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Andrea Gillanders’ son has struggled with anxiety around testing for three years. He’s in third grade.
Gillanders attributes that to Fresno Unified School District’s implementation of i-Ready, a digital learning platform designed to help teachers identify learning gaps and personalize instruction.
Millions of students nationwide use i-Ready. But as concerns about screen time and educational technology grow, some California parents and teachers say the program may be increasing anxiety while offering limited academic value.
“They have class goals of … trying to get this many people getting 100%,” said Gillanders, who is an elementary art teacher. “That’s tricky because that also makes some students feel kind of left out or not good about themselves if they’re not getting 100% on theirs.”
“He does usually score well, so, as far as that goes, I’m not concerned about it,” she said about her son, who has been using i-Ready since first grade. “But I don’t love the anxiety that it gives him.”
i-Ready, created in 2011, is used in thousands of schools nationwide by more than 13 million students, including major California districts like Los Angeles, Fresno and Oakland.
Part of i-Ready’s appeal lies in its ability to provide diagnostic data before state testing begins in third grade, helping teachers identify early literacy and math gaps. Supporters say the program allows instruction to be tailored to individual students.
Several studies, including those from Curriculum Associates, the company that makes i-Ready, and the Human Resources Research Organization, showed that students who used i-Ready outperformed students who did not on state standardized tests. The difference ranged from .14 to .24 standard deviations, according to one of the studies published in 2025.
“In many ways, it is another version of many other things we’ve tried,” said Julie Slayton, a professor of education at USC.
“The program itself has all of the bells and whistles and pieces associated with it that, on paper, make it a completely legitimate way to go. So, I would say it’s less about the program and more about the way that it runs into the realities of schooling,” Slayton said.
Recently, Curriculum Associates became the subject of a lawsuit filed in December in a Massachusetts District Court alleging that i-Ready extracts students’ personal data and builds commercial profiles on them. The company has denied the allegations as “legally meritless,” stating that it does not sell student data or use it for advertising. It also claims not to build commercial profiles on students.
i-Ready time
Alisha Mernick’s 6-year-old daughter, a student in the Los Angeles Unified School District, was required to spend 45 minutes a week on i-Ready for English and another 45 minutes for math. Mernick grew concerned about the amount of screen time, and questioned the program’s academic value.
She eventually opted her daughter out of i-Ready.
“There’s kind of a cute little character that’s cheering you on. You earn points for getting things right. The actual rigor of the challenges are very similar to what you would find on a worksheet, but there’s all of this external reward,” said Mernick, who teaches art education at CalArts and Cal State Northridge and is also part of the Los Angeles-based group Schools Beyond Screens.
Now, while other students are doing i-Ready, Mernick’s daughter completes math problems from a workbook and reads from her chapter book.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Unified School District said their guidance for i-Ready generally includes 30 to 45 minutes each week in math and English language arts “during small-group or differentiated instruction led by teachers.”
“We understand concerns raised about screen time and believe technology should be used intentionally and in balance with direct instruction, collaboration, discussion, and hands-on learning,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Since the beginning of this school year, Los Angeles Unified has provided schools with guidance focused on ‘screen value over screen time,’ emphasizing purposeful, high-quality instructional use of technology.”
At the district’s Laurel Cinematic Arts & Creative Technologies Magnet, fifth grade teacher Emily Reyes said she has more flexibility in how she uses i-Ready in her classroom.
She typically has students use the program daily, but mainly to fill time — for instance, when they finish assignments early or when she needs time to complete administrative duties. Overall, she said she would prefer not to rely on the program and instead teach students texts that are more relevant.
“There are some kids that [are] great at doing the tasks on i-Ready. And there are some students that just kind of go through the tasks and click through them, so they’re not really gaining very much understanding through them,” said Reyes.
“There’s nothing better than actually doing actual tangible instruction.”
i-Ready assessments
Los Angeles Unified began implementing i-Ready in fall 2023, according to a district spokesperson. In LAUSD, i-Ready assessments are administered at the beginning of the school year and sometimes midyear and at the end of the year, as needed.
i-Ready “provides educators with actionable information that helps guide instruction, identify learning gaps and monitor student growth over time,” Los Angeles Unified said in a statement. “Educators use the data from short diagnostic assessments and personalized lessons alongside their professional judgment to provide targeted support for students.”
Given younger students’ attention spans, Mernick said it is unlikely they will perform their best on i-Ready.
“For the little kids, especially kindergarten and first, it’s just unrealistic to expect them to sit there for so long and focus on a computer screen,” Gillanders said. “They don’t have the attention span for it.”
At Peralta Elementary School in Oakland Unified, second grade teacher Diane Colquhoun administers i-Ready diagnostic tests three times a year.
She said the assessments are not particularly useful, do not align well with the curriculum and are not developmentally appropriate for her students. Many students also struggle with the digital format. And sometimes in the math section, if a student is performing especially well, the test starts challenging them with advanced material that hasn’t been taught yet.
“The test is adaptive, which is really stressful for the children, because if they start doing really well, they start getting content above their grade level, and then it makes them really anxious,” Colquhoun said.
Reyes, the LAUSD teacher, added that students who are already performing above grade level tend to benefit more from the program and can be pushed by it. For students who aren’t, she said, it’s less effective.
Meanwhile, USC education professor Morgan Polikoff, who is also on the Curriculum Associates research advisory committee, said younger students might not gain as much as older students, who are more likely to do better with independent, self-guided work.
Because California’s Smarter Balanced Assessments do not begin until third grade, some educators see i-Ready as a useful way to spot learning gaps earlier.
Such feedback, Polikoff said, would be valuable “if you diagnose a student’s area of need, and then you would do something about it.” And addressing learning gaps at a younger age can be critical for long-term academic development.
Still, some teachers say the i-Ready assessments are unnecessary or duplicative, noting that other tools — such as Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), which examines the acquisition of early literacy skills — already provide insights into students’ progress.
“Student time would be better spent doing more art, doing more science, doing more hands-on learning,” Colquhoun said.
This story was written by Mallika Seshadri for EdSource. The original version of this article can be viewed here.
