The "Extraordinary Educators" Scam Turning Young Teachers Into Ed-Tech Shills
An i-Ready i-Reckoning, Part 2: How i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates exploits teachers for publicity and profit.
Part 2
When Jonathan Kryk, a 24 year-old Florida middle school teacher, received an email in 2023 announcing he was being honored as an “Extraordinary Educator,” he was surprised and flattered. A colleague had nominated him for the impressive-sounding accolade without his knowledge, and he was thrilled at the prospect of national recognition for his hard work in the classroom. “As a trailblazing young teacher, that feels special,” he recalls.
But as it turns out, “Extraordinary Educators” isn’t an award at all; it’s a glorified corporate loyalty program cloaked in a cap and gown — produced by Massachusetts ed-tech giant Curriculum Associates (CA), publisher of the controversial i-Ready e-learning platform. i-Ready is currently mandatory for 14 million K-8 students nationwide, despite having no credible evidence it helps children learn. While “Extraordinary Educators” may sound like a meaningful Teacher of the Year type honor, bestowed by actual educators to reward pedagogical excellence and classroom achievement, its sole purpose is actually to promote “best-in-class use of i-Ready®.” Translation: maximum student screen time! (And in a nakedly ageist twist, only so-called “rising” educators are eligible to apply.)
Within days of receiving notice of his selection, Kryk — then a self-described “staunch advocate for i-Ready” — found himself swept up in a masterfully choreographed promotional campaign. Curriculum Associates immediately scheduled a flashy public event to present Kryk with the award, coordinating attendance by his district’s superintendent and school board members. A CA-authored press release targeted Florida local media, resulting in a feel-good Suncoast News profile of the energetic young teacher. A large custom-printed vinyl banner reading “Home of An Extraordinary Educator” was sent to Kryk’s school, along with custom branded creative assets emblazoned with his face for the school to share via its newsletter and a flurry of social media posts.
“Extraordinary Educators” isn’t an award at all; it’s a glorified corporate loyalty program cloaked in a cap and gown.
Soon after, Kryk and his 29 fellow members of the Extraordinary Educators “Class of 2023” were flown to Boston by Curriculum Associates for an all-expenses paid edu-junket billed as a “Leadership Summit.” Put up for three nights at a downtown luxury hotel, the cohort was treated to a boat tour of the city and wined and dined atop Prudential Tower, replete with open bar and dancing i-Ready furry mascots. Two days of networking and professional development sessions explored topics including diversity, equity, and (you guessed it) i-Ready. Curriculum Associates product leads also swooped in to solicit feedback on new i-Ready software features still in development, drafting the captive teachers as an unpaid focus group.
While Kryk still describes the experience as “beneficial to my career in allowing me to network,” and his corporate hosts as “very gracious,” by the spring of 2025, he began having second thoughts while working with his 7th graders. “I felt inadequate as a teacher just placing a student on a computer to mindlessly follow a program,” he recalled, adding “I wish I knew about the multiple studies demonstrating how programs like i-Ready have minimal effects on learning gains in comparison to other, non-computerized pedagogical strategies.”
Kryk now sees the Extraordinary Educators award for what it is: a marketing funnel disguised as an honor, preying on under-appreciated teachers’ hunger for praise and validation. “In retrospect, Extraordinary Educators is a program to use teachers as pawns to sell a product,” he said.
Kryk is hardly alone in wrestling with his “Extraordinary Educator” past. “Ms. E,” a young elementary school teacher from a Southern state who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, applied to the program in 2024. She still feels the accolade might come in handy on her resume. “Not many people from my state get national recognition, so I thought it was neat,” she said. “If I move out of my current state, I hope it will give me an edge when applying for a new position.”
“In retrospect, Extraordinary Educators is a program to use teachers as pawns to sell a product.” - Jonathan Kryk
Even so, Ms. E now has serious concerns about Curriculum Associates’ flagship product. “I worry that schools around the country rely too much on programs like i-Ready,” she confided via email. “I don’t think it is appropriate for very young children. It has made children at my school cry because they did not want to do badly on the test. When kids are panicking over testing in elementary school, there’s a problem here.”
Fake Awards as Content Farm
In the world of ed-tech marketing, data-based supporting research is essential to cite, but few school district decision-makers actually bother to read those dense studies. That’s where more accessible promotional content enters the picture—flattering, human-centric, seemingly organic anecdotes that sing an e-learning product’s praises and make procurement officials think “everyone’s using it.” Ensuring the Internet is awash in plenty of that type of false affirmation is a CA Olympic sport.
i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates has been ferocious in policing its brand online. In 2019, a middle school boy named Connor vlogged (hilariously!) that CA had filed a copyright takedown on his YouTube channel for posting a video mocking the platform. One year earlier, when Virginia math teacher Kassia Wedekind’s blog post “Why i-Ready is Dangerous” sparked early critical dialogue over the program being “dehumanizing,” Curriculum Associates deviously counter-programmed with its own search-optimized blog post “Is i-Ready Dangerous?” Elsewhere, on an unofficial i-Ready subreddit that’s still locked to new posts after Curriculum Associates served Cease & Desist threats on its moderators, archived posts chronicle CA’s successful efforts to shut down multiple i-Ready parody websites on copyright grounds.
