We're Suing the Makers of i-Ready
For our press release on the lawsuit, see here.
Education Progress is proud to announce that we are partnering with Orion Impact Litigation to sue Curriculum Associates, the company behind educational technology app i-Ready, for false advertising. i-Ready is one of the most-used K-12 educational apps in the country, with Curriculum Associates noting that more than fourteen million students (or roughly a third of K-12 students in the United States) use it.
We are not the first to raise problems with i-Ready. Earlier this year, parent Ryan Moulton wrote the viral article “Our Experience with i-Ready.” In it, he talks about how his son went from loving math as a small child to coming home from school in tears saying that he hated it. Moulton outlines how some kids would hide in the bathroom to avoid the software, while others would describe it as torture.
Moulton describes his disappointment with the app’s user interface bugs and oversights, its repetitive and basic work, and an apparent lack of adaptation. Compounding this all was that he had believed the marketing: he thought that, if his kids were persistent and did the work they were supposed to do, the app would reward them with the math they needed to learn. It did not. Nor is this isolated to a single parent. Similar reporting has come out from Unherd, NBC, Karen Vaites, and others, with students and teachers alike railing against it.
Getting institutions right for adults matters. Getting them right for kids is a matter of fundamental duty. When you’re thirty, you have alternatives, you have options, you control your own destiny. If an institution hands you an experience that does not work as advertised, you can walk out. You can make arguments in the public sphere. You can decide, for yourself, how and where you want to spend your time. While you’re a child, though, you are at the mercy of the adults in the room.
And if the adults in the room tell you that you must sit glassy-eyed listening to the same instructions hundreds of times, spending more and more of your time using an application waiting for the action to start, running out the clock hoping only to make it through another wasted day, well, that’s what you do.
Schools should respect the time and talents of their students. When they don’t, kids learn quickly that institutions are hostile and that the things that are supposed to help them exist instead as obstacles. Kids deserve better.
On its product pages, i-Ready talks about a mission to “give students what they need, when they need it.” Education Progress is suing i-Ready, in short, because we believe kids deserve schools that live up to that mission.
What claims do we make?
We make three core allegations against i-Ready:
First, we allege that it claims to provide a “diagnostic assessment” that does not diagnose. Curriculum Associates represents their product as providing “comprehensive insight into student learning” and identifying “the specific skills each student needs to develop.” But it offers only a crude screener, not a detailed diagnostic. It provides enough info to claim a student is ahead or behind in a broad domain and to guess how the student is likely to score on tests, but it does not show students or teachers the specific focused skills that need to be improved.
Second, we allege that it claims to provide “personalized instruction” but fails to deliver personalization tailored to actual students. It sorts students into categories such as “Phonics,” “Geometry,” “Measurement and Data,” and “Number and Operations,” then defaults to assigning generic lesson sequences to students in those domains no matter what their actual skill gaps look like.
Finally, we allege that it claims that when it is used “with fidelity,” iReady usage causes “46-percent greater” growth in English language arts and “38-percent greater” growth in mathematics than similar peers, but it relies on correlational studies that cannot be used to draw causal conclusions, studies that test students specifically on Curriculum Associates’ tests of Curriculum Associates’ lessons, scored by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates markets a causal result not sufficiently backed by the research they provide.
Curriculum Associates conditions its claims of efficacy on “fidelity.” If students do not use the app for thirty- to forty-nine minutes per week for at least eighteen weeks, we allege that they point to insufficient fidelity on the part of students, families, and teachers that leads to the failure to deliver gains. This attempts to shift the risk of their underperformance to children, families, and teachers, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where it can demand ever more time when students fail to gain from it.
All of these, we allege, are material misrepresentations of their product that mislead consumers, including many students and parents in the District of Columbia who are required to use i-Ready’s tools. Our ultimate goal with this lawsuit is to get i-Ready to back away from misleading claims that lead both schools and parents like Ryan Moulton who believe in the potential of educational technology to put trust in a tool that does not adequately serve their kids.
How can we do this?
Washington, D.C. has uniquely robust consumer protection laws. The DC Consumer Protection Procedures Act, unusually, allows individuals and nonprofit organizations to bring public-interest lawsuits against companies engaging in deceptive business practices. Historically, this has been used in high-profile suits against JUUL for youth vaping marketing, Marriott and StubHub for hidden fees, and in “greenwashing” environmental advocacy lawsuits against Coca-Cola and others.
Under the statute, we are suing Curriculum Associates on behalf of a proposed class of students and parents within Washington, D.C. schools in which i-Ready was mandated. Our partner in this lawsuit, Orion Impact Litigation, specializes in just this sort of work: while we can highlight the specific problems we see with i-Ready and others as part of our mandate to orient education towards excellence, Orion Impact Litigation focuses on working with nonprofits like us to bring suits against corporations whose marketing misleads the people our nonprofits fight for.
We are ready to fight to improve the education of kids in Washington, D.C. and around the country.
You can read the press release here, and see the full complaint here.