A parent’s complaint about his child’s experience with a popular piece of education technology called i-Ready went viral recently, seemingly earning applause from two of the major education schools of thought: parents upset that schoolwork isn’t challenging enough for their kids and people on the left upset about the education reform consensus of the Bush/Obama years.
I was a little taken aback by this because my son’s school uses i-Ready and, while he has various complaints in life, it has never been a big source of grievance for him.
So I gave him Ryan Moulton’s article to read. He offered to write a whole response column himself, but I decided to stay on the safe side of child labor laws and do some reporting on his views rather than have him write the take.
Broadly speaking, I would say Moulton’s characterization of his family’s experience with i-Ready did resonate with my kid; he just saw the irksome parts as less irksome,1 and he felt the adaptive features were not as inept as depicted. Generally speaking, i-Ready time is not his favorite thing about school, but he doesn’t see it as this monstrous imposition.