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.
