Tom Ultican pulls together four divergent strands of the effort to undermine public education, and iReady seems to be the tie that binds them together.
He writes:
“iReady is an economically successful software product used in public schools, by homeschoolers and in private schools. It utilizes the blended learning practices endorsed by the recently updated federal education law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). iReady employs competency-based education (CBE) theory which is also advocated by ESSA. The outcome is iReady drains money from classrooms, applies federally supported failed learning theories and undermines good teaching. Children hate it.
“Public education in America contends with four dissimilar but not separate attacks. The school choice movement is motivated by people who want government supported religious schools, others who want segregated schools and still others who want to profit from school management and the related real estate deals. The forth big threat is from the technology industry which uses their wealth and lobbying power to not only force their products into the classroom, but to mandate “best practices” for teaching. These four streams of attack are synergistic.”
What does iReady have to do with the big picture?
“Profiting from Education Law
“A group of billionaires with varying motives are using their vast wealth to shape America’s education agenda to their own liking. The last rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 called ESSA was larded up with provisions like the big money for technology which is listed in Title’s I and IV. It also specifies generous grants to promote both “blended learning” and “personalized learning.” (See page 1969 of the official law.) Charter schools, vouchers and social impact bonds are promoted in ESSA. All these initiatives drain money from the classroom and none have been credibly shown to improve education outcomes.”
Read the tangled web that Tom Ultican unweaves.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is the “third way” of death by infiltration. ESSA is a pork barrel law designed to allow businesses, particularly tech companies, to insert themselves into public schools under the guise of a legitimate service. There is nothing legitimate or evidence based about the approach. It is all about giving businesses a beachhead into public schools. We know that charters ushered in the acceptance of vouchers. Blended learning is a means to gain acceptance for total virtual programs. This has little to do with helping struggling students. It has a lot more to do with monetizing our schools and providing profits for tech companies. As we know, CBE has a long history of failure, and this profit mongering reboot is no different.
EXACTLY understood, and so well stated: DEATH BY INFILTRATION. “ESSA is a pork barrel law designed to allow businesses, particularly tech companies, to insert themselves into public schools under the guise of a legitimate service.” AND, under the guise of “caring about the kids,” having no choice but to invade with “philanthropic” intentions.
Planting Trojan horses (viruses, parasites, cuckoo eggs) is the 21st century way of organized crime. What the Mafia was doing 100 years ago with guns are now done “non-violently” via Trojan Horses. A few examples of the Trojan Horse Technique:
1) ALEC (by Koch brothers)
2) Freemarket departments at universities (by Koch brothers)
3) Charter schools (posing as public schools)
4) Common Core (posing as an advisory to better education)
5) Gates Foundation (posing as savior of humanity)
6) Duncan, King, DeVos (posing as education secretaries)
7) Trump (posing as president)
8) NRA (posing as protecting people’s rights and lives)
etc.
None of these appear mandated, violent, non of these appear directly harm or kill people. Nevertheless, their effects are lethal—much more so and on a global scale than the mob’s sawed off guns were ever capable of.
Diane: I think Ultican’s identity of four sources of “attack” offers a generalized clarity of a situation that also opens the door to identifying four kinds of personal motivations, which are split at best, and as such have “little to do with helping struggling students” or with the educational well-being of students or, by inference, the maintenance of a vibrant democratic culture. (But then we are beginning to understand that they know that already.)
Ultican also points to the conflict at the heart of the idea of “public-private partnerships” that are much-heralded every time profiteers “offer” their help, and supposed expertise, to public institutions. Though some business-people are actually well-meaning, at least until the money comes into view, too many times they also see everything from a capitalist-only viewpoint where, for instance, teachers are not rich capitalists and so are quietly seen as (sigh . . .) failures who need their help, or worse, who need to be replaced.
The other side of that coin is that a capitalist-only mindset, coupled with one or more of Ultican’s four-tier motivational script, tends to think that their capitalist-only ideology is fungible to all other what-they-view-as “business” enterprises, e.g., education. At its core, its a self-justifying ideological encroachment.
Here’s the dialectic: Like businesses, public institutions have to account for their spending and even their “bottom lines.” However, unlike businesses, public institutions do not exist only or even mainly to feed their capitalist-only stockholders. Public institutions are NOT GROUNDED-ONLY in the money (monetization), but rather in long-term social, political, cultural development, for instance, of an educated citizenship and polity–a ground, BTW, that underpins all legitimately applied capitalist principles.
The upshot is that there is nothing inherently wrong with public-private partnerships. What’s wrong is the encroachment of bad motivations over good ones, of capitalist intentions and ideology over whatever well-meaning intentions they may THINK they are fulfilling in their two-masters thought process.
Those double-intention fuzzy motivations are manifest in one-or more of Ultican’s four-levels of attack on public education where: “bad public schools” is code for “I need to fulfill one of those motivational intentions.” The “good of students” motivation slowly becomes less and less a part of the mental picture.
Such double-intent motivations are severely (and dangerously) limited by a capitalist-only mindset where those who harbor it too-easily become self-blinded to an entire professional group (teachers, researchers, etc.) that would inform their now-trampled for-the-student motivation.
If such persons hold their noses around Trump and his cronies, in fact, those persons are not so different from him, and should also do so in front of the mirror every morning.
“If such persons hold their noses around Trump and his cronies, in fact, those persons are not so different from him, and should also do so in front of the mirror every morning.”
Amen.
It’s not blended. It’s canned. There will never be canned instruction in my classroom. Never. I tried it. I hated it. Students hated it. They learned nothing. Anyone who thinks a computer can deliver anything of worth in the classroom is a dupe. Plan your own lessons. Take the time to look at your students’ work, yourself. It is worth it. Your students need you. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the the sales pitches. Stand up to those who are fooled. Be a real teacher, not an automaton.
Anything that can be delivered via a book can be delivered via a computer. And more. The problem with books is that many of them are subpar, so a human is needed to explain what otherwise could be gathered from a book. Software is no different, in fact it is worse because being as bad as most textbooks, the computers can be used for testing and assessing, so stilted and erroneous instruction is exacerbated with stilted and erroneous assessment. Putting it another way: if you use computer-based assessment or even worksheet-based assessment that you HAVEN’T DESIGNED YOURSELF, then having you in a classroom is no much better than having just a screen with attached keyboard.
When I started teaching, I taught French through an audio-visual approach that was essentially “canned.” I hated it, and thought I would lose my mind. It was tedious and boring.
Back in the 1980’s when education technology was starting to pick up, a classroom teacher in Chicago, named Marva Collins, could see what was going to happen. She summed it all up in one statement:
“Things don’t teach. Teachers teach”
-Amen.
“Children hate it.”
Yes, they do. I taught 2nd grade at a low income, almost failing public school in south Mississippi. Halfway through the year the district chose to switch curriculum……to iReady. Why? “It was rigorous.” I wanted to shove every podcast and lecture I’ve listened to about rigor in their faces. The children hated it. It was absolutely horrible. It sucked every ounce of creativity out of my teaching and was just another avenue towards failure and discouragement for my students. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating when I think back to that school year.
Puke 🤮. Get those kids ready to be slaves for the oligarchs.