Tom Ultican writes here that the i-Ready program is “Outcomes Based Education” in a new dress.
It is, he writes, a fake innovation.
He writes:
i-Ready sells digital math and English lessons to school districts. It provides diagnostic testing which recommends interventions for struggling students that it then provides. i-Ready’s pedagogy embraces competency based education (CBE) a theory promoted by the US Department of Education and blended learning theory also financially supported by the federal government. CBE is the latest name for an education theory that failed in both the 1970’s and 1990’s. Blended learning theory is an experiment with almost no research supporting it but lots of research pointing to its health risks. Students dislike i-Ready.
June 2018, I wrote “i-Ready Magnificent Marketing Terrible Teaching.” It received decent traffic for the first four days, but strangely the traffic never slowed. This year, it is my most accessed article averaging over 700 hits per month.
Curriculum Associates and Bad Education Philosophy
The Massachusetts based company Curriculum Associates (CA) distributes i-Ready and its related testing services. When founded in 1969, it was providing worksheets in support of Mastery Learning curriculum which is similar to today’s CBE. They are the same failed theories delivered by different mediums. CBE and Mastery Learning theory also go by many other names including outcome based education; performance based education; standards based education; high performance learning; transformational education and break-the-mold schools, among others.
Read on for the full story.
I started teaching in 1970, and I remember the color coded reading materials that were the all part of the “mastery learning” materials from Curriculum Associates. In our elementary schools, students in grades 3 to 5 had to go the “reading lab” to use these materials twice a week. I picked up my beginning and intermediate ELLs for their English class as this reading material was far too advanced for them at this time. I remember several very telling specifics about this experience. First of all, there was a collective groan from the students entering the lab. Students felt as though they were being punished by the experience. I remember one little mainstream boy asking if he could come with me “to work on his English.” These little cards were deadly, boring and dull as can be. The students hated the experience! I doubt that a digital rendering of the same type of product offers today’s students anything new and interesting. We phased out this meaningless behaviorism in the late 70s much to the delight of students. i- Ready is like putting lipstick on a pig.
Thank you for you eye-witness response to the selling of terrible pedagogy.
I-Ready to gadurate?
I-Ready for collage?
They should have just called it i-Stupid
This is a wonderful account of the history of some popular and bad ideas.
A long time ago (1966) I used the bloom taxonomies for a little exercise in theorizing, I created a “negative taxonomy” based on the 1956 Bloom’s (ed.) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, and the 1961 extension by Bloom, Krathwohl, and Masia–Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain.
My original intent was to show that each objective, if not yet attained by a student, could also be reframed to describe a learning problem that “should” be addressed.
With that reasoning in play, I rewrote all of the objectives as if they were intended to describe a learning problem.
That exercise revealed the extent to which the objectives (in both domains) honored conformity to rules and would discredit values associated with then current research on creative thinking and education in the arts.
I have had other and encounters with the “behavioral objectives or else’ mindset in the late 1960s and since then. For some other notes on this drive to reduce education to boatloads of specifics see Larry Cuban’s https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/whatever-happened-to-behavioral-objectives and my comment there.
Oh, Laura, that is absolutely beautiful!!! What a delicious exercise with Bloom’s Taxonomy!!!!
Best post of the year!
Bloom distanced himself from the way his (and et al’s) taxonomy was being used.
A couple of years ago I remember going to a “professional development” session. The presenter claimed he had a new way of organizing material for students. As I watched I saw him drawing Venn Diagrams. I can’t remember what he called them, but I’m sure he got a nice big check for it!!
There’s a reason, actually many, that I call them “Being Professionally Developed Days”. Basically they are an adminimal method for keeping the rabble in line by pretending to have the rabble learn something (usually not identifiable).
I think one of the big factors that perpetuates the seemingly endless cycle of bad ideas in education is the compulsion of some teachers (including, most egregiously, ed leaders) to always be doing something new. Things must be new, new, NEW! -regardless of whether the newest scheme works or not. More than ever.
Add this constant churn of untested (or sometimes stale, leftover but renamed) ideas to the toxic brew of charter school baloney and rancid standardized testing and what we’ve cooked up nationwide is more than just putrid pap. It’s like food poisoning for the mind.
The contents of this dented, leaking “can” of goods ought to be labelled soul-killing and democracy destroying,
In fairness, much of the bad stuff that goes on in our schools is surely a “meat byproduct” of the cult of progress, a syndrome that permeates the culture. That and lots of other crap, too, that’s way outside our immediate control.
The fact that public schools continue to do as well as they are is a testament to the persistence of hardworking teachers. (And, the fact that classrooms have doors. Heavy, fire-rated doors.) As one former superintendent advised me during the worst days of the truly half-assed “Common Core”: just close your door and do what’s right for the kids.
I could write more about public schooling but let me add a couple comments about McDonald’s. (There are some striking similarities, you know. Such as the mentality of some of the people out there who are working relentlessly to remake our classrooms into burger joints for the brain.)
I had to get a haircut yesterday which necessitated venturing out very early on “Black Friday”. Considering where we live that entails driving about 45 minutes.
I stopped in at a brand new McDonald’s to woof down an egg McMuffin before first doing some regular, weekly shopping.
This big, shiny McDonald’s has two “drive thru” lines and a lot fewer seats indoors. I guess most people are not venturing into these places now? (The line of cars outside wound around the parking lot.)
As I was sitting there pretty much alone, I noticed that some of the tables have video screens embedded in them with kids’ computer games ready to be played. Wow. Maybe fast food isn’t fast enough anymore….computers help it all go down better.
We’re not in technological Kansas anymore.
I certainly wouldn’t go along with the entirety of the original Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors. But the “first do no harm” part sounds pretty good to me.
i-Ready for that!
“Do no harm” is a perfect litmus test for most careers. Once at a conference I got some good advice. The speaker, Nancie Atwell, said, “If what you are doing works, do more of it, and if it doesn’t, stop doing it.” I wish teachers had the autonomy to decide this for themselves.
They used to have such autonomy. In great schools, they still do.