To Lila Byock, one of two California moms suing Curriculum Associates over its product i-Ready, the advisory was the right move. Thousands of school districts use the program, with its animated alien characters, to give students practice in math and reading.

“Excessive classroom screen use is a public health crisis,” she said, adding that district leaders should “reduce the use of individual devices, reinvest in paper curricula and stop letting Big Ed Tech exploit our kids for profit.”

Districts like and , are already rethinking their use of i-Ready or in response to growing backlash from parents. , led by the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, could be one reason. The complaint argues that the company gained “virtually unfettered access” to children’s personal information, like birth date, gender, race and disability status, and shared it with “myriad third parties.” 

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations. 

“Curriculum Associates takes student data privacy extremely seriously, and the claims in this litigation are without merit,” a spokesperson told The 74. “We do not sell student data, use it for advertising, or create commercial profiles of students. All use of student information is limited to supporting the educational services requested and authorized by schools and districts in compliance with applicable federal and state laws.”

Ed tech vendors rely on long-standing federal that says “schools may act as the parent’s agent,” provided the data they gather is for educational, not commercial, purposes. 

The lawyers taking ed tech companies to court are challenging that guidance. Linnette Attai, a data privacy consultant and founder of Playwell, LLC, said the complaint over i-Ready is based on “a lot of speculation,” but it has still put vendors and education leaders on alert.

“Curriculum Associates is facing significant legal bills, but also a public relations and customer retention issue. The industry is sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But she said the issues the complaints raise are “better suited for legislators and not a courtroom.”

‘Theories of consent’

Congress passed the in 1998, requiring online sites to verify parents’ approval before they collect, use or share information from children under 13. 

Last , the Federal Trade Commission’s FAQ on the law says that schools “can consent under COPPA to the collection of kids’ information on the parent’s behalf.”

But with that put students’ privacy at risk and that digital tools benefit kids, the attorneys representing parents like Byock hope to defeat that interpretation of the law. 

“These theories of consent that companies rely on in order to bypass actual consent from parents are all bogus,” said Andrew Liddell, one half of the husband-and-wife legal team behind the EdTech Law Center. “They have no basis in the law whatsoever.” 

The FTC updated its COPPA regulation in early 2025, but left the school consent issue alone. The agency, however, it was “concerned about the use of and other engagement techniques to keep kids online in ways that could harm their mental health.”

Last summer, the FTC submitted an in support of EdTech Law Center in a separate , an online learning platform used by more than 18 million students. The Liddells sued on behalf of three Kansas families who said the company uses “deceptive design techniques” to keep kids hooked and shares their data with a “host of private companies.” The families have asked for monetary damages.  

The law, the FTC wrote, does not create an “agency relationship between schools and the parents of school children.”

The Liddells say the brief is the most definitive statement yet that parents, not schools, have the final say over what data ed tech vendors can access. But the FTC hasn’t changed its existing guidance, and other student privacy experts say schools can continue to it.

A spokesperson for the FTC told The 74 it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

Meg Leta Jones, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University, said there is tension in Washington over this issue. On one hand, the administration is “trying to be pro-AI,” she said. First lady Melania Trump entered a White House education summit in April alongside a saying, “The future of A.I. is ‘personified,’ ” 

At the same time, Republicans support parental rights, and a few months earlier, a Senate committee held to examine the harms of ed tech.

“It’s hard to move when both of those things are happening,” Jones said. The lawsuits are important, she said, because they take the issue out of federal officials’ hands. “Clarity around this consent issue is what will come in the long game.”

Outside the courts, the litigation has inspired more parents to push for restrictions on i-Ready and other ed tech platforms. Parents in New York City’s District 4, on Manhattan’s East Side, noted the i-Ready lawsuit in a calling for screen time limits. 

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a mom of two who chairs the Community Education Council for District 4, has already opted her kids out of i-Ready and NWEA’s MAP tests. But she said she remains “a thousand percent” concerned about her 14-year-old’s use of programs like Google Classroom, IXL and JumpRope, a grading platform.

