‘Coding Kids’: Natasha Singer on Big Tech’s power in public schools
Singer discusses her latest book on tech companies’ power in classrooms
“Make kids refrigerator-ready. Make kids fax machine-ready.” If those phrases sound strange, according to Natasha Singer, that’s the point.
On Oct. 20, students and professionals gathered for a Human-Computer Interaction Seminar at the Stata Center, where New York Times reporter Natasha Singer discussed her book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools. Her recent book focuses on how big tech has gained more power in public schools than any other industry.
Students begin their day by opening a Chromebook to check assignments on Google Classroom and complete them on Google Docs. Some learn how to code by designing a custom Google Logo, and some through Apple’s version of the AP Computer Science Principles curriculum “Develop in Swift.”
But, as Singer points out, schools don’t often ask students to draw the McDonald’s logo in art class or have Raytheon-branded AP Physics courses. We routinely ask questions about corporate influence in other fields, so why doesn’t education get the same scrutiny?
The technology-infused school day
Singer explained that tech companies have gained power over public schools partly by controlling infrastructure.
The integration of Google Workspace into public education first took off in 2010 with the “Going Google” campaign, which pitched its products as opportunities to “democratize” education through low-cost tools that competed with Microsoft Office. Millions of students across the United States spend a portion of their day on school-supplied Chromebooks: Google’s low-cost, low-maintenance offering for many public schools. Students might spend their day using Google Classroom to track assignments, Google Docs to work on an essay for their English class, Google Forms to complete math quizzes, or Google Slides to compile art class portfolios.
There was always an implicit urgency behind every sales pitch: schools had to help students gain access to these tools, or students would fall behind in a world where technology grew more important each day. “Who doesn’t want their kid to have democratized access to education and valuable career skills, right?” Singer said. “You can’t say no to it.” That urgency has carried each new wave of technology into the classroom.
Singer described these waves as “tech hype cycles,” which encompass personal laptops and cellphones, massive open online courses (MOOCs), coding lessons, and now AI chatbots. Each cycle was touted as a way to democratize access to knowledge and education. Despite the urgency with which each cycle was promoted, they often weren’t as impactful as they were made out to be.
Dr. Lourdes Alemán PhD ’08, the Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at MIT’s Teaching + Learning Lab, saw that same promise being made about massive open online courses at MIT. She recalled the excitement that MOOCs “were going to revolutionize [and] democratize education” by giving anyone with computer access to some of the most advanced classrooms.
Although they helped some users, the revolution MOOCs were supposed to herald ultimately never materialized. In many cases, the result was simply bringing more technology into the classroom.
Providing cheap laptops and workspace websites were not the only ways these companies asserted their influence over public schools, according to Singer. Sometimes, this influence took the form of shaping the curriculum itself.
For instance, Google’s digital citizenship curriculum “Be Internet Awesome” stressed the concepts of “stranger danger,” phishing, and credit card use. The lessons weren’t without their benefits – Singer cited a 2023 research study in her book that reported the curriculum could improve children’s understanding of concepts like “digital footprints.”
Google later partnered with Roblox, a popular kids’ gaming platform, to bring the program to more kids. However, as the program grew to reach over 100 million children, Google was fined a total of $170M by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General for allegedly collecting kids’ personal information on YouTube without parental consent.
Singer remarked that the digital citizenship curriculum makes Google “seem like a trustworthy provider of digital safety and privacy” without showing the flaws in Google’s own systems. This creates a contrast between how tech companies portray themselves in their educational initiatives and what they’re actually doing.
Aside from the occasional irony in their messaging, these companies and their curricula have shown to be problematic for other reasons. For example, Singer pointed to the possible ulterior motives behind Google’s Hour of Code lesson for Computer Science Education Week in 2017. Throughout the lesson, students used code blocks to make creative variations of the Google logo. Teaching kids how to code through playful drawings may seem innocuous at first glance; however, by coding the logo of a trillion-dollar tech company, the students were unknowingly engaging in a form of advertising.
Moreover, teachers who taught Google’s Hour of Code curriculum received gift cards. Singer remarked that this incentive could be considered “pay-to-play influence,” which would be questioned in any other industry. She compared it to pharmaceutical companies influencing medical education, a topic she previously covered, such as bringing free lunches to hospitals while pitching new drugs. Just as this medical conflict of interest would come under scrutiny, Singer wants more people to ask the same questions about big tech in K-12 education.
