> Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce.
For a long time I've been wanting to write an essay about this exact topic. Once you start paying attention, it's everywhere: the automatic upselling attempts at self-service kiosks, the automatic pre-filled tipping inputs in the card payment terminals, and some horribly long forms that require extremely pedantic input filled just correctly, that no human would bother on paper.
I've come to think of this as a kind of automated tyranny. Few real humans would have the heart to keep trying to upsell with such persistence when most of their customers reject the sale. And very few humans would dare to ask every single human to tip a pre-filled amount of 10% or even up in such a bold manner. But because "the machine does it", there's no alternative but to accept it, or to boycott the machines.
My condolences to the author for having to witness their children live through such an experience. It sounds like hell.
Our school district uses this same math software. If one wished to design an experience to instill a hatred of mathematics into children, it would be a pretty solid approach.
We've informed teachers, nicely but firmly, that we will not be doing any of it at home. Some of them have pushed back, but barring any real consequence, I am not going to subject anyone to this counterproductive torment.
> 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.
The nice part of doing it as homework is that if it's boring and the kid runs away, it's a parent failure instead of a teacher problem.
Not just I-Ready. This is the majority of educational software.
The stupid repetitive animations. I am sure they sold it to some administrators as being "fun", and "kids are going to love it" because, see, there is a cute penguin doing a 10 second dance. But of course you have to watch the animation after each section and you can't skip ahead.
The kid makes a single mistake, and the "smart adaptive" algorithm throws them back to the preschool school level to "let's start with numbers again", while the kid just clicked the wrong button because the UI is janky and because they are angry with stupid penguin who is getting on their nerves.
Some teachers understand what's going on refuse to use this stuff and print actual paper and pencil tests and homework sheet. But that only works until the standardized tests come, those are all on the computer usually, with the same janky UI.
Guess what, it’s not that great in online masters programs either. Not like that, it sounds like genuine torture, but Canvas is still nearly the least bare-metal minimum you can get. Why? Because a PDF would be more than adequate, but would not collect revenue. So they have a shell over the PDF that makes you slowly flip the pages, etc. PDFs can even do checkboxes and little text tests and things now, so there is no excuse. You just have to pay and pay, and since kids don’t have money, they have to spiritually suffer instead and learn that the world is out to get them like some Upton Sinclair company town.
My kids and the better teachers at their school also hate iReady for generally the same reasons stated in the post. I recommend this article [0], along w/ this related reddit thread [1] (there are countless others)
Worth mentioning: The maker of iReady, Curriculum Associates, is majority-owned by private equity (shocking).
This is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what makes school boards buy this software, while many alternatives apparently exist. I don't think that school officials are unaware that kids hate it, and parents agree with their kids.
Yes my kids also hate it. They keep it muted and just watch for the visual indicator that the next section is available. It’s worse than the annual corporate compliance training that many adults have to suffer through. One thing to be optimistic about with LLMs is that even unattended poorly prompted vanilla coding LLMs won’t naturally produce such horrible software. It takes distinct human intervention to make it this bad.
My kids don't seem to have any issues with I-Ready, and I haven't heard any complaints from the other parents in my neighborhood. It's upsetting to hear it's causing issues for others. FWIW, in our district it appears to be used purely to determine where kids are at compared to the benchmark expectations. It may be coloring my views that my kids are both far above grade level according to the software.
i-Ready has two products, i-Ready diagnostic and i-Ready learning. The diagnostic is solely used for adaptive testing. The learning software is used for classwork, homework, and lessons. The learning software is what this is about. Lots of schools just use the diagnostic tests.
That is how the teachers described it to us (the testing software being adaptive). As far as I know, we only use the diagnostic software. I wasn't aware of the existence of a learning version of this software.
My child's school is the same, they use the diagnostic software. My question was more toward wondering if the diagnostic is as anemic as the learning version in terms of being adaptive.
I did look into the complaints and went direct to the source: My kids. ONe actively loves it. He seeks it out. I asked him about the author's complaints. He agreed its slow but didn't seem to bother him. He's not particularly patient, so this part was surprising based on the article.
Idk what the older brother will say but ill report back
I am uncertain of the utility of any mandated screen based technology or app in K-8 education. We keep investing in it and the standard scores keep falling. Teachers are often juggling multiple apps and now have an IT job on top of their work. None of the efficiency or adaptive promises are coming to fruition. Teachers have less time and more stress.
Something is broken. Lets go back to paper and pencil.
Duolingo was incredible to get my kids engaged with chess past USCF 1000
It also was super helpful in maintenance of a 3rd language spoken at home.
