Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook

Educators were quick to adopt tech-backed coding curricula, but AI appears to face more scrutiny.

It’s the hot new thing in tech, and it’s where all the jobs are. Students who don’t learn to use it fall behind. And to help them catch up in time, its creators are graciously providing the resources and curriculum for learning it, often pro bono.

That’s the narrative AI companies are pitching schools on right now, but according to New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer, it’s also how the tech industry has built its influence in classrooms for the past 15 years.

In a new book, Coding Kids , Singer details how tech companies took a central role in promoting computers and coding skills in education, promising computer science skills were the ticket to high-paying jobs. But by the time many of those students entered the workforce, new technologies had thrown that promise into question. Meanwhile, the companies got schools to help them create a new class of would-be workers, and trained students on using their products and software, making them likely future customers.

Now, the AI industry is pitching itself to schools with similar force. “I worry we have collective amnesia,” Singer told me on a recent episode of The Vergecast. “Have we learned any lessons from these past tech cycles in schools that are going to inform the rollout of AI, make sure that it benefits education, and put in the safeguards now — not a decade from now?” Fortunately, in some ways, she believes the answer is yes.

Singer’s book recounts how more than a decade ago, the country’s largest tech companies embedded themselves directly into school curricula through courses for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles classes. Apple and Microsoft each created their own curricula, featuring their own tools like Apple’s Swift or Microsoft’s Minecraft. “What’s striking about this is you can imagine that parents would not want, say, Pfizer AP Biology, or Northrop Grumman AP Physics, or ExxonMobil Environmental Science AP,” Singer says. She found that those in the medical field would likely understand why — medical students who are trained by a company on how to implant their proprietary device, one expert told her as an example, rarely choose to try another.

Google has also made itself a dominant force in education through its distribution of low-cost laptops called Chromebooks. Singer tracked their ubiquitous adoption across schools through the 2010s, which she says was accelerated even further during the school shutdowns of the covid-19 pandemic. Google also introduced its Classroom app to help teachers communicate things like assignments and grades. By the time generative AI took off, Singer writes, Google was already a key platform provider for many schools, and well-positioned to promote it.

Even when companies weren’t directly involved in education, they backed nonprofit groups like Code.org. Code.org kicked off its viral education campaign with a splashy celebrity-laden video that included tech moguls like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and then-Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, urging kids to learn to code. Code.org founder Hadi Partovi took a startup-style approach to promoting computer science education, and had little planned for how to capitalize on the attention of the video once it took off, Singer writes. He ultimately funneled that attention into a similarly splashy “Hour of Code” campaign across the country, urging schools to engage in entertaining hour-long courses introducing kids to coding building blocks.

At the time, there wasn’t much pushback, Singer found — though there were some attempts at alternatives. One group of academics engaged in a more traditional, methodological approach to testing and rolling out their own computer science curriculum. It had the express goal of diversifying the kinds of students enrolled in such courses, and taught students to think about big questions around the internet and technology, and scrutinize builders’ motivations.

Eventually, backlash arrived. Some recent graduates say they feel let down that they were told to code their whole lives, just to find such entry-level jobs to be diminishing, Singer told me. Some schools are getting rid of ubiquitous Google Chromebooks , and research around the world is finding that adding technology to the classroom often doesn’t have a significant impact on actual learning.

“Most parents want more than just getting kids to learn to use tech”

“I’m not arguing against tech education or tech in schools,” Singer says. “But what I am saying is most parents want more than just getting kids to learn to use tech. They want kids to learn how to be informed citizens in a democracy, and they want kids to figure out what their passions are and who they are and what their beliefs are… And so if we let the tech industry dictate or even heavily influence what happens in schools, then the question we’re asking is, how can we get AI into schools faster? Which is a product question, and not, ‘What are the most important things we want kids to learn?’”

While the AI industry of the 2020s may be pulling from the 2010s playbook, there already appears to be one distinct difference: Parents and school districts are pushing back. Just last week, the nation’s largest school system, New York City, banned elementary and middle schools from letting students use AI in the classroom for the coming school year. A day later, Los Angeles announced an even broader restriction that included high schoolers. And unlike the few-and-far-between critiques Singer documented in the early days of tech’s coding push, there appears to be a vibrant grassroots movement fighting the screen- and AI-ification of the classroom among parents and teachers alike.

“I think schools are beginning to figure it out,” says Singer, who’s “optimistic” that teachers and students are looking for a broader kind of tech education. That curriculum could teach kids “to ask deep questions about how companies are steering us with their technology, how software and AI are designed to affect our choices, and what role students have to use the tools productively. But also to push back if they like, and to not feel like they’re in a world where AI is driving them.”