The resolution cited a recent finding 141 data breaches or “unauthorized data releases” between 2023 and 2025. The district, the New York comptroller’s office said, doesn’t have an “accurate inventory” of all of the software programs schools use or the privacy risks involved. 

“It’s like ed tech on steroids,” said Salas-Ramirez, also a neuroscientist who trains future doctors. “We don’t have the data to validate that these quote unquote tools, instruments or assessments provide us anything worthwhile.” 

‘Administrative nightmare’

Ed tech experts say schools wouldn’t be able to function if vendors had to get consent directly from parents for all the online products students use in the classroom. 

It’s an “administrative nightmare” said Mark Williams, a California attorney who specializes in ed tech contracts and student privacy. “Throw that out the window; it doesn’t work.”

Vendors share data with third parties. That part isn’t in dispute. The question is if it’s being shared, as the FTC says, “for the use and benefit of the school” or falling into the hands of companies that use it for marketing or targeted ads based on students’ characteristics.  

A last year offered another look into what happens when kids click answers or type personal information into a program. The state board turned to , a nonprofit that tests software products, to investigate 100 apps commonly used in the state’s schools. 

The review found that over a third shared student information with advertisers. shared data with six advertisers. Others shared data with dozens of advertisers as well as with sites like Google and Microsoft.

The report stressed that the “presence of sharing alone does not necessarily constitute a contract violation.” Some sharing is necessary for an app to function properly, the authors wrote.

It’s “common sense” for a vendor to share data they collect to fix bugs or security flaws, said Steve Smith, executive director of , a global network of vendors and schools. But legally, it’s “a little bit of a stretch” for a company to create a new program with that information.

Vendors go too far when they share “incredibly sensitive student data” from a school monitoring app to develop a new product, said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. Many schools use such programs to monitor for online threats or risks of self harm.

“The companies have everything the kid has done online, everything that they’ve written in the Google Drive,” she said. “You can think about that extremely personal information then being used to create a personalized learning platform that they sell back to schools.”

‘Pretty opaque’

Inspired by Utah’s work, Access4Learning is developing a tool that districts can use to track what vendors do with student information. Leaders expect to launch it later this year. 

But that might not satisfy the concerns of some parents leading the charge against ed tech. They often point out that such organizations or have received funding from some of the very companies the screen-free lobby opposes. The growing mistrust surfaced at last December that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held to discuss kids’ “excessive screen time.” 

“Ed tech is so devious that it’s created dozens of nonprofits cloaked as online safety organizations,” Lisa Cline, a Maryland parent who has advocated against screens in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said at the event. “Some of them are here today. Look closely. These guys are bankrolled by big tech and frankly, they mock the work that unpaid people like myself do to educate parents.” 

While the lawsuits between parents and vendors could drag on for a while, districts should at least be transparent about the products they’re using, said Williams, the California attorney. 

Parents are allowing districts “to collect and give to a third party data that they would not otherwise be entitled to,” he said. In return, educators should explain what data they take and what they do with it. “Unfortunately, that process can be pretty opaque.”

In eighth grade reading, the percentage of students on grade level or above in those schools grew at three percentage points over last year — from 36% to 39%. In math, the percentage of fourth graders on track in majority-Black schools grew from 36% to almost 40%, the latest i-Ready assessments from Curriculum Associates found.

Those are “bright spots” in a snapshot that otherwise shows recovery has remained stagnant five years following the pandemic, said Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates. 

Black students “had a bigger dip, especially in the early grades, so they have more room to catch up,” she said. But generally, performance has plateaued and there’s still a long way to go to reach 2018-19 levels. “I think we have to hold ourselves accountable to at least that bar, but that’s not the end goal.” 

The 2024-25 data, shared exclusively with The 74, represents almost 12 million K-8 students in reading and more than 13 million in math who took the i-Ready tests during the last school year. Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the i-Ready adjusts questions to students’ level. The prompts are more advanced if kids are working above the benchmark and easier if they’re below, offering teachers a view, Huff said, of how much progress students need to make to catch up. Nearly half of fifth graders, for example, are on grade level in reading, while 29% are two grade levels or more below, the results show. The picture is similar in math, with 53% on target and 20% far behind.

