Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools

Summary

The inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America.

Fourth graders doing Google-branded coding lessons. Amazon schooling seventh graders on its warehouse robots. Advanced Placement computing courses from Microsoft and Apple. Many educators and parents would object if Exxon wrote their school’s climate curriculum—or if schools assigned nutrition lessons from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Yet today, tech giants influence nearly every step of the education supply chain. They provide the classroom devices and software many students use to do assignments. They sell schools on the latest artificial intelligence tools. And increasingly, tech companies are launching their own corporate-branded school curricula, shaping how and what millions of children learn.

In recent years, the tech industry has helped spread computer science and AI education in schools at astonishing speed and scale. In Coding Kids, award-winning New York Times journalist Natasha Singer draws on a decade of reporting to reveal how tech titans used the promise of coding (high-paying jobs! change the world!) to weave rosy industry visions of technology into the very fabric of American education, sometimes sidelining crucial ideas like civics and critical thinking. Along the way, Singer takes readers through the powerful playbook Big Tech used to scale coding lessons nationwide. Then she shows readers how tech companies are now applying the same playbook to mainstream their AI tools in schools.

A revelatory account of the powerful forces shaping education and our kids’ futures, Coding Kids also offers hope. It tells the compelling stories of pioneering teachers fighting for a broader vision of tech education—one that not only teaches kids algorithms and app-making, but also asks students to grapple with the societal impacts of tech giants and their disruptive digital tools.

“This riveting book reveals how titans of tech used the Big Pharma playbook to push computer science and then AI literacy in schools with industry-written curriculum and high-powered marketing operations. Now that promises of high-paying jobs have fizzled, Natasha Singer asks: What would education about technology look like if it focused on the best interests, and critical thinking skills, of today’s children?”—Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction