Tom Ultican wrote about I-Ready three years ago, and he continues to receive frequent clicks and letters from angry students.
He thinks the deal between Oakland Public Schools and Johns Hopkins University is of dubious value. Hopkins gets the data; students in the Oakland public schools get a curriculum that most will hate.
Ultican notes the connection between I-Ready and Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. More billionaires with big idea to change the schools.
He writes:
The foundation being cited as funding the i-Ready and Johns Hopkins study has assets of more than $600 million. FounderKenneth Rainin was an entrepreneur from Toledo, Ohio who became wealthy manufacturing and selling laboratory pipettes. When he died in 2007, the foundation became the beneficiary of the majority of his estate.
The Rainan Foundation has spent significant sums on advancing its “Seeds of Learning” reading program and the corporate control of public education. As the LittleSis map depicted above shows, the foundation sends large grants both directly and indirectly to billionaire funded “school choice” promoting organizations.
The “Seeds of Learning” program is supposed to improve reading education results through its preschool efforts. The lead story on the foundation’s web page is “Research Show Seeds of Learning Produces Quick Gains.” The research is not peer reviewed or independent. The Kenneth Rainin Foundation has spent more than $3 million for a Chicago company to produce the results. Report briefs are made available but not the study itself.
The dark side of the study is that they are testing 4- and 5-year olds in alliteration, letter naming, letter sounds, rhyming and vocabulary. That is child abuse. This appears to be an amateur created program that ignores the much greater need for babies to engage in self-directed play in safe and stimulative environments. “Seeds of Learning” is likely more personality damaging than it is helpful for reading.
Amateurs need to stop using their financial power to control education policy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fascinating that Johns Hopkins is involved. Hopkins totally panned iReady in 2016. Hopkins pointed out that iReady’s boast that it predicts “proficiency” 88% of the time on NY state tests, that’s just a binary prediction. When pushed to see how accurate iReady is in predicting whether a child will get a 1,2,3, or 4 on the tests, it’s predictive accuracy drops precipitously to only 67%. And here’s the final quote from Hopkins about iReady: “The lack of a research base on i-Ready and MAP as means for improving student learning is both surprising and disappointing given their widespread use as well as their cost. To be clear, the negative findings of a single study should not be taken as conclusive. Rather, they illustrate how just important it is for states and districts to understand precisely what research suggests about these two tests, and where we have important, unanswered questions that deserve peer-reviewed, external research studies commensurate with the widespread use of these assessments.” https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/formative-assessments/
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It seems to me that like Harvard’s graduate school of education with different factions the same may be true at Johns Hopkins. Withing their Education Policy Institute their may be more corporate friendly groups and more scholarly rigorous groups. But having factions openly co-writing a paper with Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change seems indefensible.
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working on public school issues with Jeb Bush IS indefensible — and transparent
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In my jaundiced view, anyone who writes a paper jointly with Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change is not a scholar.
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“i -not-Ready”
Ready or not
Here I come
“I-not-Ready”
“I-not-dumb”
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Forcing the latest magic-learning bullet (remember bullets of all types can injure and/or kill) on teachers and students isn’t going to work because students/children have the freedom to learn or not.
I taught in community-based public schools for 30 years (1975 – 2005), and I worked with more than 6,000 students/children.
Those that didn’t learn didn’t make an effort to learn. There is an old saying that says, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
That applies to everyone. If a child isn’t ready to learn or doesn’t want to learn, nothing teachers are forced to do is going to make those children want to learn, NOTHING!
It’s apparent that these extremist billionaires funding the harsh reform school movement are also incapable of learning because they don’t want to.
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Speaking of kids who don’t want to learn….I’d love to see Diane prompt a discussion of mandatory summer school and retention on this blog sometime (has it ever been discussed)?. Both have been abandoned in CA, as far as I can tell, and it seems to me that there are some students who would actually start making an effort if they knew there would be consequences for their abject sloth.
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Social promotion doesn’t just lower the bar, it sells it for scrap metal.
Retention opponents claim it doesn’t help the tiny percent of students who get retained while conveniently overlooking how many it harms with a free pass. Include the automatic 50 and a legion of cowardly administrators have enabled millions of students to take the path of no resistance.
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My experience would suggest that the type of students motivated by threats as distant as a summer away would be better served by more immediate sanctions and helps. You do not produce today, you sacrifice today. For these students, there is nothing but the next few hours in life.
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