Why DC Should Not Renew i-Ready
What the disapproval means, why we support it and what should happen next
i-Ready Open Letter
Thank you to Chairman Mendelson, with Councilmembers Nadeau and Henderson, for introducing a disapproval resolution for the District’s renewal of i-Ready, a digital assessment platform which is the subject of a federal class action lawsuit alleging that the company uses student data without proper consent. We thank the DC Council for listening to our parent community’s concerns and taking seriously the privacy and security of our children’s data.
Our understanding is that the disapproval resolution provides 30 days in which we can pause, assess whether the contract is in compliance with DC and federal law, and carefully reevaluate the evidence base for i-Ready to ensure that DC families are getting the value we deserve.
We believe the Council and DCPS should only invest our taxpayer dollars into educational technology that has a strong foundation of evidence that supports District-wide deployment. We have not seen robust, independently funded evidence about i-Ready’s efficacy from DCPS or another source. Thus, we strongly recommend that DCPS not renew its contract with Curriculum Associates, the parent company of i-Ready, for the 2026-2027 academic year. We believe the $1.5M allocated for this contract renewal is better spent on teacher supports and/or other alternative assessment options.
If DCPS is committed to continuing the i-Ready contract, despite the lack of evidence and ongoing litigation, at minimum we ask that i-Ready not be part of in-class instructional time or used in classroom stations or centers, or prescribed as homework. Instead, consistent with other jurisdictions’ proposed or enacted policies such as LAUSD and the state of Utah, i-Ready should be solely used as an assessment tool.
We also urge DCPS to stop using i-Ready as an assessment tool below 3rd grade. DIBELS is already used for screening and progress monitoring in grades K-2 as required by DC’s dyslexia legislation. Teachers administer the short DIBELS measures (one minute for each of the 4-6 subtests) to students in the early elementary grades, and they glean critical information about each student’s skills and confidence through the interpersonal administration process and through the teachers’ analysis of the student’s response patterns. Students’ scores are provided to families so that they, too, can understand how their child is progressing on various critical early reading skills. DIBELS is a brief, easy to administer assessment that provides specific, actionable information to teachers without requiring young children to work independently on a device.
A parent advisory council in New York City just passed a screen time restriction resolution on May 13, which calls on the state to provide paper-based assessment options for all New York State standardized assessments, particularly in elementary and middle school grades. This reflects a growing movement for offering paper-based assessments as an alternative, to help reduce the pressure to have students “prepare” for these assessments on a device (thus reducing overall time spent on screens).
Regardless of which option the Council and/or DCPS chooses, we are concerned about the allegations described in the complaint and the lack of meaningful parental choice (such as ability to opt-out, and analog alternatives) and consent. We look forward to hearing more from the Council, the DC State Board of Education, and DCPS about this, and would be happy to work together on establishing a process for addressing the broader issue of parental choice and consent for educational technology in our classrooms.
Ultimately, if evidence for the efficacy and legality of i-Ready cannot be provided, DCPS can and should move to reallocate the i-Ready budget to existing assessment alternatives and/or teacher support.
DCPS must evaluate the evidence base for i-Ready and consider its merits and efficacy in District-wide deployment.
i-Ready is currently used as both a screening and intervention tool in DCPS. While there is some research to support its use as a screener, some states (e.g., Michigan) found that i-Ready does not have sufficient classification accuracy to meet their literacy screening standards. Michigan’s standards required screeners to identify students in the 30th-40th percentile, and i-Ready failed to show evidence that it could identify these students. (See Michigan’s analysis here.)
One study found that i-Ready was less accurate in predicting standardized test outcomes than the state’s own standardized test that was administered once per year (Campaña & Solomon, 2025). In other words, i-Ready’s three-times-per-year assessment did not help schools predict how students would perform on the state test, even though it was administered for that very purpose.
i-Ready’s own website largely references studies funded by Curriculum Associates, and those studies primarily include students in second grade and above. The one study reviewed by Evidence for ESSA was with only fifth-grade students, was conducted during the COVID pandemic, and has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. We do not believe that there is sufficient independent research to support the regular use of this platform across all DCPS elementary school students in K-8th. In many cases, we are hearing that elementary students in younger grades are on i-Ready daily.
Screening & Assessment
The DC Dyslexia law requires Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to select a screener for early literacy screenings in grades K-2 that is administered three times per year. DCPS selected DIBELS as its screener. i-Ready is not part of the legally mandated screening process for dyslexia.
Schools are directed to use i-Ready in the upper elementary grades to monitor students’ growth in phonemic awareness, phonics, high-frequency words, vocabulary, literary text, and informational text, the domains that i-Ready purports to measure. One critical issue is that phonemic awareness should be assessed orally, yet i-Ready tests phonemic awareness through multiple-choice questions. In addition, teachers cannot view the questions that students answered incorrectly, nor can they access sufficiently granular data to understand how to support a student who is struggling with reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is not a single skill or even a static product, but is instead an iterative process that is influenced by background knowledge, motivation, interest, and a student’s fluctuating capacity (Catts, 2022).
For teachers to be able to truly provide targeted, differentiated instruction, they need more information than the i-Ready portal provides.