Maybe that's where the problem is. Perhaps it should be a requirement that an app must be winner in the consumer education market before it can be sold to the education bureacracy. If an app survived the cutthroat education app B2C market, you know it works well for B2E market
We're having conversations about putting everyone's kids through private school in my family now. This version of public education is starting to look like a failed experiment in many ways. The amount of money that goes into this system has become unbelievable relative to its outputs. Everything is about money now. Massive contracts. Multiple layers of entrenched bureaucracy. It's probably not going to fix itself at this point. Too many self-serving actors are involved who work in administration buildings all day. You don't need this much middle management to run an elementary school. If you eliminated all of the bullshit admin and "support" services, you could probably quadruple the salaries of the teachers.
How about the teachers who despite the comprehensive takedown in "Sold A Story" just love the "coziness" of the failing methods and promise to continue using those proven-to-fail methods of teaching reading? Or the ones sexually assaulting students?
In your work, do you exclusively work with people at your own skill level? Is that an effective way to become more skilled?
I remember that when I was in school, teachers hated my ever-present netbook laptop and the disinterest I had in their classes. Which were already repetitious and not very exciting to me.
To see it half reversed now - every student must have a laptop and use it, not listen to the teacher - and yet somehow be so much worse is really sad.
For me, the computer was a portal to worlds and experiences and time spent doing things school had no way of offering me. For a kid to grow up hating their laptop because this is what it offers them, when we have so many incredible things sitting just out of their reach, is infuriating.
I'd really like to know how and why the school hasn't responded to the parents' complaints, if they're so frequent and unanimous. Maybe they're locked into a contract?
On the other hand, a while ago I was picking up takeout at a restaurant and a little girl, the daughter of one of the owners, was doing homework and it turned out to be a simple JavaScript-like programming assignment. I helped her learn how to write a for loop to make a fox jump over some obstacles. It was fun! It's not all bad.
YMMV, I guess - we were surprised when our first grader said math was her favorite part of school this year, and she recently asked if she can get i-Ready on her iPad.
I’ve been using Claude and https://sprites.dev/ to build bespoke learning exercises for my kids. It’s been remarkably easy to put together games and practice problems with very little guidance and I can tailor the apps to anything they are struggling with in school.
Thank you for this excellent idea. I tried this today. Plugged in my daughters favorite games, asked claude code to develop some web games based on her own preferences. Coded up 3 web games that she has now been playing for almost 45 minutes, practicing her multiplication tables. I refined them to allow server side stats, so I know which games she is playing, where she is in her practice, and utilizing spaced repetition. She has never been able to sit down and work on i-ready for more then 15-20 minutes at a time at home. Big win. I choose exactly what she is learning and practicing, she gets tailor made games that appeal to her.
> 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.
This is a very cynical take, and completely wrong.
My daughter is at level Z, and some of her peers are level P or Q. It's fine, and encouraged. She just gets different work while they are still working on up-leveling.
Only lazy or underpaid/under-resourced teachers give every kid the same work.
how is that supposed to work? i mean, i agree that this would be ideal, but i believe it is far from the norm. at best advanced students get some extra work, and students who are behind gt some additional tutoring. i got advance work too, but in order to teach each child individually you need a completely different system like montessori, that is designed for that.
in particular i do not understand how more pay would give teachers more time to do this. more/better resources might help, but taking care of each student individually is something else entirely.
I went to a Math/CS magnet program for high school with selective admissions. It wasn't racially diverse and 90% Asian, but most of them were born into working class families. Virtually everyone went to top universities and did extremely well. My brother who went to a top tier private school used my teacher's math curriculum.
They eliminated the selective admissions after I graduated and now the program is worse. The teachers teach less because the students cannot learn. The students don't go to top universities anymore. But it is diverse and equitable.
I don't want to live in a world where I must buy my children access to education. Not getting into a good university and being forced to suffer the consequences of my actions made me realize the value of hard work.
If from 0-18, the determinant of my children's success is how much money I spend on them, I'm not teaching them to be better than me.
OP is sharing their experience, and you are sharing yours. neither experience is universal, and it has nothing to do with wanting to privatize education. rather it is a call for reform of the school system. (all public schools should adopt the montessori method in my opinion for example. it's not expensive. it takes just one year of training for teachers)
It truly boggles the mind how bad public schools can be. When you read something like this or see things in person, it’s genuinely difficult to imagine how a system could do this when staffed with well intentioned humans with brains. And yet. It happens.
For liberals this is a good reminder of why conservatives don’t trust government.
> Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce.
For a long time I've been wanting to write an essay about this exact topic. Once you start paying attention, it's everywhere: the automatic upselling attempts at self-service kiosks, the automatic pre-filled tipping inputs in the card payment terminals, and some horribly long forms that require extremely pedantic input filled just correctly, that no human would bother on paper.
