The Hidden Cost of Educational Software: One Family's i-Ready Nightmare

When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own.

How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math? His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids' happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn't touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears.

I started asking around to the other kids' parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

I write software for a living. I have hoped for educational software to revolutionize learning my whole life, and am extremely optimistic about its possibilities. We've given our kids lots of educational apps whenever we could find ones that seemed worthwhile. They've had tablets from a young age. They love Khan Academy and have gotten a lot out of it. I was happy the kids got chromebooks in school, started learning Scratch, and were using them regularly. I am not objecting to the concept of (or primacy of) educational software. I think it has the potential to do an immense amount of good. I have no disagreement with i-Ready's goals. The problem is that the software simply doesn't work.

i-Ready assumes that the student cannot read, that they must be read to very slowly, that they must listen to the same instructions hundreds of times, and that they cannot ever be allowed to have any control over this. As a consequence it is not physically possible for a student using i-Ready to get a reasonable amount of math practice during the time they have for schooling. The software spends nearly all of its time forcing them to listen to narration instead of doing math.

When a problem starts, the computer slowly reads aloud the text written on the screen. An animation slowly demonstrates the concept. The student is not allowed to do anything at all until it finishes. It repeats this for every single problem, even when the problem is identical to the previous problem. For every minute the student spends actually thinking about math, i-Ready spends 10 minutes narrating the same instructions over and over again.

If the student is trying to complete their work quickly, you will see them sit glassy eyed for thirty seconds, then frantically click click click click for 3, then sit glassy eyed for another thirty seconds in a loop. They spend nearly all their time waiting. A talented student could complete 10 equivalent problems on paper in the time it takes a single i-Ready problem to finish talking at them. Most students give up on trying to complete their work quickly, because they realize they are forbidden from doing so. They instead just stare at the screen and try to run out the clock for whatever time they're required to sit there.

Beyond the unskippable repetition, it's full of simple UI bugs and oversights that in adult software would quickly cause RSI. When the narration of the question is complete, the input box is not focused. The kid has to manually click it, every single time. The input box doesn't allow keyboard input, so rather than typing their answer, they have to move the mouse pointer around and click buttons on the on-screen number pad. When the problem requires the student to mark how addition works on a number line they have to drag on those number lines with a tiny track pad, over and over and over again. When their answer is accepted, they aren't done. They still have to scrunch up their little hands on that little trackpad, and move the pointer to click the "next" button to advance to the next question, every single time.

The software claims to be adaptive to the student's abilities. I saw no adaptation the entire time both kids were using it. At home prior to the school year our kids had mastered 3 digit addition and were practicing their multiplication tables. In i-Ready they were stuck tracing out single digit addition on number lines and practicing the make ten strategy. We asked their teachers to try to reconfigure it to put more challenging material in, but nothing helped. A few simple multiplication problems would enter the queue for a day, and then they would run out. They'd be back to listening to the computer narrate how to use a number line.

The problems they were doing at the end of the year were not materially different from the problems they were doing at the beginning. The problems they were doing in the next year were not materially different from the problems they were doing in the previous year. As far as i-Ready was concerned, they remained in the beginning of first grade for several years.

I feel especially guilty about this because I believed the marketing. When they were frustrated at how far below their capabilities all the problems were, I encouraged them to persevere. I assured them that if they were careful and diligent, and put in the time, eventually the software would respond by rewarding them with the kind of math they wanted to learn. It never did.

Their teachers would assign 20 minutes of i-Ready math per day as homework, not a fixed amount of content, a fixed amount of time, and eventually I just could not bring myself to force them to do it, watching how much of their time it was wasting, and how much of their youth it was spending on something they were getting nothing out of. I expected as a parent to enforce the letter of the law on homework as much as I could because I didn't want to plant the seed of even more conflict about it later, but after days and days of seeing my kids listless on the couch waiting for the computer to stop talking, I gave up, and gave in. We didn't make them do it anymore. I still feel guilty that I made them spend any time on it at all, and regret the loss of everything else we could have done with that time.

