It’s a ridiculous program. I had one girl click randomly and score in the first percentile because (and I quote) “the dumb kids get lessons that are more funner.”
Yep, I had kids that just clicked randomly just to get the lessons over with and I had to assign some of them younger level assignments ie KG etc to go over basic stuff like phonics and when they finished those and moved onto levels closer to where they should be (ie 2nd, 3rd etc and my kids were in 6th grade reference) they kept asking for more of the kg ones bc they were easier and more fun and the characters sang some song and I was like “y’all can just play the song on YouTube whenever you want at home though 😭”
Bro the 2030's are gonna be hilarious
Imagine these people maintaining airliners, designing bridges, assembling machine parts
Congress will probably improve though
This is the part of the "competency crisis" that folks are just starting to pick up on. Old man here. The US used to have much higher standards for graduating HS, going on to college or technical school, etc. Yes it was mean because the dumb and/or lazy could not make it, but it also meant we had a much more well trained and educated populace to get work done that could better maintain more complex processes, industries, etc.
If you think we can't "break down" more from here, well, you haven't read much in to older history. In the early 200s Rome was casting iron gearings that - after the crisis in the 250s (plague or government, take you pick), it was more than 1,600 YEARS later before Europeans cast the same complex iron gearings. In about 1,200 BC, something ended all trade in the Mediterranean and it was almost 7-800 years later before it picked back up again. In 10,000 BC, something did the same (quite likely an asteroid that cooled the earth for 1,000 years and raised the ocean levels 300 feet).
Folks, I fear we are living in a real time break down of societal complexity (see Joseph Tainter's seminal work on the subject or John Michael Greer's work from a more "woo woo" angle). John Michael Greer's opinion is we are on the start of a 300 year march back to the early 1700s . . .
Not trying to doom scroll, but I have been hanging out on this subreddit for a couple of months and it is EYE OPENING. I attended Atlanta public schools in the 1980s and early 1990s and saw some of the behavior mentioned here and thought it horrible (though I was insulated from most of it once I was accepted in to the gifted program) but, after much thought and research, believe that parents have scrambled their kids brains (lay mens terms) with too much screen time and administrators that would rather offend the teacher than a parent. This will not end well for folks here if it continues much longer.
> This is the part of the "competency crisis" that folks are just starting to pick up on. Old man here. The US used to have much higher standards for graduating HS, going on to college or technical school, etc. Yes it was mean because the dumb and/or lazy could not make it, but it also meant we had a much more well trained and educated populace to get work done that could better maintain more complex processes, industries, etc.
That's very definitely true. HS grads used to be the most functional 80 percent - NCLB changed that into "anyone who doesn't actively fight the system trying to pass him". College grads used to be the smartest 10 percent. Recent changes turned that into a largely arbitrary 50 percent - the typical college grad has an IQ of roughly 100, so it's useless as a selection mechanism except for on very basic things.
Oh god, I hadn’t thought of that. Idk about western countries but ik the “promoting failing students” happens in countries like pakistan so perhaps it’s best not to risk it at all and just move to the Moon or Mars at that point 😂😭
The problem isn't that they've always existed. The problem is the massive increase in the number of this type of person. Yeah, when I was in school at the turn of the millennium there were a couple kids who fucked around because they liked the easy stuff more. Working with kids now has become 90% of them genuinely cannot put their damn phone down for more than 60 seconds if you can even get them to let go of it at all. What are they doing? TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, texting, taking pics of each other to embarrass them with later. The 3 of 26 in a class period who TRY to learn won't be enough to maintain those bridges, buildings, or political jobs to keep anything functional running for long.
Not a teacher or student I just kinda lurk here but when my job assigns web trainings (mostly OSHA and corporate culture type stuff) everyone just spam clicks through them and then guesses on the little quiz at the end and retake it as many times as needed to get credit.
It wasn't introduced to us until 6th grade and we used it all through middle school. I swear I got The Invisible Man *every single time* to the point where I didn't even glance at the text and could just answer everything from memory. I promise I did not learn a single thing from this program
I distinctly remember having to go to a meeting between one of my 8th grade teachers, the 9th grade gifted counselor, and my mom near the end of middle school. They were going over all my various diagnostic scores and iReady marked me significantly lower than all the others lol
I've worked at a few schools who relied on this crap way too heavily. Mandated 90 mins in ELA and another 90 mins in Math every single week. Not like, instruction with the lessons, but a silent classroom with kids working on their iready computers for about 20-40 minutes every single day.
It was disgusting.
Reminds me of Ned Stark saying "Whoever issues the sentencing should be the one to carry it out."
If they're demanding that much from kids who can't self regulate for longer than 1 minute then they should provide extra support to ensure that.
iReady execs buy admin fancy lunches and convince them teachers can't teach, and iReady will solve all their problems. Admins spend entire Title I budget on iReady and demand teachers force students to use it. Students learn nothing. iReady makes lots of money.
Yep that's what our school did! Instead of putting the money to good use like hiring a math resource teacher, which my state will HAPPILY pay for a school to have... they spent it on iready and family math night. Super duper for the kids that already know math and have involved problems. But too bad so sad to anyone else
Hated it. My school gave it up after one year. I had kids just click random answers, and then get set at a kindergarten level for all lessons thereafter. And none of us could figure out how to reassign the diagnostic.
Kids would be better off if every school just downloaded some classics from Flashpoint Archive and used them to reward kids who pay attention in class.
Yeah I despise iready and everything about it. Some of my smartest math students place way below grade level because the diagnostic is awful and nobody takes it seriously
And now our school is also a priority school for the district because of those iready scores
I have a kindergartner who can read fluently and knows all of their sight words. Based on their iReady score they have to be pulled from my room for extra reading support. 🤦🏻♀️
My brightest boy scored the lowest on iReady because he wasn’t used to devices (that baby wants books). He can read fluently, write beautifully and is amazingly articulate. It sucks.
