yourself. In the meantime, there are many technical aspects of the i-Ready Diagnostic I will have to save for another essay.