![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260509-i-ready-ww-1138-086c6c.jpg\")
Altair Maine, a teacher in North Hollywood, says he loses valuable class time to i-Ready.Jenna Schoenefeld for NBC News<\/p>\nIn 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\u2019t learned, such as asking a kindergartner \u201c98 minus 17,\u201d 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\u2019t take i-Ready seriously and purposely try to get low scores, since the more questions they get wrong, the easier the questions become.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cglorified babysitter\u201d of \u201ckids staring at Chromebooks.\u201d He cuts hands-on lab activities to make time for the tests.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything comes at a cost, and there are only so many hours I get with the students,\u201d Maine said.<\/p>\n
Altair Maine, a teacher in North Hollywood, says he loses valuable class time to i-Ready.Jenna Schoenefeld for NBC News<\/p>\n
In Anchorage, where Petersen tutors children in math, the school district agreed in 2020 to pay $6.75 million for i-Ready<\/a> over seven years. Petersen is unimpressed with the software, which doesn\u2019t allow students to show their work, and she said many students don\u2019t take it seriously, which makes the data useless.<\/p>\n \u201cThey push the volume all the way down, and then they just start pushing buttons until the screen will change for them,\u201d Petersen said. \u201cThey\u2019re not learning anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Corey Allen Young, a spokesman for the Anchorage School District, said administrators \u201cobserved positive trends\u201d in students\u2019 math proficiency on standardized assessments since purchasing i-Ready. \u201cBased on these outcomes, ASD plans to continue using i-Ready as part of its math instructional program,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe look at the feedback, and we try to make adjustments to the product,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the reality is, we understand that not everyone \u2014 you know, 14 million kids \u2014 are going to love every single thing they do at school, but we try to get better every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n From broke to $800 million in revenue<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Rob Waldron, who was CEO at the time, came up with a plan<\/a> 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 \u2014 academic benchmarks established in the 2010s \u2014 and when federal laws like No Child Left Behind meant schools were focused on improving their standardized test scores.<\/p>\n In 2017, the Boston-based investment firm Berkshire Partners bought an ownership stake in Curriculum Associates for an undisclosed<\/a> but \u201csignificant\u201d sum. The private equity outfit praised<\/a> the i-Ready maker for its \u201cremarkable growth.\u201d<\/p>\n Curriculum Associates had 100 employees in 2008; by the time Waldron left at the end of 2024, the company employed 2,400 people<\/a> and its annual revenue had risen to nearly $800 million.<\/p>\n I-Ready\u2019s 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<\/a> Chromebooks to schools; today, about 9 in 10 schools<\/a> provide a computer or tablet to each child.<\/p>\n Growing backlash to tech in schools<\/p>\n 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<\/a> with banners and parties.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day, it\u2019s about great teachers,\u201d said Sia, the current CEO. \u201cI-Ready is not the most important thing \u2014 we are one part. We\u2019re a tool to support educators and help them save time.\u201d<\/p>\n Curriculum Associates\u2019 social media is full of teachers and principals testifying to i-Ready\u2019s value. In a video the company posted<\/a> 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<\/a> in April. \u201cI live in the i-Ready data reports,\u201d the teacher said. \u201cI find that it\u2019s easy to use, easy to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeff Lisciandrello, an education sales consultant, said i-Ready\u2019s advantage over competing software \u2014 such as Renaissance STAR, IXL, NWEA MAP Growth and others \u2014 was its user-friendly dashboard for principals and administrators.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a smart business decision because the people who buy things are administrators,\u201d he said. \u201cTeachers generally don\u2019t make the decision to purchase a particular product, especially one like i-Ready.\u201d<\/p>\n At school board meetings<\/a>, administrators often present<\/a> i-Ready scores to show students\u2019 progress<\/a>, sometimes hailing it as a tool for accountability. In March, Sharon Ofek, a superintendent in Carmel, California, praised the software\u2019s math lessons for teaching problem-solving skills rather than memorization of formulas. Rita Patel, a Carmel board member, responded, \u201cI\u2019m glad we\u2019re starting them young.\u201d<\/p>\n Some teachers feel \u2018handcuffed\u2019<\/p>\n 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 \u201cExtraordinary Educator.\u201d He thought it was \u201can amazing honor, because that\u2019s how they market it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kryk accepted a free trip to Boston, where Curriculum Associates offered professional development to 30 teachers from across the country who demonstrated \u201cbest-in-class use of i-Ready.