They unfortunately had to continue to use it in class. It is easy as an adult to feel that this is histrionic, that kids will always be bored or unhappy about school, and that maybe this is all just good for them even if they hate it. If you feel this way, I challenge you to try to recreate this experience for yourself. Go find a video on youtube that slightly annoys you, then watch 30 seconds of it. When 30 seconds are up, using your trackpad, click the pause button, drag the video slider back to the beginning of the video, and then press play. (Using any keyboard controls or a mouse to do this is cheating. It has to be a trackpad, preferably a low quality one. You'll know you're doing it right if your hands start cramping.) Do that 30 times in a row. Repeat this every weekday. Repeat this for every week in a year. Make sure you use the same video the entire time. This is what using i-Ready is like.

When we sent our kids to public school, I anticipated them being bored, at least a little. I was also bored in school. It was basically fine. I hoped that the benefits, exposure to kids from a variety of backgrounds, and having social connections to the community, would be worth it, and those aspects have paid off well. When I was in grade school, and bored, for me this practically meant that I could finish my work quickly, then daydream, doodle, or read a book. When school was undemanding, it didn't demand my attention, and so I was free with my own thoughts.

"Being bored" in school is now an entirely different experience than it was when I was a kid. Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce. A teacher, faced with a bored student, would not force them to pay rapt attention to an identical lesson 30 times in a row, 5 days a week, for the entirety of the school year. Software can do that easily. A teacher would not demand that all students take an identical amount of time to finish an assignment regardless of how well they've mastered the material. Software can do that easily. A teacher paying attention to a class will adapt to what is working, what is holding their attention, and what is serving their needs. Software is by default thoughtless, and that allows it to be thoughtlessly cruel.

The most galling bit about this is how simple most of these problems could be to fix. Skipping a repetitive animation is not a complex technology. Someone within the company empowered to change the code could implement it in the time it takes you to read this sentence. The kind of UX issues that make entering your answer difficult and fiddly haven't been tolerated in the industry of web based software for decades, because those issues make you lose customers and money. Even ADA compliance would make it legally compulsory to fix them.

I do not know why it fails entirely at its goal of being adaptive. One possibility is that the software is so poor at receiving user input that students can't reliably enter the answers they know. When you choose a school or a school district for your kids, you expect to be picking their peers, their teachers, their campus, the park they'll go to after school. You probably did not consider that you are choosing their software. The software contracts that the district is bound by will likely have as big an effect on your child as all of the other factors you were paying more attention to. The software will be doing much of the instruction. The software will be enforcing the rules. The software may even be occupying most of their school time. Even if the teachers hate it, they may not have a choice. Despite the fact that software is the most malleable invention humans have ever created, no one in an entire school district has any ability to change the slightest bit of behavior in the software they purchase. You would have an easier time convincing your school district to fire a teacher or even to build an entirely new campus than to change a single line of JavaScript in the software they have contracted to use. If the software is bad, your child's education will be bad, and there is no possible escape within the district.

During the year where their only math education was primarily i-Ready, our kids made no progress at all. As far as we could tell they had regressed. Problems they were happy to do in their heads at the beginning of the year, they could no longer do. During that year, i-Ready became the antagonist of my son's whole imaginary world. Whenever he drew spaceships or heroes in his elaborate drawings, the villain they were attacking was always i-Ready.

Seeing that our kids were likely to learn nothing at all from their in-school math, we enrolled them in Beast Academy after school, which they've loved. Beast Academy also delivers homework via software, but the software works. They're happy to do it, at least as happy as you can expect a kid to be about math homework, and it never wastes their time.

I can't speak to whether i-Ready is any better at its job after you pass third grade. I also can't speak to whether any of these issues have improved in the last two years. We left the district. We had several reasons to leave, but i-Ready made it an easy choice. Whenever our kids worried about missing their old friends after we moved, we consoled them by reminding them that they would never have to touch i-Ready again, and that helped.