I've come to think of this as a kind of automated tyranny. Few real humans would have the heart to keep trying to upsell with such persistence when most of their customers reject the sale. And very few humans would dare to ask every single human to tip a pre-filled amount of 10% or even up in such a bold manner. But because "the machine does it", there's no alternative but to accept it, or to boycott the machines.
My condolences to the author for having to witness their children live through such an experience. It sounds like hell.
“it’s just going to ask you a couple questions”
Our school district uses this same math software. If one wished to design an experience to instill a hatred of mathematics into children, it would be a pretty solid approach.
We've informed teachers, nicely but firmly, that we will not be doing any of it at home. Some of them have pushed back, but barring any real consequence, I am not going to subject anyone to this counterproductive torment.
From the article:
> 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.
The nice part of doing it as homework is that if it's boring and the kid runs away, it's a parent failure instead of a teacher problem.
Not just I-Ready. This is the majority of educational software.
The stupid repetitive animations. I am sure they sold it to some administrators as being "fun", and "kids are going to love it" because, see, there is a cute penguin doing a 10 second dance. But of course you have to watch the animation after each section and you can't skip ahead.
The kid makes a single mistake, and the "smart adaptive" algorithm throws them back to the preschool school level to "let's start with numbers again", while the kid just clicked the wrong button because the UI is janky and because they are angry with stupid penguin who is getting on their nerves.
Some teachers understand what's going on refuse to use this stuff and print actual paper and pencil tests and homework sheet. But that only works until the standardized tests come, those are all on the computer usually, with the same janky UI.
Not to mention that we now know it appears to be especially detrimental during childhood learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
Guess what, it’s not that great in online masters programs either. Not like that, it sounds like genuine torture, but Canvas is still nearly the least bare-metal minimum you can get. Why? Because a PDF would be more than adequate, but would not collect revenue. So they have a shell over the PDF that makes you slowly flip the pages, etc. PDFs can even do checkboxes and little text tests and things now, so there is no excuse. You just have to pay and pay, and since kids don’t have money, they have to spiritually suffer instead and learn that the world is out to get them like some Upton Sinclair company town.
My kids and the better teachers at their school also hate iReady for generally the same reasons stated in the post. I recommend this article [0], along w/ this related reddit thread [1] (there are countless others)
Worth mentioning: The maker of iReady, Curriculum Associates, is majority-owned by private equity (shocking).
[0] https://archive.ph/hsvbh
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskTeachers/comments/1rdowny/iready...
This is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what makes school boards buy this software, while many alternatives apparently exist. I don't think that school officials are unaware that kids hate it, and parents agree with their kids.
Yes my kids also hate it. They keep it muted and just watch for the visual indicator that the next section is available. It’s worse than the annual corporate compliance training that many adults have to suffer through. One thing to be optimistic about with LLMs is that even unattended poorly prompted vanilla coding LLMs won’t naturally produce such horrible software. It takes distinct human intervention to make it this bad.
My kids don't seem to have any issues with I-Ready, and I haven't heard any complaints from the other parents in my neighborhood. It's upsetting to hear it's causing issues for others. FWIW, in our district it appears to be used purely to determine where kids are at compared to the benchmark expectations. It may be coloring my views that my kids are both far above grade level according to the software.
i-Ready has two products, i-Ready diagnostic and i-Ready learning. The diagnostic is solely used for adaptive testing. The learning software is used for classwork, homework, and lessons. The learning software is what this is about. Lots of schools just use the diagnostic tests.
If the learning software isn't actually adaptive, is the testing software?
That is how the teachers described it to us (the testing software being adaptive). As far as I know, we only use the diagnostic software. I wasn't aware of the existence of a learning version of this software.
My child's school is the same, they use the diagnostic software. My question was more toward wondering if the diagnostic is as anemic as the learning version in terms of being adaptive.
I agree. I share your situation and comments.
I did look into the complaints and went direct to the source: My kids. ONe actively loves it. He seeks it out. I asked him about the author's complaints. He agreed its slow but didn't seem to bother him. He's not particularly patient, so this part was surprising based on the article.
Idk what the older brother will say but ill report back
I am uncertain of the utility of any mandated screen based technology or app in K-8 education. We keep investing in it and the standard scores keep falling. Teachers are often juggling multiple apps and now have an IT job on top of their work. None of the efficiency or adaptive promises are coming to fruition. Teachers have less time and more stress.
Something is broken. Lets go back to paper and pencil.
Duolingo was incredible to get my kids engaged with chess past USCF 1000
It also was super helpful in maintenance of a 3rd language spoken at home.