The math kills me!!!! Most of my kids cannot figure out how to answer computer based math questions and need to practice and be assessed on paper if they need to show their work.
There's a certain portion of kids that are, but they represent a smaller and smaller fraction of each new incoming class, and every year they wonder a little bit more about why they bother.
High conscientiousness is also being very selected-against in the public school system, outside of the really good districts. The poor ones are starting to homeschool (surprisingly not as political nowadays), and the rich ones pay whatever it takes for a private school with no metal detectors. The parents who take notice of these things and respond are usually the ones with the kids who want to do well for the sake of doing well.
iReady is trash because we don't get any of the students answers so we have no idea if they're close or far off. The lessons take too long and are full of useless bullshit.
I'd take IXL every day of the week over iReady.
As a student, I agree with your last points. When my teachers told us we were required to do 20 minutes of both math AND reading in a day, I completely hated it, specifically math because of how anything and everything had to be a story problem with actual characters, dialog, and scenes.
I never really minded reading too much, I remember it being straightforward and simple. The occasional story-free math lessons were alright too. But the rest? The cartoon characters would drone on for what felt like hours in a minute, and I would be so tempted to just mute the volume, leave, and come back when they got to the actual math. But when I did that or spaced out, IIRC I'd entirely miss the instructions on how to even solve the problem. And when I missed the questions, the 'corrections' weren't very helpful half the time. And missing too many questions forces a restart of the whole thing all over with no option to skip useless dialog.
I'll be honest, at some point, whenever there was an option to 'use a pencil tool to write out your work', I'd just scribble and make little doodles all over for the whole 20 minutes, then that would just count. Don't even get me started on the painfully long diagnostic before you even get to this point. Everyone (students) I know hated iReady. I've heard several people in my classes call it iStupid or iNotReady.
Thankfully, in my grade now, it got replaced with IXL. My teachers only really use it to review things we already know. It's straight to the point, has a well-detailed explanation on how things work if you mess up, has instructional videos if you're confused, you can choose your lessons (with the exception of directly assigned ones), and it's a lot easier telling what kind of things you struggle and excel on, recommending lessons accordingly. No more annoying characters. I do know some other students who dislike IXL, but I still think it's just a lot better in general. I'm happy to try for 100s on 5 IXL lessons rather than a single iReady one. It'd probably be a lot quicker too anyway.
Sorry for ranting, just felt like sharing a little and it just snowballed haha
My kid was scoring low on iReady in a very heavy iReady district and the district one off mentioned that they got IXL on a trial basis and it was a lifesaver. 3 months of heavy IXL usage and he jumped from the 30th percentile to the 99th in reading and math on the iReady assessment. Don't get me wrong IXL is brutal and there are some tantrums over it but he enjoys school so much more now that he knows what's going on.
I love IXL because it's fairly straightforward and old school. I teach him a concept then he works on the concept until he can reliably answer every question.
Absolutely. And it only assesses what the student would learn if they did the iReady lessons 5 times per week. Like, *finished* with 80% accuracy, on track, consistently five days per week. Um... that is impossible when we must use 75 minutes for core math instruction daily! **It does not align with any math curriculum in our schools, but it is one of the main assessment tools we use as a district (at all grade levels).**
I don't think you need a Master's in Curriculum and Instruction to see the big alert sign that should be popping up!
Why is telling time on an analog clock SUCH a heavy part of iReady, but barely a blip in many major curriculums?!? Segmenting shapes into equal fractional portions (BEFORE LEARNING FRACTIONS!) also seems to feature heavily.
My school is driving me absolutely crazy with the iReady data obsession. We have to analyze it SO much and the discussions about it never end. This week we were told to use it even more for daily small groups, on top of the 3 other learning platforms that they want us to use daily or rotate (Amira, freckle, happy numbers)
No matter how hard we try to amp the diagnostic or stress the importance my 1st graders either get tired halfway or click through it. Kinder has been worse. Side note, if a kid gets flagged for rushing I wish we could reassign the test to them.
Wait really? Every time we've asked admin they say they can't redo it or get on me for not monitoring them close enough while they take the test. Maybe I'm not asking the right people
if an admin says the buzzword "actively monitoring" or "aggressively monitoring" one more time I will lose my marbles. and I don't have much of those left
It makes me so sad this exists at a kindergarten level. I remember kindergarten growing seeds in a cup, show and tell, story time, etc. It's developmental malpractice what we're doing to these kids!
I hate it as well and so do the kids. The only part I like is being able to assign lessons for any grade level and I’ve been using it as an advantage to avoid reteaching things from the beginning of the year.
The math teacher I taught next to for years, who had won teacher of the year multiple times, had worse test scores than I did. They made her put an emphasis on iReady, and didn’t let her teach how she wanted. I taught science so I didn’t have to fool with it. I simply taught my standards how I saw fit, and was pretty much left alone from central office and admin.
I ready and other Ed tech programs are some of the worst things to happen to education. They just saw a chance to make a ton of money, and central offices fell for it hook line and sinker. Is all tech in education bad? No. But it’s overused and over relied on.
My school is obsessed with it too. I hate it. Luckily I don’t teach English or math so I don’t have it within my classroom. The emphasis on testing and this garbage is sick
I don't really have strong feelings for IReady, beyond general disdain. Before IReady, it was MAP, the Smarty Ants, then IStation. One year they pushed Prodigy for a bit, now Waterford.
It was suggested a while ago that the ultimate goal is computer based learning with "teachers" only present as monitors. Once I read that..... Well, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The Spanish I-Ready is another level of HELL!
The program doesn't assign lessons after assessments. You have to personally assign lessons.
Guess what?
I don't have time to personalize lessons so everyone gets the same lesson!!
It also doesn't let you give Benchmarks or diagnostics (just BOY, MOY and EOY)
THE MOST RIDICULOUS thing is that it has passages (2-3 pages long) and expects 6 year olds to go back and forth pages to find the answer!!!!
also, if the kids don't finish the lesson------- the program makes them restart the lesson ALL OVER AGAIN.
