Editor’s note: All teachers interviewed have had their names changed to protect their employment in accordance with the FRS Times’ anonymous sourcing policy.

Earlier this year, Jefferson Elementary School District (JESD) fully implemented iReady, a learning software developed by Massachusetts-based curriculum development company Curriculum Associates, for all students in grades three to eight. The district purchased the program and its accompanying services for $202,682, according to a contract signed in July by district officials.

But Fernando Rivera Intermediate School (FRS) teachers feel like they were left out of the selection process and are frustrated with the program.

Students downright despise it.

‘It’s never engaging’

Coraline Griffin is a seventh grader at FRS. She finds that the district spent far too much money on a program that she says can be easily cheated on by students.

“It never really works because it’s never engaging. I look around the classroom when I’m doing iReady, [and] almost no one is on their Chromebook though. They’re looking out the window or talking to their friends,” she said. “They spent way too much on something that everyone can just kind of cheat on, because it’s always just like ‘Oh, you hold down your mouse or jiggle it a couple of times and you get your 45 minutes.'”

We haven’t learned anything

Both Griffin and eighth graders Ethan Bunag and Ella Wong say they have not learned anything from the iReady personalized instructions. Many students say they find the lessons extremely boring and tedious. 

“No one really learns anything off of it. You’re never engaged in it, like the TCR from when you were in elementary school. It’s the equivalent to that,” she said. 

TCR refers to multiple booklets containing various texts distributed to students in elementary school as part of the district-adopted Benchmark Advance English language arts curriculum.

“We already have state testing, there’s no real reason to add another thing. It’s actually frickin’ pointless,” Wong said.

‘Maybe the ‘we’ just means ‘them’’

John Johnson is a teacher at FRS and was included in the 2023-24 school year iReady pilot. But Johnson said it wasn’t a true pilot — teachers were not afforded the opportunity to give feedback to district officials regarding the program’s adoption.

“There was no formal ‘Teachers, how do you actually feel about this?’ There was no formal feedback or official feedback that we gave. We were told it was a pilot and then we were told we’re doing it,” he said.

Jane Davis is also a teacher at FRS and says she was supposed to be included in the pilot but was never told by school administration or the district office. As a result, her students never used iReady.

The data is great, but the personalized learning leaves much to be desired

Both Johnson and Davis find the data generated by iReady to be extremely helpful for their teaching.

Johnson said that he can pull a student’s name up and iReady will tell him what standards they’ve mastered, needs improvement on, and what skills they need to master those standards.

“I don’t know that I’m fully convinced on the personalized learning platform. I think the data part’s great, but I don’t know about the personalized learning platform,” he said.

Johnson and Davis take issue with how lesson progression works.

Upon failing a lesson twice, the student will no longer be able to complete any further lessons in that subject, and a red flag will appear on the teacher’s side. That teacher then has to manually allow the student to finish the lesson.

Both wish the program would automatically give the student foundational skills to work on if they fail too much on a single lesson. But iReady leaves it up to the teacher to manually figure out what the student needs to work on.

Students have also experienced technical issues with iReady, like it crashing, not saving lesson progress, and inaccurately displaying lesson progression.

Davis has multiple students who have tested out of iReady via the diagnostic. They have nothing to do for one whole class period every week as a result.

She says that she has spoken to higher-ups but was told to create extended learning opportunities for those students who test out of the program.

“It is hard for teachers when we make accommodations, we modify a lot of students’ work based on their levels, so when we’re given a platform that the district is like ‘Yeah! It’s great, it’s super easy!’ and then when we find the flaw in it, they’re like ‘Well you have to make those accommodations, you have to figure that out, you have to make other lessons for your students,’ as if we aren’t doing that already for the lessons we’re teaching everyday,” she said.

45 minute mandate

The district issued a mandate early November to all ELA and math teachers that all students must complete 45 minutes of iReady My Path each week.

Johnson and Davis both say that it’s been eating into their instructional time as they have to carve out a class period for their students to start on their minutes. It’s also been a struggle for them to get their students to complete the mandated My Path minutes outside of class.

Bunag says the 45 minute mandate also uses up a lot of time that could be used to complete classwork.

“I know that my students aren’t going to do it for homework, and if they really want to mandate it, we kind of have to do it in class. So it takes away from instructional minutes,” Davis said.

Are you still there?

Johnson and Davis both take issue with how iReady will stop counting a student’s minutes if no activity is detected on the student’s side. Upon stopping minute counting, their screen will be frozen with a message stating “Are you still there?”. Students have to click the screen for their minutes to be counted.

They say this also penalizes students who are focused on a problem and working on it on the side in addition to those who are actually cheating.

Bunag also takes issue with this feature for the same reasons that Johnson and Davis do.

“There’s some kids who will just do the 45 minutes quick quick quick because it’s easy, and there’s some kids who are taking their time with it and the minutes are gonna pause on them, so they’re actually spending more time on it,” Davis said.

Professional development, lot’s of it

The contract with Curriculum Associates specifies that 16 professional development sessions will be provided to teachers, with each lasting up to six hours.

The district has already conducted multiple sessions, pulling out large groups of teachers out of teaching and causing major substitute teacher shortages at all middle school sites.

On the first professional development day of the 2024-25 school year, all teachers, from physical education to social studies teachers, were given training on how to use iReady in preparation for administering the iReady diagnostic to all students in their advisory class.

Yet Johnson says this training proved ineffective.

Teachers were only taught how to use the platform, not administer the tests. Some teachers who do not teach math did not know they had to supply scratch paper or math tools, leaving many students without the necessary tools to do their math diagnostic. Consequently, students unperformed on the math diagnostic and were given lessons that were too easy. 

“And I think that connects to it being boring too, right? Like some kids are like ‘Oh this is way too easy,’ and some of the kids are getting lessons that are way too easy because they took iReady without some of their resources, like scratch paper, or tools. And so their iReady is not accurate to their actual abilities. Because that training was so poorly done,” he said.

“You [the district] should definitely reconsider about what you’re doing with this. Look at how the students feel and look at how the teachers feel. Look at the cons and look at the pros, and then you should really reevaluate your decisions,” Griffin said.

Johnson and Davis both take issue with how iReady only involves students sitting down and answering questions on their Chromebook, without any instruction involved.

“I just don’t know a room of 13 year olds, on their laptops, with headphones in, are really engaged in academic minutes,” Johnson said. “We know learning is best when it’s hands-on and collaborative and exploratory, and this [iReady] is not any of those things.”

The FRS Times was able to schedule an interview with Pam Scott, Assistant Superintendent of Education Services; and Dina Conti, Program Director of Assessment, Accountability, and Multilingual Learner Services and former principal of FRS. 

Scott and Conti declined to answer questions the day of the interview due to this article’s usage of anonymous sources.