More recently however, Curriculum Associates seems to have rethought (for now, anyway) its thin-skinned, draconian litigiousness — instead refocusing its 100+ in-house editorial staff to flood the web with sunny i-Ready propaganda, much of it laundered through the “Extraordinary Educator” program’s credentialed teachers and principals.
Flattery (and Chateaubriand) Will Get You i-Everywhere
Official photos of Extraordinary Educators junkets reveal an almost cult-like indoctrination: honoree educators are welcomed in Boston as celebrity heroes, marched down a red carpet flanked by cheering CA employees and flashbulbs. Teachers are fawned over for maximizing i-Ready classroom screen time, and plied with catered gourmet food and alcohol in swanky conference spaces beneath large screens displaying their local news star turns. It’s a heady mind game, engineered to stroke egos and mint long-term product evangelists.
More importantly, once buttered up, all “Extraordinary Educators” are methodically ushered into professionally lit sets for on-camera interviews about their in-class use of i-Ready. Those interviews are then sliced and diced into marketing collateral—social media videos and podcasts — in which real educators parrot vendor talking points to manufacture the appearance of grassroots i-Ready validation.
“Extraordinary Educators” are also invited to author uncompensated “success stories” for Curriculum Associates’ website. These often follow a classic religious conversion narrative arc: the educator describes a state of lostness driven by student underperformance, followed by the near-mystical “revelation” provided by the i-Ready black box Diagnostic. One author notes, “I thought I knew my students, but the data showed me what I was missing.”
A typical contribution comes from young Illinois principal Sean Rabiola, a 2025 Extraordinary Educator. Four months after attending the Boston i-Ready junket, he wrote an article declaring his personal pedagogical mission to be “Implementing Stretch Growth®” — Curriculum Associates’ trademarked metric which conveniently interprets all i-Ready testing outcomes, whether passing or failing, as rationale for students to increase i-Ready screen time.
Declaring Stretch Growth “a game-changing approach… that motivates students,” Rabiola’s testimonial is linguistically indistinguishable from an i-Ready brochure. His bio at the end completes the loop: CA identifies Rabiola as a member of the “Extraordinary Educator™ Leadership Collaborative.” By including the trademark in his professional title, the principal is subsumed by the brand; he is a vetted representative of the i-Ready ecosystem, providing what the company calls “Noteworthy Voices” to validate their “Essential Solutions.”
Rabiola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Extraordinary Schools, Too!
Curriculum Associates duplicates the Extraordinary Educators model of meticulously packaged false achievement at the institutional level with i-Ready Super Stretch Schools, another “honor” bestowed upon hundreds of local schools annually. Of course, it too isn’t an award so much as a client relations and marketing/publicity loop — or as “Extraordinary Educator” apostate Jonathan Kryk now describes it, “just another ploy to make schools and districts feel special.”
But when Curriculum Associates delivers gilded award plaques, shiny vinyl banners, and creepy dancing i-Ready furries to reward client schools for tethering children to its platform, affirmation-starved administrators rush to crow about their so-called “honor” on LinkedIn, social media, and local news.
And with each grade school social media post and local news story, Curriculum Associates’ meaningless vendor metrics quietly acquire the patina of public legitimacy. It’s brand laundering by applause: an ed-tech corporation’s internal, black box benchmarks recycled through school leaders’ megaphones until vacuous i-Ready marketing starts to sound like actual merit.
Jonathan Kryk now sees that as offensive. “Stretch Growth is a mere concept Curriculum Associates just made up,” he says. “To celebrate schools based on a self-created metric that isn’t recognized as a legitimate measurement of student success is wrong.”
And with each grade school social media post and local news story, Curriculum Associates’ meaningless vendor metrics quietly acquire the patina of public legitimacy.
Playing an Ageist Long Game
In interviewing educators from across America for Part 1 of this series, one recurring theme was that veteran teachers, with decades of classroom experience predating the rise of ed-tech, were significantly more likely to oppose i-Ready. After all, they remember the before times, when they decided the lesson content, and students interacted with human classmates and teachers instead of silently consuming infantilizing gamified cartoons. More vitally, older teachers remember achieving far better outcomes using books and paper than they do now using the boring, buggy i-Ready app that kids despise.
For Curriculum Associates, that puts older educators in the crosshairs of a war of attrition — in which they appear to have an active battle plan. In fact, the Extraordinary Educators Program explicitly restricts honoree eligibility to “rising” principals in their roles under 36 months, and teachers scarcely out of their probationary years. In other words, educators young enough to be impressionable and old enough to be useful — ideally for the next twenty years of procurement cycles. The result is a carefully curated cast that’s conspicuously youthful, ensuring CA’s educator videos have a glossy, future-forward sheen, mercifully free of gray hair or fuddy-duddy traditionalism.