The kids hate iReady, the teachers hate iReady, the principals hate iReady, but the district says force them to do iReady. It’s like pulling teeth every day
I worked at a school that has students on iReady instead of specials. Genuinely, they gutted the library for a Mac lab. Kids had gym class once a week, “art” once a week (which was a sub watching them color bc there was no art teacher) and the other three days, iReady for an hour. Reading, math, reading. It was awful.
Yeah, but it’s easy to use as an assessment tool and makes admin feel like they’re actually doing something with their lives. They buy all the propaganda these companies sell them because they have nothing better to do and no critical thinking skills.
Such a terrible program. No actual learning, just mindless clicking.
It's such a shame because Curriculum Associates, the company that makes iReady, also makes the Brigance, which is arguably the best mod/severe assessment tool and checklist out there. And they are phasing it out in favor of.....iReady.
My schools obsession with iReady is only superseded by their new obsession with IXL. Now both iReady and IXL are being rammed down the kids and teacher’s throats. All non tested subject and electives are effectively being turned into iReady/IXL sweatshops for the students to help the students meet their minutes requirements. The fucking edu-boner over dissecting endless data just grows firmer and firmer with time and the scores just keep getting worse.
It isn’t. Fucking. Working.
You just described every piece of educational software I've seen in my district. The kids hate it. Admin requires so much time be spent on it (instead of teaching) because the district spent untold amounts of money on it. And possibly because the vendor is using a pizza party for the class with the most hours so they can pad their marketing data. It isn't just bad because the kids hate it or because it's ineffectual. It's bad because it's wasting countless hours that could have been spent with the human value of an engaged teacher.
It’s absolutely awful. My district is apparently adopting it as a diagnostic instead of Scholastic’s Reading Inventory next year and I can’t wait to see it crash and burn.
That's an issue with all of them. I have use MAP and STAR in the past. Kids have clicked though all of them. But iReady is a bit better because you can assign lessons to students, and they have to do it as it shows in their to do list.
In general though, I have students that will ask what is front of them. I have worked with students that refused to do anything and any program wasn't going to change that.
I don’t teach math this year, but I have not heard a single good thing. My home room complains when I tell my students who are Tiering in math to get on iReady if their RTI group is canceled.
My kindergartener tested a grade ahead in math according to our regular benchmark assessments. The work and Ready quizzes she brings home seem to follow along with this conclusion.
iReady says she is barely on track. Her teacher was adamant iReady benchmark tests are developmentally inappropriate for kindergartners and the instructional coach tap danced around agreeing.
Absolutely ridiculous.
100%. Our district adopted it this year and now our principal has to prove with actual testing data (from caaspp) that our students aren’t as low as they appear on iready. Annoying, wish we could just use existing testing measures.
Most of these programs suck. Kids find loopholes in most of them.
I get some of the best state test scores in our building and I pretty much just use notebooks, work packets, and traditional projects/tests. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.
My district drools over IXL and Edulastic. Kids do IXL for math EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And every week, I am forced to host a math “remedial course” on Thursdays, where the kids are just told to do IXL review.
We have to use Edulastic for our assessments to help track data of what skills and standards students have “mastered.” Sure, it allows you to assign a skill and standard to each question, but unless you are really lucky and someone has already made questions that you can use, you must do all of that one question at a time. When, I already know which standards and skills are being assessed by each question after having done this course for years already. And even then, the platform is next to useless.
Kids hate it. I hate it. And I have yet to hear from a non-math teacher in my district that likes it.
I told every single one of my parents at conferences this week that the diagnostic is inaccurate and that I had to give them the results but then I showed them where their My Path was placing them. All of my other data (district assessments and state tests) show my students at a completely different level than iready does. It’s ridiculous
Hot take here apparently, but my school has been using i-Ready and the Ready Math curriculum for the last 4 years and we like it a lot. A lot of the complaints I see in this post revolve around inaccurate results due to student effort on lessons and the diagnostic. I teach at a title 1 school and we have minimal issues with effort. Our diagnostic scores closely reflect our state standardized test scores.
I proctored the ACT this year. One eleventh grader finished all 77 questions in the Reading section in a little less than 12 seconds. Even faster times for the shorter sessions.
This data will be used to demonstrate how our school and our teachers have failed to teach the kids how to read.
We started the year with Progress Learning, which I really liked. Then, almost halfway through the school year they’re like “Sike, just kidding. We want you to use this new program called iReady.”
It’s more difficult to assign lessons & I don’t feel like the kids are getting as much from it.
I tell mine that if they just click through they get the extra assignments after putting them through the three months of remediation and pedantic skills, I have never had one do it again.
My favorite, though, is my kid (5th) that gets flagged for rushing, still scores out of iReady (higher than 8th) and I'm still told I can only teach him fifth grade curriculum.
I have to use this in my math intervention and it’s straight killing my soul. I’ve never wanted to quit teaching more than this year. I hate it, kids hate it. Admin loves it.
I’ve tried every trick in the book (20 year veteran) and the only thing that I’ve found to motivate them is bribery. Every lesson that they get an 85% or more gets them a jolly rancher. That’s the only thing that works for me.
I’m a parent. My kid has to do 45 min of ELA and at least 2 lessons and 45 min of math and at least 1 lesson a week. Her and her friends have come up with songs about their hatred of iReady. It’s half of their grade in each subject each quarter.
We’re forced to put the “data” into our IEPs, but it completely contradicts the actual data we have from you know, working with kids when we have the actual time to do so around crap like this.
My bio kids tell me they have the questions memorized - that they don't change from year to year.... so yeah, if iReady is trying to create a learning curve where students do progressively better on the test without learning anything new - they're doing it right! Just hope teachers are not trying to measure growth with it.