\u201d The company quoted Kryk endorsing i-Ready on its website<\/a>, in a podcast<\/a> and in a news release<\/a>.<\/p>\n But after the trip, Kryk changed his mind. The more he used i-Ready, he said, the more he saw how its results didn\u2019t predict students\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cTeachers aren\u2019t being allowed to teach,\u201d Kryk said. \u201cWhen a teacher is essentially handcuffed to a certain program \u2014 even if the program isn\u2019t working, or that child has been using that program from kindergarten to, say, seventh grade \u2014 you don\u2019t have that authority to make that instructional decision that maybe I should use something else to help this child.\u201d<\/p>\n The Hernando County School District, where Kryk teaches, disagrees with his assessment of i-Ready and plans to continue using it. The software \u201cprovides teachers with the necessary data and resources to differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of all students,\u201d Aaron Ellerman, the district\u2019s communications director, said in a statement.<\/p>\n Criticism of i-Ready is a frequent topic on Reddit<\/a> and TikTok<\/a>, where teachers describe how i-Ready\u2019s larger benchmark assessments<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Amid these concerns, some researchers have questioned whether<\/a> the software works.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> on X in March that called the existing studies on i-Ready \u201cweak and full of measurement tricks to make their product look better.\u201d Some studies rely on the software\u2019s own benchmark assessment to measure student outcomes and exclude students who don\u2019t use the software as intended, for example by hitting random buttons.<\/p>\n \u201cWe should just have a higher bar before experimenting on children at this scale,\u201d Graff wrote.<\/p>\n Curriculum Associates rejected Graff\u2019s critique, defended its research<\/a> as meeting \u201crigorous\u201d industry standards and said the school districts it works with have seen benefits.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s loads of public data on improvements in big, big districts across the country where we\u2019re a part of \u2014 test scores trending positively and faster than their peers,\u201d said Sia, the CEO.<\/p>\n In 2022, a study the company paid for at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Center for Research and Reform in Education found an advantage among students in one district who used i-Ready lessons for math<\/a>, but the same researchers found mixed results in a study<\/a> that measured reading scores. The researchers cautioned that the studies don\u2019t tell a full story; they didn\u2019t get a chance to interview teachers about how they used i-Ready and its data.<\/p>\n Some of i-Ready\u2019s defenders also said it can be hard to know what role the software plays in students\u2019 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\u2019 state test scores in math rise over 20%.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you say that that\u2019s because of i-Ready,\u201d Cox said, \u201cversus 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Curriculum Associates has not done a randomized controlled trial \u2014 considered the gold standard of scientific research \u2014 to prove i-Ready\u2019s effectiveness. It would be too expensive and would rely on a school district volunteering as a test case, company leaders said, so they don\u2019t plan to do one.<\/p>\n Opting out in Los Angeles<\/p>\n Last month in San Diego, at a major conference on digital learning called the ASU+GSV Summit, Curriculum Associates previewed i-Ready\u2019s latest feature: an AI tool that asks students to read aloud to the computer so the software can record and analyze their voices.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI could see this being a great screening tool,\u201d David Cisneros, Curriculum Associates\u2019 director of Spanish content and implementation, told the three dozen people who attended the session.<\/p>\n But in some districts, teachers and parents are seeking less technology, not more.<\/p>\n One week after the summit, the Los Angeles Unified School District\u2019s board voted to audit i-Ready, which the district signed a $20 million, five-year contract<\/a> for in 2023.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t understand why they would need an iPad to do math and reading,\u201d said Bridie Lee, the mother of a third grader.<\/p>\n![\"Curriculum](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260511-Curriculum-Associates-Rob-Waldron-mn-1415-667621.jpg\")
Former Curriculum Associates CEO Rob Waldron, pictured in 2015, led the company through its creation of i-Ready.Keith Bedford \/ Boston Globe via Getty Images file<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260509-i-ready-Jonathan-Kryk-1x1-ww-1131-f24a4b.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
Jonathan Kryk holds a Teacher of the Year award for the 2025-26 school year.Courtesy Jonathan Kryk<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260509-i-ready-ww-1125-e3c715.jpg\")
Parents in Los Angeles pushed the school board to mandate an audit of i-Ready’s usefulness in the district.Jenna Schoenefeld for NBC News<\/p>\n