On May 12, the Washoe County School District Board of Trustees voted 5-2 to renew a $2 million, one-year license for i-Ready lesson and assessment software.
As a parent and former ed-tech reporter, I’m disappointed the board voted to renew the pricey i-Ready lesson platform, rather than purchase the much cheaper assessment software alone. The main reason I’m unhappy with the vote is not because these optional lessons cost so much money, but because there’s no quality evidence that they actually help students learn.
Show me the (independent) data
No academic data was presented at the May 12 meeting, despite the fact that our K-8 students have been using i-Ready’s online math and reading lessons since 2023. At one point, Trustee JJ Phoenix directly asked chief academic officer Don Angotti whether any analysis had been done.
“We’ve done, obviously, after the first year of initial implementation, there was analysis done. There’s ongoing analysis as well,” Angotti said. “We just want to get tighter with that. We want an opportunity to dive deeper with that.”
Curriculum Associates, the maker of i-Ready, appears to lack efficacy data as well. You’d think that, after 15 years on the market and with 13 million users, the company would have a gold-standard, peer-reviewed study or two showing whether its i-Ready lesson platform improves student learning in reading and math.
Instead, the best we seem to have are two Johns Hopkins white papers (white papers are not peer reviewed) paid for by Curriculum Associates. These papers show the i-Ready lessons had no effect on learning in reading and resulted in a 0.8 percent improvement in math, according to a breakdown of the evidence by educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath.
Moving in the wrong direction
By renewing i-Ready for the 2026-’27 school year, we missed a chance to be among the leading school systems in our nation and around the world that are acting on the fact that most ed-tech tools have not been proven to help—and may even harm—student learning.
Less than 2 percent of ed-tech products have strong or even moderate evidence of effectiveness, according to a 2023 report by UNESCO, the education arm of the United Nations. The report notes that most ed-tech research is conducted “in house” and not subject to peer review, which means there’s a risk of bias.
UNESCO also found only 11 percent of U.S. school districts even requested peer-reviewed evidence prior to the adoption of new technology.
The Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use calls on U.S. schools to “reduce the role of screens in the lives of our nation’s children” in order to address this “urgent public health crisis.”
Here in Washoe County, five of our seven elected trustees voted to pay good money to mandate weekly i-Ready screen time for students as young as 5, without any real evidence that it’s worth it—all while we’re in the middle of a global youth mental-health crisis tied largely to screens.
It’s a move that goes against the 2026 Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use among children. Issued in May, the document calls on U.S. schools to “reduce the role of screens in the lives of our nation’s children” in order to address this “urgent public health crisis.”
The warning directs schools to “limit screen use by assigning work in books or on paper whenever possible” and to “invest in physical textbooks and prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities, and social activities for all grade levels.”
Teachers speak out
On May 27, the American Federation of Teachers—a national teachers’ union with nearly 2 million members—released a similar plan to scale back tech use in schools. The document calls for no screen use through second-grade except for students with special needs; no student-facing AI in elementary schools; and independent research on the effects of AI, screens and technology on students.
Our district’s vote to renew i-Ready not only goes against these recommendations, but it also files in the face of a local teachers’ union survey as well. Conducted in May with responses from more than 930 K-8 teachers, the results of that survey—presented to trustees at the May 12 meeting—seem to echo the views of teachers and students nationwide.
Less than 30 percent of the teachers surveyed by the Washoe Education Association said students were engaged while using i-Ready; more than 70 percent said i-Ready takes time away from other instructional priorities; and about 75 percent said the district’s investment in i-Ready was “not worth it.”
WCSD leaders countered this with their own staff survey, which shows 974 employees agreed with the statement “I’m excited about the use of i-Ready at my school.”
Addressing the discrepancy between the two surveys, Trustee Colleen Westlake questioned whether teachers are comfortable answering honestly when their bosses are conducting the survey, which brings us back to the perils of in-house research.
“I just have to say they might have felt a little more comfortable answering that (union) survey than what we send out,” she said. “I only know what my teachers tell me, and I’ve had a lot tell me that they’re afraid to speak out. You know, it’s scary. So, you speak out to those you know will listen.” (The dissenting i-Ready votes came from Westlake and Beth Smith.)
Make good choices
To our district leaders and trustees: I implore you to reverse your decision to renew the optional i-Ready lesson platform based on the information I’ve provided.
Five trustees voted to renew this expensive, unproven program amid serious budget constraints, all while our elementary schools continue to go without district funding for PE and art—two widely loved and research–backed staples of primary education.
Meanwhile, i-Ready parent company Curriculum Associates—owned by the private equity firm Berkshire Partners—is being sued by parents for alleged predatory data-mining practices.
Please make good choices about how we use our limited funds in the future. Our district spent more than $121 million in pandemic recovery funds from 2020 to 2024, and we have little to show for it in terms of academic improvement.
Such lack of progress in the face of heavy spending often comes down to whether state and district leaders prioritize evidence-based investments, according to staff at the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, which tracked the relationship between district pandemic spending and test scores nationwide.
“In states like Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, districts posted stronger progress alongside investments,” the Edunomics Lab reports. “Meanwhile, in Nevada, South Dakota and Washington, districts’ average math scores barely budged, and reading scores were flat or continued to fall, even as more money and staffing rained down on systems.”
I understand that budget and curriculum decisions are complicated, but moving forward, we must use real peer-reviewed evidence—rather than a company’s own in-house research—to make them. I would be happy to work with our district leaders to help make this happen.
Brandi Vesco is the parent of a WCSD student and a former staff writer for the Center for Digital Education. She recently founded the Washoe Parent Coalition, where families band together to drive positive change for children.