At Epostasy, a critical investigative series has been looking at the problems with screen time in schools and the companies that are fighting hard to increase it. In this entry for the series, John Allen Wooden looks at the trouble with i-Ready.
Curriculum Associates (CA), the previously low-profile, billion-dollar ed-tech behemoth, is having a no-good, terrible 2026 — and it’s poised to get a whole lot worse. CA’s ubiquitous online learning platform i-Ready®, which is compulsory for 14 million American kids, is facing a remarkable wellspring of loathing from parents, students, and teachers across the country. But Curriculum Associates’ problems run much, much deeper than mere consumer subjectivity; they now face an outright existential threat borne of the inescapable reality that their flagship product is harmful to the health of the same human children it purports to educate.
By now, even mentioning the ever-growing mountain of scientific evidence linking screens with physiological harm to kids seems about as edifying as a reminder that the sun will rise tomorrow. Americans have grown so numb to revelations of childhood maladies caused by screens — from depression to anxiety to profound cognitive deficits — we’d likely just shrug at news they give kids rickets and hammer toe, too.
And yet, any ethical business, upon learning its product had been definitively linked to even one serious health threat, would promptly issue a consumer warning or recall. Curriculum Associates, on the other hand, now reveals its private-equity true colors — prioritizing the protection of its primary revenue stream over the health of children. Throughout the spring of 2026, CA has unfurled a cynical public relations campaign that mixes deceptive word salad and outright lies about its own history to portray i-Ready screen time as non-harmful and “limited.”
Doubtlessly aware of Glow Kids or the slow, steady drumbeat of warnings that followed, Curriculum Associates — as a savvy, liability-averse corporation keen to preserve plausible deniability — has long strenuously avoided any explicit public defenses of i-Ready’s screen-based format. Since the product’s launch in 2012, all educator or parental concerns about screen time were met with politician-worthy pivots to ed-tech blather. CA would stress “high-fidelity implementation” — pointing to outlier studies drawing distinctions between “passive” screen time and “active engagement.” In fact, Archive.org historical searches of curriculumassociates.com establish that the term “screen time” never once appeared on the website until 2026.
Read the full article here.