While students are learning, they’re not mastering as much material as their peers did before COVID. Learning loss is more pronounced in the younger grades, confirming that even those students who were too young to attend school were affected by the disruption. Multiple studies have shown that economic hardship and fewer opportunities to socialize left less prepared for school. In reading, 60% of first graders — those who were toddlers during the early years of the pandemic — are on grade level. That’s down from 68% in 2018-19.

‘Slight improvement’

Majority-Black schools, however, were well behind majority-white schools before COVID — by roughly 20 percentage points. Their scores also saw a steeper drop off after the pandemic. 

About a year after the pandemic, McKinsey &Company, a consulting firm, used i-Ready data that students in majority-Black schools were a full year behind those in predominantly white schools, an increase of three months over the prior achievement gap.

“Black students were often at the lowest achievement levels in many districts,” said Kareem Weaver, co-founder of Fulcrum, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that provides literacy expertise to school districts. “It makes you wonder what was happening before for students to be at a level where even slight improvement is considered noteworthy.”

If students don’t acquire strong reading skills and basic math facts in elementary school, they won’t be able to keep up with more challenging assignments, said Ameenah Poole, who worked as a high school administrator in East Orange, New Jersey, until 2022. Her former colleagues, she said, often wondered why students came to them as struggling readers and lacking proficiency in math. 

“These foundational skills are paramount,” said Poole, now principal of Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary in the district. 

In a school already not meeting expectations under the state’s accountability system, the pandemic just put kids further behind. Many parents in the 84% Black school have jobs in the service industry. Some are nurses, one drives an Amazon truck, Poole said, and most parents didn’t work from home when schools went remote.

A lot of students didn’t even log in to class, and rebuilding attendance routines has been slow and sometimes futile, she said.

“The culture during the pandemic and post-pandemic [was] that school was an option,” she said. “We say, ‘If you miss a day, you miss a lot.’ Students have to be here in order for us to teach them.”

On New Jersey’s state test, 19% of third graders met the standards in reading in 2022. That’s the same year the district began using i-Ready. Students work on skills like phonics and vocabulary or measurement and geometry in 40-minute blocks every week. 

At first, the extra instruction didn’t translate into higher scores. In fourth grade, the percentage of students reaching the proficient level actually fell to 11%. But when those same students were fifth graders in 2024, Poole began to see the payoff. Thirty-five percent met or exceeded the goal. 

That still means the majority of students are working below grade level, which the i-Ready data also shows. 

Student learning is “moving in the right direction,” said Huff with Curriculum Associates, “but it’s not accelerating fast enough.”

The way the i-Ready results are reported, however, could be hiding some improvement, suggested Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. 

Identifying the total percentage above and below the threshold doesn’t capture those students who may have moved up a level or two over time. Districts are “far from full recovery,” he wrote in an from 28 states. But he concluded that $190 billion in COVID relief, the largest-ever one-time infusion of federal funds for schools, contributed to a significant increase in math performance during the 2022-23 school year. 

Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham City schools in Alabama, saw evidence of that in his district.

“I told the teachers, ‘You [will] have to teach like you’ve never taught before,’ meaning that we had to make up multiple grades within a year because of unfinished learning,” he said. 

A 2024 Curriculum Associates showed that Birmingham, where 89% of students are Black and 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University the district for the same reason.

Leaders rearranged the calendar so that at the end of every nine-week session, students had a week off. But teachers provided optional instruction during that open week. About 7,000 students participated “when they didn’t have to come to school,” Sullivan said. “We’re seeing the fruits of that.”

There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word. 

The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts. 

The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia. 

The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8^th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8^thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points. 

To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track. 

The table below shows the state-level results in 8^th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards. 

You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the , 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests. 

Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8^th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. 

To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success. 

A philanthropic initiative launched in 2022 to get students back on track from COVID learning loss is returning promising results, a new study suggests: just four weeks spent in the program last year helped students regain nearly one-fourth of their reading skills and one-third of math skills, compared to students who didn’t participate in the program.

