When a student opens a homework tab, looks at a progress bar that is currently at 82, and realizes that one incorrect response will cause it to slide backward, a certain kind of dread sets in. IXL is that. And that experience has gone from being merely annoying to actually damaging for an increasing number of students nationwide.
For math, English, and other subjects, thousands of schools use IXL Learning, an online learning platform that has been around long enough for some parents to recall it from their own children’s early school years. It presents itself as an adaptive learning tool that supports students’ development by meeting them where they are. The pitch seems plausible. According to what educators and students have been saying for years, the reality is more complicated than that.
Most people believe that the platform’s scoring system is its greatest shortcoming. Your SmartScore will rise by a few points if you correctly answer a question. A single incorrect answer can cause the score to plummet significantly, occasionally dropping a student from the mid-80s back to nearly 80. That method doesn’t feel like adaptive learning, especially for younger students. It seems like punishment. The platform, according to a seventh-grader who wrote about it online, leads to stress, rage, and a sense of learned helplessness that worksheets never did.
IXL is now completely prohibited in some school districts. Students used a word you don’t often hear in relation to homework policy to describe the news when one district dropped it: relief. Not merely a little respite, either. The kind that implies there was a real problem. Teachers have also begun to quietly rebel. According to reports, one math teacher described the system as “completely unfair,” which is noteworthy for a teacher to say about a teaching tool they are meant to assign.
The question of whether platforms like IXL are designed with students in mind or to impress administrators who are viewing engagement dashboards is a valid one. For instance, a system that erases minutes of meticulous work due to a single moment of distraction is especially detrimental to students with ADHD or test anxiety. Even the answer-formatting requirements are strangely strict, rejecting technically correct responses because they weren’t entered in a certain way, as one commenter with programming experience noted. Pedagogy isn’t that. Lazy design, that is.
Whether IXL is “getting shut down” in a formal, corporate sense is still up for debate. There have been no announcements indicating that the business is closing. However, schools are opting out, which is another development that may be equally significant. Teachers are quietly deciding not to assign it, renew it, or defend it in parent meetings, district by district. Although it doesn’t garner much attention, a slow exit has the same impact on an edtech product’s future as a shutdown.
It will be interesting to see if IXL takes any significant action in response to the criticism or if it continues to operate under the presumption that school contracts will continue to renew in any case. Due to the fact that students do not have control over procurement budgets, EdTech has a long history of withstanding student complaints. However, it becomes a different issue when teachers begin to agree with the students. And it appears that many of them do at the moment.