It’s brand laundering by applause: an ed-tech corporation’s internal, black box benchmarks recycled through school leaders’ megaphones until vacuous i-Ready marketing starts to sound like actual merit.
Converting Tomorrow’s Teachers Today
And if fake awards hook today’s teachers, higher ed partnerships hook tomorrow’s. Because despite all the ed-tech industry’s rapacious inroads, sometimes young teachers still get corrupted by analog pedagogy. Even “Extraordinary Educator” Jonathan Kryk now describes i-Ready’s cornerstone “supplemental instruction’ as really “just another way to throw a kid on a computer.”
And so Curriculum Associates is also proactively indoctrinating college undergraduate education students to i-Ready — evidently hoping to expedite a vocation-wide dissipation of futile resistance to ed-tech.
In North Carolina, Curriculum Associates has partnered with the Lees-McRae College Elementary Education department to groom young teachers-in-training to use i-Ready straight out of the career gate. The result is to normalize screen-based, AI-driven instruction before new teachers can receive meaningful exposure to analog classroom practice.
A 2025 Lees-McRae announcement leads with a photo of a smiling Curriculum Associates sales rep alongside Dean of Education Dr. Teresa Santis and Director of Teacher Education Kim Simmons. The trio is co-presenting a conference session titled “Going Beyond Pedagogy: Things Educator Programs Don’t Teach.” It goes on to confirm that Lees-McRae College faculty “have begun to build Curriculum Associates’ resources into their own curricula,” with education majors now using i-Ready “as a jumping-off point for building lessons, analyzing test results, and creating tutoring materials.”
Luke Morin, a longtime Colorado English teacher who writes The Middle School Literacy Project, worries this will impact new teachers adversely. “They’re not writing their own lesson plans. That takes opportunities away from teachers to develop their vocational skill set — eliminating the friction and rigor from their jobs,” he said. “It’s not developing the kind of highly-skilled teachers that create transformative outcomes for kids. And that frightens me.”
The Awards Industrial Complex
Of course, the overwhelming majority of “awards” issued in America today are utterly meaningless. They are mostly for-profit trade group hustles: glorified cub scout merit badges for adults, established not out of magnanimity, but to create a halo effect on the brand issuing them. (Full disclosure: I myself have various entertainment and media trade awards that I hypocritically tout when professionally convenient.)
And Curriculum Associates itself isn’t immune to the siren call of worthless accolades. Their website lists a seemingly impressive roster of 22 awards, including nine said to “honor our world-class learning programs.” Mind you, two are mere finalist nods from something called the CODIE Awards, a software trade association program that charges ~$1,500 per submission and annually distributes awards across more than 100 technology categories. All Curriculum Associates’ other “awards” are likewise bestowed by trade groups, conference organizers, and ed-tech industry publications. The proverbial Nobel Prize for teaching, these are not.
Of course, education isn’t just any trade. Schools rightfully hold a quasi-sacred space in our culture, because we entrust them with our most cherished collective asset: the young minds of future generations. That’s why it feels especially distasteful when an ed-tech snake oil peddler like Curriculum Associates cynically exploits hard-working teachers’ universal human need for validation as a vehicle for its own publicity and profit.
Nobody wants to hear a simple “Buy our product!” pitch. “Extraordinary Educators” awards lets Curriculum Associates get away with saying, “Behold these amazing teachers — who by the way all just happen to use i-Ready!” And when a teacher or school is selected as a winner, that creates (or merely enlarges) a kind of good will foot in the door. Curriculum Associates’ client and sales reps can then leverage this transparent flattery to bolster business relationships and help cement longer-term contracts at the district level.
i-Ready i-Regrets
Today, when you Google the name of Jonathan Kryk or any other “Extraordinary Educator,” the top search results are virtually guaranteed to include their participation in Curriculum Associates’ marketing program and their roles as i-Ready product ambassadors. That troubles Kryk, who now says, “I do not want to be seen as a pawn for a program I don’t believe in. I don’t use i-Ready at all anymore. I did some research and my philosophy has changed. Edtech is essentially ruining our schools.”
Asked what he would tell other young teachers and principals who are considering applying for Extraordinary Educators, Kryk didn’t mince words. “Ask yourself: does [i-Ready] match my teaching philosophy? If you value student-centered, high-impact, and results-driven instruction, look elsewhere.”
Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the objectives of the Extraordinary Educators program, whether any honorees have received renumeration, or the rationale for limiting eligibility to “rising” educators.
An i-Ready i-Reckoning - The Epostasy Investigative Series:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4: Coming May, 2026
About John Allen Wooden:
Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com
I worry about the teaching profession when educators that taught before edtech took over leave the field, we are loosing institutional memory! The tech industry seems to prey on human nature as a way to keep "users" of their product. Thank you for shedding light on the nefarious tactics the company uses to gaslight educators about their crappy product!
i-definitely-NotReady!