The jobs promise
The push to teach coding in public schools was rooted in the promise of high-paying tech jobs. The central example in Singer’s book is CodeAI (formerly Code.org), whose viral 2013 launch video framed coding as a path to high-paying jobs or building fast-growing startups. Singer criticized this focus on becoming a founder as “a very builder-centric vision of computer science, not an analytical vision.” While these efforts made computer science education more accessible, the tech industry’s values of speed, scale, and efficiency often don’t mesh with what works in education.
Some educators believe that, despite the messaging of companies like CodeAI, computer science education serves a purpose outside of building for industry. Mitchel Resnick, PhD ‘92, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab and leader of the research group that developed the MIT block-coding platform Scratch, said jobs aren’t the main reason he wants kids to learn to code. Instead, he sees it as “more like learning to write.” Most people who learn to write don’t become novelists or journalists, Resnick explained, but they gain a way to express their ideas.
Resnick wants technology to be used for “projects, passion, peers, and play,” using code as a means to explore things they care about. In a podcast interview with Singer, Resnick pointed out how schools teach kids to recognize propaganda in writing but also to write their own stories, and that computer science education could do the same. Singer made a similar comparison, likening teaching computer science to teaching government civics, which is not only about government but also about the individual’s power and rights.
Younger students and technology
As tech companies gain more of a foothold in the classroom, some parents have begun speaking out. During her seminar, Singer mentioned the push to get cell phones and social media out of schools as an example of the growing movement to minimize the role of technology and the companies that make it within schools.
One parent described how embedding laptops into schoolwork leaves no easy way to monitor whether their child is using them as intended, creating frustration when most assignments could’ve been done on paper in the first place.
“Parents don’t want big tech raising their kids,” Singer said.
As a parent, Alemán expressed concerns about a version of Google’s AI, Gemini, being embedded in Google’s Chrome browser and search tool on school Chromebooks. She said general-purpose chatbots such as Gemini can remove the productive struggle that is conducive to learning. Having AI built into a tool schoolchildren use daily makes it “a little bit too easy and too available and accessible to a younger audience,” she remarked.
The stakes are even greater for middle- and high-school students who are still learning foundational skills and knowledge. She clarified that she referred to general-purpose AI tools, not tutoring systems built for learning, and that the right age for students to begin exposure to AI is an open question.
For Alemán, AI revives a pandemic-era lesson about online content and human interaction. She recounted how some MIT instructors thought that their courses would benefit from polished online resources, only to see students had become demotivated by them. Some students even asked their instructors for live explanations of what the recorded lectures already covered. This example, she explained, is representative of how human interaction is central to motivating students, something intimately familiar to those teaching K-12 every day.
A fifth-grade classroom
For some teachers, integrating technology into their classes has had its benefits.
Kelsey Kelzer, known to her students as Ms. K, is a fifth-grade teacher at a Spanish immersion school in Minnesota. She previously taught fifth grade at a small school in Costa Rica and has experience teaching a variety of subjects, including English and Social Studies. She has implemented a variety of AI tools through MagicSchool AI, a generative AI platform designed for K-12 education. Within this platform, students can access tools such as chatbots based on historical characters and monitored “student rooms” that prompt students to think through tasks.
Kelzer emphasizes that her implementation of AI tools goes beyond simply using them: it also includes teaching “the process of why and how we use it, just so it doesn’t become an automatic thing.” Otherwise, she says, students’ development of critical and creative thinking might be in danger. She appreciates the engagement that new technologies, like AI, can bring to the classroom, but she doesn’t include them without teaching students to think critically about how they use them.
In her book talk, Singer acknowledged the possible advantages to a technology-classroom dynamic like Kelzer’s, discussing how students use AI and how educators want to help them navigate it. A growing sentiment among educators is that students should learn that AI is fundamentally a prediction engine, not magic, so that they can think carefully about what they use it for.
Singer’s reporting shows how tech companies have shaped schools, from the devices students use to the lessons they learn. Their tools can help students, but they may also benefit the companies behind them.
“Education,” Singer said, “should not follow the tech industry’s lead without first considering what’s in kids’ best interests.”