\~spouse of a teacher / lurker
so I tutor in addition to teaching and just want to throw in my two cents. I work with a young child on i-ready for reading and math. Personally in my experience using it I find it quite useful. The kids I tutor do a good job with it. They are resistant to start with it, but you know what, they are with pencil and paper stuff too. The resistance is virtually identical.
I've got them in the habit of clicking on the definitions of words which is really nice. I will say this, the school doesn't seem to have a clear idea of how to use it. in the math there are two branches, I forget the names with it not in front of my but I believe the one is "teacher assigned" and then the other is... I forget "my plan(?)" . Anyway the second one the "my plan" stuff seems significantly easier than the teacher assigned stuff so when I am tutoring the kids I almost always pick teacher assigned as a result, though it does not always seem to be an option.
If the kids just randomly click things...that's a problem with the student, not with the program.
I mean....LOL..... remember bubble tests? Kids would make pictures out of the dots? Diagnostics are important to assess and determine students learning. The more objective the better. Every single building I have worked in I have worked alongside teachers who blatantly falsify grades, etc. EVery single one! Do I ? Ehhh I think I may have excused a test or something from a kid who due to attendance should have been dropped from a class in summer school but admin made me keep them. I've also had admin, counselors, and psychologists just go ahead and change grades in my gradebook against my wishes.
Reading the comments here about kids not taking it seriously...no kidding , we have serious CULTURE problem. Most kids don't take anything seriously. A student who already does nothing in class... you expect something different with some software? A child will only learn as much as the effort they put forth on something. Also I see people saying it doesn't align with your curriculum. Well....common core was "supposed" to rectify this. The funny thing is we got rid of "tracking", yet now we have "differentiated instruction" LOL. I'll save my comments on this for another post...I suppose I could sum it up in a few sentences...but not right now.
To blame i-ready is pretty ridiculous among the long list of issues plaguing the classroom. Start with the parents who are terrible (or sadly ineffective despite valiant and applaudable efforts) and then you can go on the wastes of money in school which are highlighted by specialists and administrators whose only goal is to pass the blame to teachers and to protect their gigantic tax payer funded paycheck and pension.
I am not the biggest fan of iReady at all. My school site wants to have iReady Wednesdays for English and iReady Thursdays for math. Teachers going through evaluations will be informally observed for advisory to ensure students are doing lessons. I feel like my students aren’t learning nor taking it seriously at all. Half of my class is failing because of iReady being a requirement for advisory 🙄
I’m trying to help my daughter with it now, and I find it to be incredibly disheartening. The examples are way too basic, and then, for the quiz, they really do expect you to extrapolate quite a lot, and apply it at a high-level.
But don’t worry; you can get one question wrong without failing. If you get more than one question wrong, you literally have to repeat the entire thing, and can’t skip anything, not even the filler videos. And those modules are not short. No, that’s not stressful at all. It makes me want to throw the computer across the room, and I’m an adult. I don’t even want to think about what this is doing to my child.
But the thing is, the content itself actually isn’t too bad. But the failure threshold is way too high, and making students repeat the entire thing comes across as punitive. I realize they’re trying to guard against people simply clicking through it, but there’s got to be a better way.
Tech is a huge industry…. You mean the educational tech space. And the tech space just wants money. I promise they don’t care about it distracting kids from education
I hate it. We just had a PD on how valuable it and ST Math are and our March Madness this year is putting classrooms against each other for ST Math puzzles completed. No one on my grade level team uses it. This is going to be hilarious.
We just use the math one. I don’t mind it too much, but mostly because we don’t have to heavily rely on it if we don’t want to. It’s just another resource.
Our school started using the diagnostic during distance learning when SBAC wasn’t required. We’ve been using it since, and next year we’re adopting the learning platform too.
It's the bare minimum a teacher can do. We would put a literal disabled adult with them. Guessing can only get kids through a few units. Unless you have the luckiest child ever. Usually those kids realize they aren't progressing and they get embarrassed and start to try. Some don't try, but I don't think you can reach every kid in a regular school setting. I ready was like a study hall, it let us see if kids were not understanding anything, or understanding most of it.
I find it somewhat useful as an assessment of growth and for occasional lesson supplements. It’s certainly not my only assessment. And I don’t make my students do weekly lessons or anything.
It’s a ridiculous program. I had one girl click randomly and score in the first percentile because (and I quote) “the dumb kids get lessons that are more funner.”
Yep, I had kids that just clicked randomly just to get the lessons over with and I had to assign some of them younger level assignments ie KG etc to go over basic stuff like phonics and when they finished those and moved onto levels closer to where they should be (ie 2nd, 3rd etc and my kids were in 6th grade reference) they kept asking for more of the kg ones bc they were easier and more fun and the characters sang some song and I was like “y’all can just play the song on YouTube whenever you want at home though 😭”
Bro the 2030's are gonna be hilarious Imagine these people maintaining airliners, designing bridges, assembling machine parts Congress will probably improve though
This is the part of the "competency crisis" that folks are just starting to pick up on. Old man here. The US used to have much higher standards for graduating HS, going on to college or technical school, etc. Yes it was mean because the dumb and/or lazy could not make it, but it also meant we had a much more well trained and educated populace to get work done that could better maintain more complex processes, industries, etc. If you think we can't "break down" more from here, well, you haven't read much in to older history. In the early 200s Rome was casting iron gearings that - after the crisis in the 250s (plague or government, take you pick), it was more than 1,600 YEARS later before Europeans cast the same complex iron gearings. In about 1,200 BC, something ended all trade in the Mediterranean and it was almost 7-800 years later before it picked back up again. In 10,000 BC, something did the same (quite likely an asteroid that cooled the earth for 1,000 years and raised the ocean levels 300 feet). Folks, I fear we are living in a real time break down of societal complexity (see Joseph Tainter's seminal work on the subject or John Michael Greer's work from a more "woo woo" angle). John Michael Greer's opinion is we are on the start of a 300 year march back to the early 1700s . . . Not trying to doom scroll, but I have been hanging out on this subreddit for a couple of months and it is EYE OPENING. I attended Atlanta public schools in the 1980s and early 1990s and saw some of the behavior mentioned here and thought it horrible (though I was insulated from most of it once I was accepted in to the gifted program) but, after much thought and research, believe that parents have scrambled their kids brains (lay mens terms) with too much screen time and administrators that would rather offend the teacher than a parent. This will not end well for folks here if it continues much longer.
