Originally published in the Moultrie News.
My daughter is getting one digital learning program after another, even though she’s in a brick-and-mortar school. The requirements are exhausting, but it hasn’t helped her learning. Now I’m hearing one of the programs is being sued. Are these programs hurting kids?
The pandemic should have ended the fascination with online learning for children.
For years, tech supporters hawked their tools as the answer to failing schools and growing achievement gaps.
Then came 2020, and kids stayed home with only a Chromebook. It was a forced acceleration of an experiment that failed. Online learning bombed. Teachers witnessed the digital dream disintegrate in real time. Many districts are still trying to climb out of the ruins.
Whether due to ignorance, greed, hubris, or a toxic cocktail of all three, online learning is back. Learning platforms are again being pushed as the answer to problems districts clearly cannot solve.
To your point, the results have been so disastrous that lawsuits are emerging. The most recent target is i-Ready, an online program used by 14 million students that purports to provide personalized reading and math instruction.
Opposition to i-Ready from students, parents, and teachers is substantial. Their primary objection: its repetitive, stultifying process makes kids hate learning.
Here’s how parent Ryan Moulton described it: “When a [math] problem starts, the computer slowly reads aloud the text written on the screen. An animation slowly demonstrates the concept. The student is not allowed to do anything at all until it finishes. It repeats this for every single problem, even when the problem is identical to the previous problem. For every minute the student spends actually thinking about math, i-Ready spends 10 minutes narrating the same instructions over and over again.”
The lawsuit from the Center for Educational Progress centers on three allegations: 1) i-Ready falsely claims to serve as a “diagnostic assessment” of student deficiencies when it’s actually just a crude screener of broad skills. 2) It falsely claims to provide “personalized instruction” when it merely sorts students into generic lesson sequences. 3) It falsely claims to cause impressive student growth in reading and math.
i-Ready isn’t alone. Other learning apps under fire include IXL, a sort of online workbook that gives students targeted practice questions in various subjects. Complaints include that it’s repetitive, it requires excessive screen use, and it takes valuable time away from live instruction. It’s also said to incite high frustration from students who can’t reason with it, resulting in many gaming its system by simply looking up answers. Used globally by over 18 million students, IXL has faced class-action litigation alleging improper collection and monetization of student data.
Edgenuity is often issued as a means of “credit recovery” for adolescents who did little work in regular classes. Used by over 4 million students, it’s been targeted and even picketed by parents and students who criticize its substandard instruction. Teachers report that students can quickly pass its requirements through assorted workarounds. In one lawsuit, a teacher claimed that a student using Edgenuity completed more than 50% of an entire yearlong course in just two days.
Many such popular platforms—including NoRedInk, Aleks, and Achieve3000—are described as “repetitive” and “formulaic” because they simply digitize the “drill and kill” approach fashionable in ’90s era worksheet-driven curricula. That strategy was so widely assailed that many principals banned it. Strangely, when embedded into an online program, it’s now a revolutionary learning method.
And teachers are slowly coming on board—not because the apps are effective, but because they’re being systematically conditioned to believe that they’re individually incapable of providing the same level of instruction. They’ve bought the lie that traditional teaching—with a qualified educator serving as a direct instructor—has failed students, and screens have arrived to clean up the wreckage.
It isn’t true.
Yet despite tech’s failure to substantiate its delusional claims, education keeps shoving students in front of screens while the real answer—empowered teachers—wait in the wings as impotent “guides on the side.”
Through legal, legislative, and grassroots efforts, the tables are turning. Now many parents are demanding to opt out of the tech takeover, and more districts are agreeing.
It shouldn’t take lawsuits, however, to see what should have been evident six years ago.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.
I think school systems have spent so much money on technology, and they don’t want to admit it’s all been wasted. Not only the money, but the time and energy went down the drain. In my opinion, the whole technology push has been a mistake.