The initiative, underwritten by and other funders, serves charter school students about to enter grades 1 through 9.  

Researchers at Arizona State University examined over 35,000 Summer Boost students in eight cities, finding that in just 22 days of programming, on average, students saw about three to four weeks of reading progress and about four to five weeks in math. In reading, that works out to making up about 22% of COVID learning losses; in math, it’s about 31%.

While students across all demographic groups got a boost, English Language Learners saw the strongest growth, achieving about seven to eight weeks worth of learning in just over four weeks. Researchers said students moving into grades 4-8 saw particularly accelerated growth.  

Students took part in the study in Baltimore, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, New York City, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. 

Schools participating in Summer Boost are free to use either a provided curriculum or a high-quality one of their choice, but researchers found that about a third of schools used a “balanced kind of curricular approach” that reserved time for both academics and engaging enrichment activities, said ASU’s Geoffrey Borman, who led the research.

Schools that struck that balance, he said, had “the most positive impacts for kids.” 

In summer school more broadly, Borman noted, the biggest challenges are getting kids to show up and stay engaged across the summer — and attracting high-quality teachers at a time when “both teachers and kids would probably rather be on summer break.”

To that end, schools in the program are encouraged to use as much of their budget as possible to pay teachers, said Sunny Larson, K-12 Education Program Lead at Bloomberg. The incentive, she added, “really got those veteran educators back into the classroom.”

Many prioritized hiring teachers who had already worked with these students during the school year. That allowed a continuity “that I also think was beneficial,” said Borman. 

Previous research suggests that pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most students, with many needing the equivalent of about four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Ninth-graders need a full year of extra school to catch up, according to 2023 findings from the assessment provider NWEA.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the findings were promising, but that he’d like to know whether the effects persist throughout the school year.

“While I think many have the perception that summer school is rarely effective, these results show that well designed summer programs can indeed be a helpful tool to help catch children up or accelerate their growth,” he said. The results suggest the impact of Summer Boost is “very promising — on par with regular school-year learning rates.”

‘Effective guardrails’ in place

The program includes at least 90 minutes each of English Language Arts and math instruction daily with a 25:1 student-teacher ratio. Summer programs must maintain an average daily attendance rate of 70% to get full funding — “effective guardrails” that ensure high quality, Borman said.

While they have flexibility in how they recruit, they’re encouraged to seek out students who can most benefit. 

Summer Boost originated in 2022, when Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, likened stalled academic progress from the pandemic to “the educational equivalent of long COVID.”

“Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally,” said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser to the research. “With so many students far behind, I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options.”

Kane noted that to expand the school year beyond 180 days incentivizes districts “to replace what students lost during the pandemic, which was instructional time.” 

Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, whose helped gauge the program’s effectiveness, said she was glad to see its positive impact. 

“There is real urgency to use summer programs to provide specific, personalized support for struggling students so that they can return to school ready for grade-level work,” she said. “Assessing students relative to grade level standards is the most accurate way to understand where they are and what support they need.”

Huff noted that Curriculum Associates will soon release research showing student academic growth “still has a way to go” to recover to pre-pandemic levels, especially for the youngest students. “The Summer Boost program results underscore this, and show that when given the right supports, students can accelerate their learning.”

In the new ASU study, researchers noted a few caveats. For instance, they admitted that the findings are based on only one year of data and can’t provide evidence of impact over time. It’s possible, they said, that the findings may change as more years of data are added and the sample size increases. 

They also noted that many student records in the sample were incomplete, missing either math or reading pre- or post-test scores.   

Also missing: key student demographic data, meaning that researchers couldn’t analyze all of the students’ scores in relation to indicators such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. And the data don’t include how students ended up in the program, limiting researchers’ ability to compare it to other types of summer learning programs that may have different enrollment requirements. 

But Borman noted that research on such large groups rarely yields such strong results, “And the fact that these outcomes are seen pretty consistently across thousands of kids and multiple cities, I think that lends even more power to these results.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Michael Bloomberg’s party affiliation when he ran for president in 2020.