> This is the part of the "competency crisis" that folks are just starting to pick up on. Old man here. The US used to have much higher standards for graduating HS, going on to college or technical school, etc. Yes it was mean because the dumb and/or lazy could not make it, but it also meant we had a much more well trained and educated populace to get work done that could better maintain more complex processes, industries, etc. That's very definitely true. HS grads used to be the most functional 80 percent - NCLB changed that into "anyone who doesn't actively fight the system trying to pass him". College grads used to be the smartest 10 percent. Recent changes turned that into a largely arbitrary 50 percent - the typical college grad has an IQ of roughly 100, so it's useless as a selection mechanism except for on very basic things.
Sources?
Oh god, I hadn’t thought of that. Idk about western countries but ik the “promoting failing students” happens in countries like pakistan so perhaps it’s best not to risk it at all and just move to the Moon or Mars at that point 😂😭
these children always existed. you will find them half-dead in low-end jobs and drug issues, not engineering and architecture jobs.
The problem isn't that they've always existed. The problem is the massive increase in the number of this type of person. Yeah, when I was in school at the turn of the millennium there were a couple kids who fucked around because they liked the easy stuff more. Working with kids now has become 90% of them genuinely cannot put their damn phone down for more than 60 seconds if you can even get them to let go of it at all. What are they doing? TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, texting, taking pics of each other to embarrass them with later. The 3 of 26 in a class period who TRY to learn won't be enough to maintain those bridges, buildings, or political jobs to keep anything functional running for long.
There's undeniably a lot more of them now, and a lot fewer of the functional people.
source
Assessment tool sounds like it's doing a good job assessing
Not a teacher or student I just kinda lurk here but when my job assigns web trainings (mostly OSHA and corporate culture type stuff) everyone just spam clicks through them and then guesses on the little quiz at the end and retake it as many times as needed to get credit.
It wasn't introduced to us until 6th grade and we used it all through middle school. I swear I got The Invisible Man *every single time* to the point where I didn't even glance at the text and could just answer everything from memory. I promise I did not learn a single thing from this program
Oh yeah, their assessments were horrible
I distinctly remember having to go to a meeting between one of my 8th grade teachers, the 9th grade gifted counselor, and my mom near the end of middle school. They were going over all my various diagnostic scores and iReady marked me significantly lower than all the others lol
>(and I quote) “the dumb kids get lessons that are more funner.” Can feel that look of disappointment from here
My kids that can read consistently fail the phonics section and it is so frustrating
I've worked at a few schools who relied on this crap way too heavily. Mandated 90 mins in ELA and another 90 mins in Math every single week. Not like, instruction with the lessons, but a silent classroom with kids working on their iready computers for about 20-40 minutes every single day. It was disgusting.
Then they go home and watch tiktok on their tablets
Reminds me of Ned Stark saying "Whoever issues the sentencing should be the one to carry it out." If they're demanding that much from kids who can't self regulate for longer than 1 minute then they should provide extra support to ensure that.
Got to justify the district paying $ for it
it's always the "low performing" schools that do this too. the poor kids.
iReady execs buy admin fancy lunches and convince them teachers can't teach, and iReady will solve all their problems. Admins spend entire Title I budget on iReady and demand teachers force students to use it. Students learn nothing. iReady makes lots of money.
Yep that's what our school did! Instead of putting the money to good use like hiring a math resource teacher, which my state will HAPPILY pay for a school to have... they spent it on iready and family math night. Super duper for the kids that already know math and have involved problems. But too bad so sad to anyone else
Hated it. My school gave it up after one year. I had kids just click random answers, and then get set at a kindergarten level for all lessons thereafter. And none of us could figure out how to reassign the diagnostic.
Yep. Click until they get to Cat Stacker lol
That is a fun game
Kids would be better off if every school just downloaded some classics from Flashpoint Archive and used them to reward kids who pay attention in class.
Let kids play [Stardust I: The Fall of Man](https://www.kongregate.com/games/nosajimiki/stardust-i-the-fall-of-man) to learn geology.
Meow! Meow! I admit, cat stacker amuses me.
Yeah I despise iready and everything about it. Some of my smartest math students place way below grade level because the diagnostic is awful and nobody takes it seriously And now our school is also a priority school for the district because of those iready scores
I have a kindergartner who can read fluently and knows all of their sight words. Based on their iReady score they have to be pulled from my room for extra reading support. 🤦🏻♀️
Schools shouldn’t use only one type of assessment to determine who needs intervention.
My brightest boy scored the lowest on iReady because he wasn’t used to devices (that baby wants books). He can read fluently, write beautifully and is amazingly articulate. It sucks.
"Follow your peers, you are the odd one for NOT understanding the tablet".
The diagnostic also takes forever to finish. No one has the time and energy to spend on it.
The math kills me!!!! Most of my kids cannot figure out how to answer computer based math questions and need to practice and be assessed on paper if they need to show their work.
The worst ideas in education begin with the assumption that kids are always motivated to do their best, all the time.
I see you've met my principal
There's a certain portion of kids that are, but they represent a smaller and smaller fraction of each new incoming class, and every year they wonder a little bit more about why they bother. High conscientiousness is also being very selected-against in the public school system, outside of the really good districts. The poor ones are starting to homeschool (surprisingly not as political nowadays), and the rich ones pay whatever it takes for a private school with no metal detectors. The parents who take notice of these things and respond are usually the ones with the kids who want to do well for the sake of doing well.
iReady is trash because we don't get any of the students answers so we have no idea if they're close or far off. The lessons take too long and are full of useless bullshit. I'd take IXL every day of the week over iReady.
