BOSTON — A Billerica-based educational software company is facing a putative class-action lawsuit in which the plaintiffs allege the company has been improperly harvesting and sharing student data.
The lawsuit was filed against Curriculum Associates in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Dec. 22, 2025. The lead plaintiffs are four elementary school students from California represented by two of their parents, Nicole Reisberg and Lila Byock, on behalf of the nationwide class of “All persons in the United States who attend or attended a K–12 school who used one or more Curriculum Associates Products.”
The lawsuit alleges that Curriculum Associates is violating the federal Wiretap Act. It also alleges the company to be in violation of different state laws, including Massachusetts’ Consumer Protection Act and Right to Privacy Act, and California’s Invasion of Privacy Act and Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
Curriculum Associates is the company behind i-Ready, a learning and educational assessment software used in schools by K-12 students nationwide. In the original complaint the plaintiffs allege the company “creates and extracts reams of personal information from K–12 students.”
“Using that data, Curriculum Associates creates detailed data profiles of students that are used to predict and influence their behavior and guide decision-making about them. It further uses that information for commercial purposes, including developing, marketing, and delivering its own products,” the complaint said. “Curriculum Associates also allows numerous third parties to access the information it obtains from K–12 students for the commercial benefit of both Curriculum Associates and those parties.”
One of the issues at hand, according to the complaint, is that students in schools that use i-Ready are required to be in school, where they are required to use the software during the school day with no alternative, and without giving their consent about the use of their data.
“Through this lawsuit, Plaintiffs seek to hold Curriculum Associates accountable for its surreptitious and unlawful data practices, obtain redress for the millions of school-aged children whose personal information has been unfairly exploited, and restore to students and Parents their basic right to be free from unwanted intrusion into their lives,” said the complaint.
In a statement to The Sun Monday afternoon, Curriculum Associates said this is just one of many civil data privacy lawsuits being filed against educational technology providers like themselves, and called the claims “legally meritless.”
“The i-Ready platform requires only the personal information necessary to deliver personalized assessment and instruction, and all use of student data is solely for educational purposes, in compliance with applicable federal and state laws. To be clear, we never sell student data, and we do not create commercial profiles of students,” said the company’s statement. “Curriculum Associates has been a leader in education, developing curriculum and research-backed assessment tools with input from educators since long before the digital age. Our focus has never changed: improving student outcomes. We are agnostic between print and digital, guided first and foremost by what works best for teachers and students.”
Curriculum Associates said it takes the protection of data “very seriously.”
“We are proud to have earned the trust of thousands of school districts over our 57-year history in education, and we will continue to work closely with districts to ensure robust data protections are in place, limit data collection to what is necessary, and maintain transparent data privacy and data handling policies,” said the company.
Among the team of plaintiff attorneys is Andrew Liddell of the EdTech Law Center. Liddell told The Sun Monday afternoon that the class for the lawsuit has not yet been certified, but when it is he expects it “to be in the millions.”
“We’ve heard from a lot of parents of kids, some kids themselves, and teachers,” said Liddell.
The EdTech Law Center website lists a number of cases the firm has been involved in against companies with educational technology products, including Google, Renaissance Learning and Instructure, among others. Many of these cases deal with the companies’ handling of student data.
According to the complaint, the data in question may include basic information like a student’s first and last name, birthday and gender, as well as things like their race, first language, grade level, school of enrollment, their teacher, data from their responses to questions in i-Ready assessments and lessons, and data collected about the student when the i-Ready profile is set up. The complaint alleges it could also include data about the specific device students used to complete the lesson on i-Ready.
“The data Curriculum Associates generates and extracts from students who use its Products, including Plaintiffs, far exceeds what could be legally or traditionally characterized as “education Records,” said the complaint. “Even if certain data could be characterized as education records, Plaintiffs — like all students — retain significant rights over the personal information contained in such records, which are protected by state and federal law.”
Curriculum Associates filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Feb. 27. That filing said the complaint “represents the most recent chapter in Plaintiffs’ and their counsel’s ideologically-motivated crusade to use the courts — rather than the legislative process — to change how technology is used in schools.”
“In this and other lawsuits brought against major U.S. educational technology (“edtech”) providers, Plaintiffs and their counsel seek to destroy a longstanding regulatory framework that allows schools to consent to edtech providers’ collection of student data in the classroom,” said the motion from Curriculum Associates.
The plaintiffs have since filed an opposition to the motion on April 3, in which they said Curriculum Associates engaged in “ad hominem attacks against the Plaintiffs,” in the motion to dismiss.