Coding Kids
Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times reporter Singer's searing debut reveals the growing influence of Big Tech on American public education. The book opens in 2013, when "learning to code" went viral thanks to a popular video, "What Most Schools Don't Teach," that featured tech billionaires like Bill Gates reflecting on "how they first learned to program computers as children," and which had been produced by Code.org, a nonprofit cofounded by a former Microsoft executive. With its "immense resources," "political leverage," and gamified coding lessons, Code.org quickly overtook decades-long "grassroots" efforts to democratize computer science, serving instead as an avenue for "trillion-dollar companies" to expand into the American classroom via hardware, software, and even the curriculum itself. (Eyebrow-raising examples of the latter include Google's Be Internet Awesome lessons, which are "awash in Google branding," and Apple's College Board–approved AP Computer Science Principles class, which uses the company's Swift programming language.) Singer argues that these branded lessons work to present tech companies as "benevolent," suppressing students' critical thinking about their business practices and ethics. She also cautions that coding has now been tossed aside for an "AI education blitz" that employs the same tools, despite major unknowns when it comes to the technology's impact on students. This pressing investigation raises urgent questions about not only corporate meddling in schools but the intended purpose of education.
