Author of the linked i-Ready rant here.

I agree with a lot of this, but I think it understates how big the gap between good and bad software can be. Usually good software is what we choose to use in our daily life, and bad software is a corporate tool your workplace has purchased that you are forced to use. Ed tech is structurally like the latter, where the back office buys it based on "nobody every got fired for buying IBM," a list of requirements, and some contract negotiation, and then everyone has to use it if they hate it or not.

The software industry knows how to make software good. Pay close attention to your users to see if they're succeeding at their tasks and happy with it, through some combination of interviewing them directly and monitoring how they use it, then fix broken things. If there are many layers between the people using the software and people working on it, that iteration can't happen. If users don't have any choice in the matter, then that iteration won't be forced to happen. Relatively trivial things, like our experience, stay broken forever. Our experience was probably not intended, and if the company was paying close attention, they would figure out what's wrong and fix it. But despite the fact that it seems fairly widespread among other parents who reacted, they aren't paying attention, and structurally can't be.

So while, ed tech may not be "the problem" in general, it certainly was for us, and I think there are reasons to expect this sort of situation to be common, especially relative to commercial software that parents pay for directly. (FWIW my kids had a few absolutely magical teachers at the school we left, their experience there was not all negative at all, but unfortunately none of those magical experiences were via software.)

To look for a structural solution to this, you would have to tighten the feedback loop between kids/parents/teachers and the software that is chosen and used. Software can be much better, and I suspect there are platforms that already are, but you have to have some mechanism where that software can break in. Meanwhile we're still at the level where "If the problem expects the student to put in numbers, let them type numbers on their keyboard" is a feature the software has not delivered.

At any rate, my main goal of writing that was to just to put it out there because all the other parents I knew were just quietly letting their kids not do it, and I felt like at least someone had to be loud. And hopefully a few parents who had heard their kids complain about i-Ready and weren't sure how seriously to take their complaints (as I also wasn't at the beginning) now have more reason to take them seriously and escalate to someone with control of it. I wasn't really intending on kicking off a whole general ed-tech debate.

In an ideal world, maybe this breaks through to someone at i-Ready who can make their software better, because the ordinary channels that software companies use to learn and iterate on it don't exist. Angry viral blogposts are maybe the only effective feedback mechanism parents or students have.