Parents across the state have questions about an online test preparation software program that nearly every school district in Florida is using.

LAKEWOOD RANCH — Sitting at his kitchen table, McNeal Elementary School third-grader Dylan Patterson stared back at a cheerful orb talking to him from the computer screen.

“What is this whole text mostly about? Complete each sentence,” the shiny, happy ball said, leading Dylan to an article about spiders. Dylan's eyes moved back and forth between the passage and a set of fill-in-the-blank questions, reading each question then scrolling through the article, looking for the answer.

“I’m just scanning the text,” he told his mom when she asked him if he had read the entire passage.

Soon Dylan had correctly answered the questions about spiders, and the orb returned and excitedly asked him the type of question a teacher might to hook students’ interest.

“Think about this: How could a flower be in danger?” the voice said. “Let’s see what this story tells us.”

The program Dylan was using, i-Ready, has exploded in popularity in Florida school districts. Closely linked to the Florida Standards Assessment, the program is being used in 57 of the state's 67 school districts as a teaching and diagnostic tool that adapts as students use it and provides teachers with data on what state standards their classes need help with. Curriculum Associates, which makes i-Ready, reported that students using their product saw nearly 40 percent higher gains for English and math than students who received more traditional remediation.

Despite those impressive statistics, critics statewide see the program as a harbinger of a dystopian education future, in which teachers are replaced with computers and "learning" consists entirely of staring slack-jawed at a screen.

"It is crap," said Manatee County education activist Bridget Mendel, who regularly calls on school districts to spend money on reading specialists rather than computer programs.

Mendel is not alone in her sentiment; i-Ready is a hot topic among parents, bloggers, school board members and education advocates who want to know just how long their kids are spending on the program every day, the long-term impact of screen time and whether it has academic merit.

Not peer reviewed

While Florida has gone all-in on its use of i-Ready in classrooms statewide, there is not a clear consensus on the program’s quality among academics.

Curriculum Associates has commissioned studies showing that student outcomes on i-Ready can predict whether students will pass the FSA, but there are no peer-reviewed academic studies published on the program yet.

Johns Hopkins University research fellows Alanna Bjorklund-Young and Carey Borkoski wrote in a 2016 paper on i-Ready’s research claims that when “parties associated with the publishers of the assessments have authored the studies, (it) inevitably calls objectivity into question.”

And Albert Ritzhaupt, an associate professor of education technology at the University of Florida and the editor of the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, said the limited figures presented by i-Ready don’t tell him enough to make an educated assessment of the program.

“To be quite frank, there is not enough detail in there to scrutinize it as a researcher,” Ritzhaupt said. “All I am seeing are glorified numbers, but I don’t have the context behind the numbers for it to make sense.”

Getting rigorous and scientific analyses done on i-Ready is a priority, but it has been slow-going because the process requires “extensive data sharing, privacy safeguards, significant funding, and longstanding relationships with districts and schools,” said Lynne O’Connor, an associate vice president of marketing with Curriculum Associates.



"There is relatively little true independent research in peer-reviewed journals on any contemporary edtech products,” O’Connor said.

Ritzpaugh said i-Ready should undergo rigorous testing to determine its educational value, but the research world isn’t as clear-cut as i-Ready's critics may assume. Peer reviewed research shouldn’t be accepted as gospel truth, and industry-funded research shouldn’t be automatically ignored.

“Just because something is peer reviewed doesn’t make it the best science out there,” Ritzhaupt said.

Two organizations that have highly endorsed i-Ready — the Center on Response to Intervention and the National Center on Intensive Intervention — are both run by the American Institutes for Research, the company that produces the Florida Standards Assessment.

Critics of i-Ready dismiss AIR’s endorsement, seeing it as pay-for-play in the overlapping worlds of education technology and test administration. Ritzhaupt said it isn’t that simple.

“It’s good to be a skeptic of anything, and there is definitely concern about whether the testing companies are in bed with these development companies," he said. "But AIR is considered a respected entity to review these things.”

Concerns over screen time

Stacey Carlin and her family moved to Manatee last year. She said her son was receiving homework assignments to complete on Khan Academy, an online learning program, in addition to spending time at school on i-Ready. When she realized how long her child was spending on a computer, she was not happy.

“It clicked to me that my 10-year old was spending 90 minutes on a screen,” she said. “That was my big beef. I was hot. I was just like, this is not how we do things. How people can think this is OK is beyond me.”

Carlin and her family moved to Manatee from Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan signed legislation last spring that requires the Maryland State Department of Education to develop best practices for the use of digital devices in schools.

“Here they are grasping onto putting your kid in front of a computer, and I am wondering where the teacher-led instruction is,” Carlin said. “I am just shaking my head. I have never seen anything like this down here.”

District officials in Manatee and Sarasota counties say they limit use on i-Ready to 90 minutes a week or less, and they say it is not designed to replace teachers or traditional classrooms.

One of the challenges school districts face in determining how much time students should spend on computers is that there is still not definitive evidence that screen time in itself is harmful to students.

“Screen time measured in minutes seems fairly meaningless," said David Hill, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media. "It’s not like the screen itself emits some sort of dangerous radiation."

Hill said research has shown that screen time before bed causes sleep disruption and passive television viewing leads to obesity and stunts vocabulary development. But, he said, the research does not show that merely using a device with a screen is problematic.

Hill said more research is needed on the impact of screen time on children, and schools should measure effects that they are worried about in the interlude.

"What is meaningful to us is what’s happening with that time?" Hill said. "Is it displacing other healthier activities? Is it exposing kids to materials that may be developmentally inappropriate for them?”

Not a replacement

The pressure to bolster test scores — particularly third-grade reading scores — has helped drive i-Ready's popularity in Florida. Students who are reading below grade level at the end of third grade face a host of challenges, and schools are graded based on their students' test scores. i-Ready offers enticing solutions.

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The program is not only a reliable indicator of how a student will do on the FSA, but an i-Ready test score can serve as another route to third-grade promotion, creating an invaluable backup plan for schools with students right on the border of being held back.

If i-Ready's research is accurate, it could be tempting for administrators to steer more students into i-Ready remediation and away from traditional approaches, like small-group learning or one-on-one tutoring.

Aaron Lotton, vice president of Marketing and Customer Experience for Curriculum Associates, pointed to i-Ready research that showed students who did remediation through i-Ready showed 39 percent greater gains in English than students who were in other forms of remediation.

Despite those impressive claims, i-Ready's executives say the program is not intended to take the place of traditional learning.

"We think it is a logical complement to time spent in traditional classrooms, time spent in small group, time spent in one on one, and time spent in personalized learning," Lotton said. "It is good to give students a mix of all those experiences. It is in no way a replacement."

Although Curriculum Associates only recommends their product for 45 minutes per subject, per week, parents worry that school district officials will push more time on the program to bolster test scores. An early version of Manatee County's 2018-19 i-Ready plan called for a minimum of 90 minutes per subject, per week. Organek said that version was incorrect, and on Friday sent an updated version that limited use on the program to 45 minutes per subject, per week. She said that policy was being enforced, although in July Superintendent Cynthia Saunders said principals have the autonomy to assign more i-Ready time if necessary.

Ritzhaupt said he understands the concerns parents have over the program, and he said the most pressing need is for Curriculum Associates to partner with a university and research the product more thoroughly. In the meantime, he said, there are no obvious answers as to whether i-Ready is harmful to the education process.

"This company is one of the more established companies that has been around a while," he said. "I don’t know what the best solution would be. I really don’t. It’s a complicated issue."