Editor’s note: The following piece is written by Kelly Sia, chief executive officer of Curriculum Associates, the company behind i-Ready, a widely used online assessment and instructional program for reading and math. In recent months, i-Ready has faced a wave of criticism concerning screen time, implementation, and the strength of the evidence supporting its effectiveness. We invited Curriculum Associates to respond to those concerns and to explain how it believes schools should use and evaluate the program.
In recent months, i-Ready has become a focal point in the broader backlash against classroom technology, with parents, teachers, and researchers raising concerns about excessive or mandated screen time, the role of technology alongside teacher-led instruction, and whether the program’s academic benefits are supported by sufficiently rigorous and independent evidence. Those concerns raise important questions that the education-reform community should be asking about all edtech: What does responsible adoption look like? What usage thresholds should districts monitor? What drives meaningful growth and learning? And what does good evidence actually require?
Recently I heard from a teacher troubled by all of this. She wanted to push back and share the historic progress she’d seen in her own district using our program. She told me: “You can’t fight darkness with a stick; you have to shine a light.” She wanted to correct the record.
So do I. We welcome honest scrutiny of our research, our data practices, and the student experience. But scrutiny that starts from incomplete data doesn’t serve educators, and it doesn’t serve kids.
What is i-Ready, really?
i-Ready is a three-part system: an adaptive assessment, personalized digital instruction, and teacher resources that include printable mini-lessons for small-group or whole-class instruction, all driven by students’ individual assessment results.
We built the program to help educators do what they do best: teach. Walk into a fourth-grade math class working on comparing fractions with unlike denominators. Some students don’t yet know that ¼ is less than ½, a third-grade skill. Others can’t compare fractions with like denominators, a skill covered earlier in fourth grade. And a few are already converting fractions into decimals, a fifth-grade concept. One teacher. One lesson. Multiple starting points.
i-Ready identifies exactly where each student’s foundational understanding breaks down, then works to fill those gaps before the teacher-led lesson begins. When they arrive at a whole-class discussion equipped with prerequisite knowledge, the lesson has a real chance to land. The teacher isn’t spending half the period recovering lost ground, and students who would have sat in quiet confusion can actually participate.
This approach works. An independent, peer-reviewed study from Georgia State University, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and covering nearly 28,000 students, found that students using i‑Ready scored statistically significantly higher on MAP assessments. The greatest gains were among students traditionally at risk. For example, students who were “Black, male, free and reduced-price meals–eligible, or with intellectual disabilities experience(d)…up to 14 weeks of instructional growth,” leading the authors to note i-Ready’s particular ability to “assist populations of greater need and of fewer resources.” The study also found that outcomes improved further when teachers assigned lessons in addition to computer-assigned ones, confirming that “teacher input is critical to the effectiveness” of the platform and that i-Ready works best as a “supplement to (versus replacement) for—traditional face-to-face instruction”.
Our own state-specific research across grades, subjects, and student groups corroborates that students who use i-Ready Personalized Instruction as recommended consistently score higher on summative assessments than peers who don’t. Additional ESSA Tier 2–3-aligned studies support these findings. And I’ve met with many district leaders across the US who are excited to share their results, including at Cincinnati Public Schools, where between 2022 and 2025, math proficiency climbed across all tested Grades 3–8, with CPS achieving the highest percentage and largest increase in student proficiency among the eight large urban districts in Ohio.
That’s i-Ready’s role. Not to replace what teachers do, but to extend their reach to every student.
How much time should students actually spend in i-Ready?
When you see coverage describing students spending an hour in the program every day, that’s likely conflating two distinct products: i-Ready Personalized Instruction, a supplemental tool, and i-Ready Classroom Mathematics, our comprehensive (print-based) core curriculum where students spend 50–90 minutes a day with books, teacher-led lessons, and traditional materials.
For i-Ready Personalized Instruction, our recommendation is 30–49 minutes per week, per subject, which equates to roughly 6–10 minutes of active use per school day. For Grades K–2 specifically, where debate about screen time in schools is most concentrated, the data show the typical student spends about 33 minutes per week in their interactive reading or math lessons.
Underuse and overuse are real, and we work with districts to address both. Underuse is often a training and awareness issue as staff find their footing with a new tool. Overuse is rarer than the coverage suggests: Across grades and subjects, on average only about 3 percent of Grades K–2 students use i-Ready Personalized Instruction well beyond our guidelines. Even for these outliers, “well beyond our guidelines” translates to about 16 minutes/day, still a small fraction of total instructional time.
While more time in i-Ready continues to show a positive relationship with learning gains, more isn’t always better. Our guidelines exist to protect something no program can replace: the time students spend collaborating with their teachers and peers. The back-and-forth of a well-led lesson doesn’t just build academic skills, it supports the development of the whole child. That’s paramount.
We recognize that ideal conditions aren’t always possible. A substitute, a snow day, these are moments when students may end up spending more time in the platform than we recommend. It still drives learning, but it’s the exception, not the design. Students using i-Ready at truly extreme levels—the scenarios generating those alarming headlines—are quite rare and counter to explicit directives from school and district leaders and from us.
