When the professional breaking point came for public middle-school teacher Benjamin Coleman, it wasn’t about lousy pay, meddling helicopter parents, or even the insidiously distracting smartphones. It was a school-mandated computer program that had hijacked his classroom — and ultimately drove him toward early retirement.
For 10 years, Coleman loved his job teaching math and technology in Fall River, Mass. He lived for the “teachable moments” when young minds lit up and grasped concepts during lively, spontaneous tangents from lesson plans. Then his district mandated that he use i-Ready, an online platform that delivers canned tests and “personalized learning” on internet-connected devices. Coleman wasn’t wild about it. His students began complaining bitterly. Many disengaged entirely or learned to game the system.
Then a directive came down that usage of the system would increase. “The day that the principal told us that we needed to do i-Ready three times a week, that’s when I was done,” he tells me. “It was three hours a week for each class, when we only had five hours a week. So 60% of the teaching was going to be done by this computer that the kids absolutely hate. That’s not what I went to college for.”
Coleman’s story isn’t unusual. Across the United States, veteran teachers in public and private schools alike describe a quiet exodus from a profession radically transformed by i-Ready and other educational-technology, or “ed-tech,” platforms.
Of course, American education has had a rough few decades; student achievement continues to fall ever further behind other developed nations. Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk “data-based” panaceas like i-Ready.