Intervention
DCPS follows i-Ready’s recommendation for students to use the platform for 45 minutes each week for both reading and math. No independent research has found that i-Ready improves reading or math outcomes on distal measures. One commissioned study found a small, positive effect of consistent i-Ready practice on i-Ready’s own test (Swain et al., 2020). In addition to the conflict of interest, there are other limitations of this study: It only included students who performed two or more grade levels below their current grade, and it did not include any other assessment as an outcome measure. Therefore, no conclusions can be drawn about the effects of i-Ready on students who perform slightly below grade level, at grade level, or above grade level in reading. Further, because the study only used i-Ready diagnostics for the baseline measures and outcome measures, it is not possible to determine whether the i-Ready reading intervention improves student performance on anything other than i-Ready.
While it is not surprising that spending more time on i-Ready would make students slightly better at i-Ready specifically, this finding cannot lead to the conclusion that more i-Ready helps students become better readers.
It is not clear to many parents what problem DCPS is trying to solve by recommending or requiring that students spend in-class time, during the school day, on the i-Ready platform. What is clear is that teachers, and parents, are feeling pressure to improve i-Ready scores through more “practice,” which leads to more screen time, both in classrooms and as recommended homework.
Alternatives to i-Ready
If DCPS wants to improve students’ decoding in the upper elementary grades, there are several evidence-based practices and programs (e.g., Word Connections, which is free) that meet this need (see this IES practice guide). If DCPS wants to address students’ reading comprehension deficits, this can be done by explicitly teaching vocabulary and higher-level language skills (e.g., inferencing, comprehension monitoring; Hogan et al., 2011) and by adopting a high-quality, culturally relevant knowledge-building curriculum that includes full books (Cabell et al., 2025; Cabell & Hwang, 2020; Cervetti et al., 2016). If DCPS identifies a need for reading comprehension interventions, there are many available evidence-based interventions that can be provided by teachers or paraprofessionals. This IES practice guide offers many recommendations for reading interventions in grades 4-9. A similar practice guide for math is also available.
Below are a few alternative platforms to consider for screening and assessment, though we note that there are many others. See the list of academic screeners from the National Center for Intensive Intervention.
EasyCBM provides low-cost benchmark and progress-monitoring measures for various reading skills, including word and passage reading fluency and reading comprehension, in both English and Spanish, and for math skills, from number sense through algebra and geometry.
ROAR offers online screening and measurement in various aspects of reading.
CUBED provides teacher-administered benchmark and progress-monitoring measures for decoding and narrative language, including both listening and reading comprehension.
DCPS and the DC Council must assure parents that i-Ready is operating in compliance with the law, particularly as it relates to parental consent.
The Ed Tech Law Center has filed a class action lawsuit against Curriculum Associates, the company that produces i-Ready. The lawsuit alleges a host of claims based on the company's improper collection and use of minor student data through the i-Ready program.
While this litigation is still early in the process and these claims are not yet proven, the complaint raises several important and troubling issues about meaningful parental consent that we believe are important to consider in the District. The complaint argues that:
Consent is not informed because the schools create the i-Ready account, and parents never really get the chance to review the company’s data practices and actually provide meaningful consent.
Consent is not voluntary, because parents have no choice but to use the i-Ready platform if their kids are in a DCPS school.
Consent isn't being provided by the right person. School administrators are effectively providing consent on behalf of parents and students.
The complaint’s first claim is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Act. If the factual and legal allegations are proven, Curriculum Associates will be found in violation of federal law. D.C. should not want to work with a provider that is facing an allegation of violation of federal law in a class action lawsuit.
In terms of the other legal grounds for the case, the plaintiffs allege violations of Massachusetts and California statutes and common law for which there are clear D.C. analogues. For example, one of the claims alleges a violation of the Massachusetts Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act. D.C. has its own Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act, which is analogous to Massachusetts'. Similarly, the complaint alleges common law claims of negligence and unjust enrichment. Those claims both exist under D.C. law as well. Thus, if Curriculum Associates is found in this lawsuit to be violating Massachusetts law, it is extremely likely that it is violating D.C. law, too. If this lawsuit is successful, others will likely follow throughout the country. D.C. should not want to renew a contract with a provider that has been alleged to engage in this sort of unlawful activity.
The lawsuit also affects D.C. because the complaint seeks to represent a nationwide class, which, if approved, will include D.C. residents. The proposed class is “All persons in the United States who attend or attended a K–12 school who used one or more Curriculum Associates Products.” As DCPS requires students to use i-Ready, a Curriculum Associates product, the proposed class includes all DCPS students in grades that use i-Ready. In sum, the allegations are that Curriculum Associates is violating federal law, the rights of D.C. residents, and likely D.C. law as well.
The District is in a budget crisis. Every education technology contract should be carefully scrutinized to determine value for taxpayer dollars. We have heard from parents and teachers that children across the city have varying access to safe, appropriate outdoor and indoor recreational infrastructure and opportunities, depending on their school and zip code. We would rather spend our scarce resources on these basic needs.
We cannot afford to waste taxpayer funds on educational technology platforms that have not been proven to contribute to our shared goal: the best quality education for every DCPS student.
For more information on the various issues with i-Ready, please see recent coverage:
The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury (NBC)
Lawsuit spotlights popular tablet-based learning system and technology in classroom (NBC)
Essential or excessive? Schools grapple with use of i-Ready to support learning (EdSource)
Note: This letter reflects the authors' opinions based on publicly available information.