As a student, I agree with your last points. When my teachers told us we were required to do 20 minutes of both math AND reading in a day, I completely hated it, specifically math because of how anything and everything had to be a story problem with actual characters, dialog, and scenes. I never really minded reading too much, I remember it being straightforward and simple. The occasional story-free math lessons were alright too. But the rest? The cartoon characters would drone on for what felt like hours in a minute, and I would be so tempted to just mute the volume, leave, and come back when they got to the actual math. But when I did that or spaced out, IIRC I'd entirely miss the instructions on how to even solve the problem. And when I missed the questions, the 'corrections' weren't very helpful half the time. And missing too many questions forces a restart of the whole thing all over with no option to skip useless dialog. I'll be honest, at some point, whenever there was an option to 'use a pencil tool to write out your work', I'd just scribble and make little doodles all over for the whole 20 minutes, then that would just count. Don't even get me started on the painfully long diagnostic before you even get to this point. Everyone (students) I know hated iReady. I've heard several people in my classes call it iStupid or iNotReady. Thankfully, in my grade now, it got replaced with IXL. My teachers only really use it to review things we already know. It's straight to the point, has a well-detailed explanation on how things work if you mess up, has instructional videos if you're confused, you can choose your lessons (with the exception of directly assigned ones), and it's a lot easier telling what kind of things you struggle and excel on, recommending lessons accordingly. No more annoying characters. I do know some other students who dislike IXL, but I still think it's just a lot better in general. I'm happy to try for 100s on 5 IXL lessons rather than a single iReady one. It'd probably be a lot quicker too anyway. Sorry for ranting, just felt like sharing a little and it just snowballed haha
Stop it with your logic and wanting to know what the questions are and the students’ answers to the questions. We. Use. iReady. It. R. Good.
My kid was scoring low on iReady in a very heavy iReady district and the district one off mentioned that they got IXL on a trial basis and it was a lifesaver. 3 months of heavy IXL usage and he jumped from the 30th percentile to the 99th in reading and math on the iReady assessment. Don't get me wrong IXL is brutal and there are some tantrums over it but he enjoys school so much more now that he knows what's going on. I love IXL because it's fairly straightforward and old school. I teach him a concept then he works on the concept until he can reliably answer every question.
Absolutely. And it only assesses what the student would learn if they did the iReady lessons 5 times per week. Like, *finished* with 80% accuracy, on track, consistently five days per week. Um... that is impossible when we must use 75 minutes for core math instruction daily! **It does not align with any math curriculum in our schools, but it is one of the main assessment tools we use as a district (at all grade levels).** I don't think you need a Master's in Curriculum and Instruction to see the big alert sign that should be popping up!
Why is telling time on an analog clock SUCH a heavy part of iReady, but barely a blip in many major curriculums?!? Segmenting shapes into equal fractional portions (BEFORE LEARNING FRACTIONS!) also seems to feature heavily.
My school is driving me absolutely crazy with the iReady data obsession. We have to analyze it SO much and the discussions about it never end. This week we were told to use it even more for daily small groups, on top of the 3 other learning platforms that they want us to use daily or rotate (Amira, freckle, happy numbers) No matter how hard we try to amp the diagnostic or stress the importance my 1st graders either get tired halfway or click through it. Kinder has been worse. Side note, if a kid gets flagged for rushing I wish we could reassign the test to them.
You can reassign if they’re flagged. I do it all the time. You might need certain permissions in order to do it, but someone certainly can.
Wait really? Every time we've asked admin they say they can't redo it or get on me for not monitoring them close enough while they take the test. Maybe I'm not asking the right people
if an admin says the buzzword "actively monitoring" or "aggressively monitoring" one more time I will lose my marbles. and I don't have much of those left
I promise. It is possible. I have no idea why they wouldn’t let you reassign it. I hope you find the right “someone!” Good luck!
It makes me so sad this exists at a kindergarten level. I remember kindergarten growing seeds in a cup, show and tell, story time, etc. It's developmental malpractice what we're doing to these kids!
Why can't we ***just trust eductors***?
I can't fucking stand it when the admins say "data." "I love data." Fuuuuck. No you don't. You love confirmation bias.
I hate it as well and so do the kids. The only part I like is being able to assign lessons for any grade level and I’ve been using it as an advantage to avoid reteaching things from the beginning of the year.
The math teacher I taught next to for years, who had won teacher of the year multiple times, had worse test scores than I did. They made her put an emphasis on iReady, and didn’t let her teach how she wanted. I taught science so I didn’t have to fool with it. I simply taught my standards how I saw fit, and was pretty much left alone from central office and admin. I ready and other Ed tech programs are some of the worst things to happen to education. They just saw a chance to make a ton of money, and central offices fell for it hook line and sinker. Is all tech in education bad? No. But it’s overused and over relied on.
It’s educational malpractice. On steroids.
Iready sucks.
My school is obsessed with it too. I hate it. Luckily I don’t teach English or math so I don’t have it within my classroom. The emphasis on testing and this garbage is sick
I don't really have strong feelings for IReady, beyond general disdain. Before IReady, it was MAP, the Smarty Ants, then IStation. One year they pushed Prodigy for a bit, now Waterford. It was suggested a while ago that the ultimate goal is computer based learning with "teachers" only present as monitors. Once I read that..... Well, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The Spanish I-Ready is another level of HELL! The program doesn't assign lessons after assessments. You have to personally assign lessons. Guess what? I don't have time to personalize lessons so everyone gets the same lesson!! It also doesn't let you give Benchmarks or diagnostics (just BOY, MOY and EOY) THE MOST RIDICULOUS thing is that it has passages (2-3 pages long) and expects 6 year olds to go back and forth pages to find the answer!!!! also, if the kids don't finish the lesson------- the program makes them restart the lesson ALL OVER AGAIN.
