Is it possible that a math test could be dangerous? This teacher educator, Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, says yes. She says the iReady Assessment is dangerous.

She explains:

This school year Fairfax County Public Schools, the 10th largest school division in the United States, adopted the iReady assessment as a universal screener across all of its elementary schools. Students in grades K-6 take these assessments individually on the computer three times per year, and the results are made available to both teachers and parents.

According to Curriculum Associates, the company that makes iReady, these assessments are an “adaptive Diagnostic for reading and mathematics [that] pinpoints student need down to the sub-skill level, and [provides] ongoing progress monitoring [to] show whether students are on track to achieve end-of-year targets.”

The Fairfax County Public Schools website further asserts that iReady is a “tool that has the potential to streamline Responsive Instruction processes, promote early identification and remediation of difficulties and improve student achievement.”

While I have found this assessment deeply troubling all year, it has taken me a while to be able to articulate exactly why I think this assessment is so dangerous, and why I think we need to use our voices as teachers, administrators and parents to speak out against it.*

So, let’s get back to the claim in the title of this blog post. iReady is dangerous. This might sound like hyperbole. After all, this is just a test, right? In this era of public schooling, children take many assessments, some more useful than others, so what’s the big deal with iReady?…

Based on the scores, iReady generates a report for each student for each of the domains. The report offers a bulleted list of what the student can do and next steps for instruction. However, if you take a look at the finer print you’ll learn that these reports are not generated from the specific questions that the child answered correctly or incorrectly, but rather are a generic list based on what iReady thinks that students who score in this same range in this domain likely need.

The teacher can never see the questions the child answered correctly or incorrectly, nor can she even access a description of the kinds of questions the child answered correctly or incorrectly. The most a teacher will ever know is that a child scored poorly, for example, in number and operations. Folks, that is a giant category, and far too broad to be actionable.

But above all else, the iReady Universal Screener is a dangerous assessment because it is a dehumanizing assessment. The test strips away all evidence of the students’ thinking, of her mathematical identity, and instead assigns broad and largely meaningless labels. The test boils down a student’s entire mathematical identity to a generic list of skills that “students like her” generally need, according to iReady. And yet despite its lumping of students into broad categories, iReady certainly doesn’t hesitate to offer very specific information about what a child likely can do and what next instructional steps should be.

Read on. See her examples. What do you think?