But the results from Curriculum Associates, which publishes the I-Ready assessments, also reveal how much work remains to be done: Fewer children in the early grades are developing essential phonics skills, they found. In fact, even more were below grade level in the spring of 2022 than there were a year ago — in third grade, 27%, compared to 24%.

The results in math reflect a similar trend. Performance for some students is not only below what it was in the years before schools shut down; it’s worse after a year of mostly in-person learning. In grades five through eight, for example, fewer students than ever are developing essential math skills like understanding place value, multiplication and fractions. 

“That first year back, they didn’t recover all the way,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates. 

Last year, teachers had more students below grade level than ever, Huff said, and the “whole classroom dynamic changed.” Foundational math and reading skills “are the two bridges where we’re seeing those gaps endure.” 

The findings follow the recent release of long-term achievement data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which revealed sharp declines in reading and math for the nation’s 9-year-olds. I-Ready, with results in first through eighth grade, serves a different purpose than the so-called “nation’s report card.” But the takeaways are similar: The pace of recovery is slow, and those who were struggling before the pandemic have the steepest hill to climb, particularly Black and low-income students.

Among I-Ready’s more encouraging signs, however, is that schools serving a majority of Black and Latino students saw the greatest gains in fourth grade in both reading and math. From a sample of almost 5,000 schools, over 300 exceeded expectations, despite serving students at least two years behind. Experts say the results show the need for well-targeted academic support.

“We don’t necessarily say everyone needs acceleration in all subjects for the next five years, but some kids will,” said Libby Pier, chief of staff at Education Analytics, a Madison, Wisconsin, nonprofit that monitors state data. “There are certain skills, certain students and certain schools where things are looking less or more dire.”

‘Wanted the data to tell us’ 

In the testing field, I-Ready is known as a diagnostic assessment — used to identify what students know and where skill gaps remain. After states canceled annual tests in 2020, schools relied more on I-Ready and similar assessments to better understand the pandemic’s impact. 

“They have continued to play an important role in providing more timely information to schools about recovery efforts,” Pier said. 

At Blakesburg Elementary School, among those s where students scored better than expected, Principal Tammy Davis began using I-Ready to monitor students’ reading comprehension skills and supplement a state test that focuses on fluency.

The school is located in a farming community in southeast Iowa. About 30% of students are low-income, and even though the school distributed Wi-Fi hotspots, many students lacked reliable internet during remote learning. After seeing “huge dips” in reading and math when schools reopened in the fall of 2020, teachers examined every student’s score on each category of the assessment. 

“I had a feeling where we were the lowest, but I wanted the data to tell us,” Davis said.

To build comprehension skills, teachers never stopped devoting time in the school day to social studies and science — even though many districts prioritized math and reading, said April Glosser, curriculum director in the Eddysville-Blakesburg-Fremont Community School District.

“If you’re reading something that you have nothing to connect to, it’s never going to make sense to you,” she said, pointing to a passage on the sport cricket. 

Teachers, she added, began to do more “think alouds” explaining  to students what to do if they ran into words or phrases they didn’t recognize or understand. The school’s sixth graders, who have always struggled, Davis said, saw significant growth, from 35% proficient in spring 2021 to  56% proficient last school year. Schoolwide, 74% were proficient, getting closer to the goal of 80%.

Emerging state results

Students at Blakesburg spent most of the 2020-21 school year in person, but that wasn’t the case in many other districts. Asstates begin to release test results from last school year, researchers plan to further examine links between remote learning and student achievement.

Also Tuesday, Brown University economist Emily Oster released of state test data confirming that learning loss was greater in districts that had more remote and hybrid instruction.

In Virginia, for example, just 5% of students attended districts with “high levels of in-person instruction” during the 2020-21 school year. In 2021, the percentage of students reaching proficiency in math and English language arts was 20.5 percentage points lower than in 2019. This year, it was still 12 percentage points lower.

In Louisiana, almost two-thirds of students learned mostly in person in 2020-21. Proficiency levels in 2021 and 2022 were 5.5 and 4.1 percentage points below 2019, respectively.

“Districts that had more remote learning during the pandemic have a much longer way to go,” Oster said in a statement.