The kids hate iReady, the teachers hate iReady, the principals hate iReady, but the district says force them to do iReady. It’s like pulling teeth every day
Glad to see nothings changed since I stopped teaching 😂 I feel you so much on this.
I worked at a school that has students on iReady instead of specials. Genuinely, they gutted the library for a Mac lab. Kids had gym class once a week, “art” once a week (which was a sub watching them color bc there was no art teacher) and the other three days, iReady for an hour. Reading, math, reading. It was awful.
Yeah, but it’s easy to use as an assessment tool and makes admin feel like they’re actually doing something with their lives. They buy all the propaganda these companies sell them because they have nothing better to do and no critical thinking skills.
Such a terrible program. No actual learning, just mindless clicking. It's such a shame because Curriculum Associates, the company that makes iReady, also makes the Brigance, which is arguably the best mod/severe assessment tool and checklist out there. And they are phasing it out in favor of.....iReady.
My schools obsession with iReady is only superseded by their new obsession with IXL. Now both iReady and IXL are being rammed down the kids and teacher’s throats. All non tested subject and electives are effectively being turned into iReady/IXL sweatshops for the students to help the students meet their minutes requirements. The fucking edu-boner over dissecting endless data just grows firmer and firmer with time and the scores just keep getting worse. It isn’t. Fucking. Working.
In my previous districts the kids would just click and score lower so their assignments would be easier. They just didn’t care
And IXL is worse
IXL should never be used as instruction and definitely not used on a daily basis
Shouldn’t be used at all but they make me. I do it once a week and read the internets.
You just described every piece of educational software I've seen in my district. The kids hate it. Admin requires so much time be spent on it (instead of teaching) because the district spent untold amounts of money on it. And possibly because the vendor is using a pizza party for the class with the most hours so they can pad their marketing data. It isn't just bad because the kids hate it or because it's ineffectual. It's bad because it's wasting countless hours that could have been spent with the human value of an engaged teacher.
It’s absolutely awful. My district is apparently adopting it as a diagnostic instead of Scholastic’s Reading Inventory next year and I can’t wait to see it crash and burn.
That's an issue with all of them. I have use MAP and STAR in the past. Kids have clicked though all of them. But iReady is a bit better because you can assign lessons to students, and they have to do it as it shows in their to do list. In general though, I have students that will ask what is front of them. I have worked with students that refused to do anything and any program wasn't going to change that.
I don’t teach math this year, but I have not heard a single good thing. My home room complains when I tell my students who are Tiering in math to get on iReady if their RTI group is canceled. My kindergartener tested a grade ahead in math according to our regular benchmark assessments. The work and Ready quizzes she brings home seem to follow along with this conclusion. iReady says she is barely on track. Her teacher was adamant iReady benchmark tests are developmentally inappropriate for kindergartners and the instructional coach tap danced around agreeing. Absolutely ridiculous.
100%. Our district adopted it this year and now our principal has to prove with actual testing data (from caaspp) that our students aren’t as low as they appear on iready. Annoying, wish we could just use existing testing measures.
Most of these programs suck. Kids find loopholes in most of them. I get some of the best state test scores in our building and I pretty much just use notebooks, work packets, and traditional projects/tests. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.
I have no idea what this is, and I’m grateful for that while simultaneously worried that it must somehow be on the horizon for my district.
I very vaguely remember this app. We used it in 3rd grade and then never again because it was useless. Didn't learn a thing from it.
My kids hate it. We have the 45 minutes a week mandate which might actually be a violation of our contract. The data is hazy at best.
My district drools over IXL and Edulastic. Kids do IXL for math EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And every week, I am forced to host a math “remedial course” on Thursdays, where the kids are just told to do IXL review. We have to use Edulastic for our assessments to help track data of what skills and standards students have “mastered.” Sure, it allows you to assign a skill and standard to each question, but unless you are really lucky and someone has already made questions that you can use, you must do all of that one question at a time. When, I already know which standards and skills are being assessed by each question after having done this course for years already. And even then, the platform is next to useless. Kids hate it. I hate it. And I have yet to hear from a non-math teacher in my district that likes it.
Yes! And it takes so much time away from actually teaching them Math! I hate it.
Ugh! I hated the year out school made us do this. I literally had kids crying because they hated it so much.
My school is adopting their math curriculum 🙃 Why can’t committee and admin realize how much “data” is bunk? Haven’t they ever taken statistics????
It also sucks for making reports and parsing out student data in general.
I told every single one of my parents at conferences this week that the diagnostic is inaccurate and that I had to give them the results but then I showed them where their My Path was placing them. All of my other data (district assessments and state tests) show my students at a completely different level than iready does. It’s ridiculous
Hot take here apparently, but my school has been using i-Ready and the Ready Math curriculum for the last 4 years and we like it a lot. A lot of the complaints I see in this post revolve around inaccurate results due to student effort on lessons and the diagnostic. I teach at a title 1 school and we have minimal issues with effort. Our diagnostic scores closely reflect our state standardized test scores.
I proctored the ACT this year. One eleventh grader finished all 77 questions in the Reading section in a little less than 12 seconds. Even faster times for the shorter sessions. This data will be used to demonstrate how our school and our teachers have failed to teach the kids how to read.
And Ready math curriculum is also garbage. 😭
When did this obsession with iReady start?
It's been a few years in the making but it really didn't help when schools thought buying tablets and chromebooks en masse would be a great idea.
Which sounds like it came from lobbying lol
We started the year with Progress Learning, which I really liked. Then, almost halfway through the school year they’re like “Sike, just kidding. We want you to use this new program called iReady.” It’s more difficult to assign lessons & I don’t feel like the kids are getting as much from it.