Maybe that's where the problem is. Perhaps it should be a requirement that an app must be winner in the consumer education market before it can be sold to the education bureacracy. If an app survived the cutthroat education app B2C market, you know it works well for B2E market
We're having conversations about putting everyone's kids through private school in my family now. This version of public education is starting to look like a failed experiment in many ways. The amount of money that goes into this system has become unbelievable relative to its outputs. Everything is about money now. Massive contracts. Multiple layers of entrenched bureaucracy. It's probably not going to fix itself at this point. Too many self-serving actors are involved who work in administration buildings all day. You don't need this much middle management to run an elementary school. If you eliminated all of the bullshit admin and "support" services, you could probably quadruple the salaries of the teachers.
How about the teachers who despite the comprehensive takedown in "Sold A Story" just love the "coziness" of the failing methods and promise to continue using those proven-to-fail methods of teaching reading? Or the ones sexually assaulting students?
In your work, do you exclusively work with people at your own skill level? Is that an effective way to become more skilled?
John Taylor Gatto nailed it over 30 years ago: https://cantrip.org/gatto.html
You're confused because you think the purpose of school is to educate.
I remember that when I was in school, teachers hated my ever-present netbook laptop and the disinterest I had in their classes. Which were already repetitious and not very exciting to me.
To see it half reversed now - every student must have a laptop and use it, not listen to the teacher - and yet somehow be so much worse is really sad.
For me, the computer was a portal to worlds and experiences and time spent doing things school had no way of offering me. For a kid to grow up hating their laptop because this is what it offers them, when we have so many incredible things sitting just out of their reach, is infuriating.
I'd really like to know how and why the school hasn't responded to the parents' complaints, if they're so frequent and unanimous. Maybe they're locked into a contract?
On the other hand, a while ago I was picking up takeout at a restaurant and a little girl, the daughter of one of the owners, was doing homework and it turned out to be a simple JavaScript-like programming assignment. I helped her learn how to write a for loop to make a fox jump over some obstacles. It was fun! It's not all bad.
YMMV, I guess - we were surprised when our first grader said math was her favorite part of school this year, and she recently asked if she can get i-Ready on her iPad.
I’ve been using Claude and https://sprites.dev/ to build bespoke learning exercises for my kids. It’s been remarkably easy to put together games and practice problems with very little guidance and I can tailor the apps to anything they are struggling with in school.
Thank you for this excellent idea. I tried this today. Plugged in my daughters favorite games, asked claude code to develop some web games based on her own preferences. Coded up 3 web games that she has now been playing for almost 45 minutes, practicing her multiplication tables. I refined them to allow server side stats, so I know which games she is playing, where she is in her practice, and utilizing spaced repetition. She has never been able to sit down and work on i-ready for more then 15-20 minutes at a time at home. Big win. I choose exactly what she is learning and practicing, she gets tailor made games that appeal to her.
> 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.
It sounds like it's browser-based so maybe start a project to automate it with tampermonkey or a chrome extension. It could be a fun family project :)
> When we sent our kids to public school,
And there's the problem. Public schools do not want groups of children to go faster than other children because it is inequitable.
By simply teaching first grade content for several years, equity is ensured since it is impossible to get ahead.
The system is working as intended.
This is a very cynical take, and completely wrong.
My daughter is at level Z, and some of her peers are level P or Q. It's fine, and encouraged. She just gets different work while they are still working on up-leveling.
Only lazy or underpaid/under-resourced teachers give every kid the same work.
how is that supposed to work? i mean, i agree that this would be ideal, but i believe it is far from the norm. at best advanced students get some extra work, and students who are behind gt some additional tutoring. i got advance work too, but in order to teach each child individually you need a completely different system like montessori, that is designed for that.
in particular i do not understand how more pay would give teachers more time to do this. more/better resources might help, but taking care of each student individually is something else entirely.
This is my experience as well. OP is parroting a common talking point from the groups that want to privatize education.
I went to a Math/CS magnet program for high school with selective admissions. It wasn't racially diverse and 90% Asian, but most of them were born into working class families. Virtually everyone went to top universities and did extremely well. My brother who went to a top tier private school used my teacher's math curriculum.
They eliminated the selective admissions after I graduated and now the program is worse. The teachers teach less because the students cannot learn. The students don't go to top universities anymore. But it is diverse and equitable.
I don't want to live in a world where I must buy my children access to education. Not getting into a good university and being forced to suffer the consequences of my actions made me realize the value of hard work.
If from 0-18, the determinant of my children's success is how much money I spend on them, I'm not teaching them to be better than me.
OP is sharing their experience, and you are sharing yours. neither experience is universal, and it has nothing to do with wanting to privatize education. rather it is a call for reform of the school system. (all public schools should adopt the montessori method in my opinion for example. it's not expensive. it takes just one year of training for teachers)
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It truly boggles the mind how bad public schools can be. When you read something like this or see things in person, it’s genuinely difficult to imagine how a system could do this when staffed with well intentioned humans with brains. And yet. It happens.
For liberals this is a good reminder of why conservatives don’t trust government.