Big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft use devices, training and conferences for teachers and students to embed in schools. The New York Times' Natasha Singer discusses the impact in Coding Kids.
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's back-to-school season, and in many classrooms, digital devices have replaced or supplemented books. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have tried to get schools to buy their products and have offered tech training to teachers and students in subjects like coding, the use of AI, online safety and basic computer tools. So what are the tech giants getting in return for this investment? And how much are they influencing what and how children and teens are taught in schools?
My guest, Natasha Singer, is a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education. She's written a new book titled "Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle To Remake Public Schools." She writes that in interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for her book and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, quote, "it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain," unquote. Singer was a member of a Times reporting team whose coverage of tech industry privacy violations won a George Polk Award in 2019 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting.
Natasha Singer, welcome to FRESH AIR. You describe how tech companies have provided things for schools. Are they donating them, or are the schools buying them?
NATASHA SINGER: So public schools in the United States spend billions of dollars a year buying technology for the classroom, including software, math apps, but also computers for every kid. And so those are purchases, and companies like Google and Microsoft have education divisions that sell technology to schools. Then these companies provide software services. Like, if you're gonna buy a Chromebook for every kid, then you need a system to track where the Chromebooks are, and if you're going to give tests, you're going to have to lock down the computer, so that might cost, like, $12 per kid per year.
So there are services that schools pay for. And then on top of that, the companies provide a lot of services that they don't charge schools for, including if you're a client that uses Google apps for your schools, then, you know, you get Gemini, Google's chatbot. And, you know, the teacher training is often funded by tech companies or even led by tech companies. And there are other things like their digital lessons for kids on how to be proficient with spreadsheets or how to, you know, make PowerPoints, or, you know, how to analyze data or how to code that the companies have funded or have made themselves. And those are often free.
GROSS: How do the companies compete with each other to convince schools or, you know, school boards to buy their products as opposed to their competitors' products?
SINGER: So we already have an entrenched system where school districts refer to themselves as, we're a Google district or we're a Microsoft district or we're an Apple district. And so imagine that if you are a wealthy suburban district that can afford to buy MacBooks for all the middle schoolers and high schoolers and iPads for all the elementary schoolers, and Apple comes with a new thing, you know, it's going to fit with the system you're using, and you're going to want to use maybe the Apple coding lessons.
And if you are a huge district like Chicago Public Schools or Miami-Dade County Public Schools and you are a Google district, and your students all have Chromebooks, or you're a Microsoft district, and Google comes and says, like, you can just start using Gemini with your students – and because you already have all the software and apps that Gemini will be embedded in.
And so part of it is the, like, incumbent advantage in school districts. And then when you see newcomers trying to break into this market, so OpenAI, with its ChatGPT chatbot, is one of the newcomers. And education's a crucial market for tech companies because if you want your product to scale and have permanence and have lifelong customers, the best thing to do is either target elementary schoolers, and they're going to use your app for life, or you target teachers who are going to introduce them to kids. And so we see that OpenAI made deals with some large school districts and some small districts, and they agreed to provide ChatGPT Edu, which is a form of ChatGPT that doesn't use teacher and student data to train OpenAI's model and has some increased safeguards compared to the consumer product.
OpenAI did deals with schools to train teachers on these tools and to allow teachers to use ChatGPT Edu for free for, you know, initial period of a year or so. And then, you know, the school will see how it works. Are teachers more efficient if they use a chatbot to help make their lesson plans or their quizzes? You know, are the teachers doing interesting things with a chatbot with kids?
And so now, in the last few weeks, Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, announced it had made a program for teachers with online lessons that teachers can sign up for to become proficient at Claude. And so you can see that the newcomers are trying to break into the space where companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple already have heavy footprints.
GROSS: Do the companies make suggestions of what to teach with their tools? Or what kind of, like, computer literacy, whether it's AI or coding or just digital knowledge? Do they make suggestions of what to teach and how to teach it?
SINGER: They do, and I think that there's a very interesting tension here between the desire of schools and teachers and parents to want students and kids to learn the latest technology. We don't want kids to be left behind. We want them to be able to operate in this machine-laden world we're living in. But at the same time, when you have tech companies shaping the curriculum and training the teachers, they're going to teach what is good for them but also what their worldview is.
And so, you know, I've talked to these companies, and they're like, yes, AI literacy. Every kid must have AI literacy. And sometimes when I say, what does AI literacy mean, it means learning how to use their particular chatbot. And that's a very, very narrow way of thinking about AI. And so, you know, there are also moves to teach much bigger themes about AI to students, including, like, where do these generative AI tools come from? Who made them? You know, who profits from them? Because we have a handful of companies that have massive amount of data and have scraped the internet and books and newspaper archives to build their language models that are then able to make these powerful tools, right?