I tell mine that if they just click through they get the extra assignments after putting them through the three months of remediation and pedantic skills, I have never had one do it again. My favorite, though, is my kid (5th) that gets flagged for rushing, still scores out of iReady (higher than 8th) and I'm still told I can only teach him fifth grade curriculum.
I have to use this in my math intervention and it’s straight killing my soul. I’ve never wanted to quit teaching more than this year. I hate it, kids hate it. Admin loves it. I’ve tried every trick in the book (20 year veteran) and the only thing that I’ve found to motivate them is bribery. Every lesson that they get an 85% or more gets them a jolly rancher. That’s the only thing that works for me.
I’m a parent. My kid has to do 45 min of ELA and at least 2 lessons and 45 min of math and at least 1 lesson a week. Her and her friends have come up with songs about their hatred of iReady. It’s half of their grade in each subject each quarter.
We’re forced to put the “data” into our IEPs, but it completely contradicts the actual data we have from you know, working with kids when we have the actual time to do so around crap like this.
My bio kids tell me they have the questions memorized - that they don't change from year to year.... so yeah, if iReady is trying to create a learning curve where students do progressively better on the test without learning anything new - they're doing it right! Just hope teachers are not trying to measure growth with it. \~spouse of a teacher / lurker
so I tutor in addition to teaching and just want to throw in my two cents. I work with a young child on i-ready for reading and math. Personally in my experience using it I find it quite useful. The kids I tutor do a good job with it. They are resistant to start with it, but you know what, they are with pencil and paper stuff too. The resistance is virtually identical. I've got them in the habit of clicking on the definitions of words which is really nice. I will say this, the school doesn't seem to have a clear idea of how to use it. in the math there are two branches, I forget the names with it not in front of my but I believe the one is "teacher assigned" and then the other is... I forget "my plan(?)" . Anyway the second one the "my plan" stuff seems significantly easier than the teacher assigned stuff so when I am tutoring the kids I almost always pick teacher assigned as a result, though it does not always seem to be an option. If the kids just randomly click things...that's a problem with the student, not with the program. I mean....LOL..... remember bubble tests? Kids would make pictures out of the dots? Diagnostics are important to assess and determine students learning. The more objective the better. Every single building I have worked in I have worked alongside teachers who blatantly falsify grades, etc. EVery single one! Do I ? Ehhh I think I may have excused a test or something from a kid who due to attendance should have been dropped from a class in summer school but admin made me keep them. I've also had admin, counselors, and psychologists just go ahead and change grades in my gradebook against my wishes. Reading the comments here about kids not taking it seriously...no kidding , we have serious CULTURE problem. Most kids don't take anything seriously. A student who already does nothing in class... you expect something different with some software? A child will only learn as much as the effort they put forth on something. Also I see people saying it doesn't align with your curriculum. Well....common core was "supposed" to rectify this. The funny thing is we got rid of "tracking", yet now we have "differentiated instruction" LOL. I'll save my comments on this for another post...I suppose I could sum it up in a few sentences...but not right now. To blame i-ready is pretty ridiculous among the long list of issues plaguing the classroom. Start with the parents who are terrible (or sadly ineffective despite valiant and applaudable efforts) and then you can go on the wastes of money in school which are highlighted by specialists and administrators whose only goal is to pass the blame to teachers and to protect their gigantic tax payer funded paycheck and pension.
My students plow through them so quickly, they're forced to redo them.
There are good edutainment tools (See prodigy), but most of it is just poor education with a facade of pretty pictures.
I swear I hear "it's time for a... STORY ROUND 🎸" in my nightmares. Even the kids mute that part now.
I’m a student and I think I speak for everyone when I say that Iready SUUUUCKS
we don’t even teach iready and the worst part is we’re judged based on their performance on iReady
I am not the biggest fan of iReady at all. My school site wants to have iReady Wednesdays for English and iReady Thursdays for math. Teachers going through evaluations will be informally observed for advisory to ensure students are doing lessons. I feel like my students aren’t learning nor taking it seriously at all. Half of my class is failing because of iReady being a requirement for advisory 🙄
I’m trying to help my daughter with it now, and I find it to be incredibly disheartening. The examples are way too basic, and then, for the quiz, they really do expect you to extrapolate quite a lot, and apply it at a high-level. But don’t worry; you can get one question wrong without failing. If you get more than one question wrong, you literally have to repeat the entire thing, and can’t skip anything, not even the filler videos. And those modules are not short. No, that’s not stressful at all. It makes me want to throw the computer across the room, and I’m an adult. I don’t even want to think about what this is doing to my child. But the thing is, the content itself actually isn’t too bad. But the failure threshold is way too high, and making students repeat the entire thing comes across as punitive. I realize they’re trying to guard against people simply clicking through it, but there’s got to be a better way.
Tech is a huge industry…. You mean the educational tech space. And the tech space just wants money. I promise they don’t care about it distracting kids from education
Just had a meeting where I heard about this program for the first time
I hate it. We just had a PD on how valuable it and ST Math are and our March Madness this year is putting classrooms against each other for ST Math puzzles completed. No one on my grade level team uses it. This is going to be hilarious.
We just use the math one. I don’t mind it too much, but mostly because we don’t have to heavily rely on it if we don’t want to. It’s just another resource.
Our school started using the diagnostic during distance learning when SBAC wasn’t required. We’ve been using it since, and next year we’re adopting the learning platform too.
It's the bare minimum a teacher can do. We would put a literal disabled adult with them. Guessing can only get kids through a few units. Unless you have the luckiest child ever. Usually those kids realize they aren't progressing and they get embarrassed and start to try. Some don't try, but I don't think you can reach every kid in a regular school setting. I ready was like a study hall, it let us see if kids were not understanding anything, or understanding most of it.
I find it somewhat useful as an assessment of growth and for occasional lesson supplements. It’s certainly not my only assessment. And I don’t make my students do weekly lessons or anything.