What happens when new technologies are sold to public schools as indispensable learning tools?
Today’s tech titans didn’t invent the sales pitch with their Chromebooks, iPhones and laptops.
Back in the day, Thomas Edison hailed his moving pictures as superior to books in helping students learn.
A new book explores just what happens when technology and education collide.
Guest:
- Natasha Singer, New York Times journalist/author, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. Technology is pervasive in public schools, from the very devices students use to the actual lessons they're being taught, supplied by the very tech giants whose products are being blamed for harming a generation of young people. How did schools come to rely so heavily on Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the like, giving them a foothold in the education system using curriculum they devised? And some would say, all but elbowing educators out of the way. It didn't start out that way, however. New York Times reporter Natasha Singer covers technology in schools and the tech industry's influence in education. And her new book that's just out is titled, "Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools." Welcome back to All Sides, Natasha. Thanks, Amy. So congratulations on your book to start out.
Natasha Singer: Thank you. It just came out yesterday and I'm so glad to talk to you all about it.
Juravich: Yay. Okay, so your book had me thinking about the last time we had you on the show. It was this past April, and you came on to talk about a story you wrote. It was titled "Chromebook Remorse, Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones." So that really shows how schools are continuing to grapple with this onslaught of technology and devices they're having to deal with. But at the same time, big tech has a big hand in shaping how technology is taught, specifically computer science. So what were you learning in your everyday reporting? That set you on the path where you were like, this is actually a book, not just a news story.
Singer: Well, you know, I've been covering tech in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade. And over time, I started to see this really interesting pattern. You'd see large tech companies like Microsoft and Google push schools to adopt a new technology like Google with its Chromebooks or a new tech subject like computer science. And now in fact, we're seeing them all push for AI. And there was this cycle of industry saying this new tool or this new tech subject is super important. And it will democratize access to learning and it'll improve educational outcomes and it would teach kids really important career skills. Right, and who doesn't want to democratize education and give kids valuable career skills, we all do. And so there would be this enthusiasm for this thing, like let's give kids lessons on video and they'll be able to drive their own learning, right? And then schools would rush to adopt it and then you'd have this fall off where in fact it didn't live up to the hype and then a year or two later the tech industry would be back with like. Every kid needs to use these adaptive math and reading apps that are going to like adjust lessons in real time. Right.
And so we've been through a number of these classroom tech cycles. And I just thought like, it feels like collective amnesia, like we're not learning lessons from these cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment in schools. And the same with social media, right? We were all excited about social media. It was going to connect everybody including kids and do all this great stuff. And now we're like, actually, we think that social media has. You know, harmed childhood in a lot of ways and interfered with adolescents and a whole bunch of other things. So what have we learned from that? And so the idea of the book is it's not anti-tech nor is it anti-tech industry involvement in schools. It basically takes parents inside this powerful playbook that tech companies use to get their tech products like computers and laptops and Chromebooks in schools but also to get schools to teach tech subjects like computer science and now like AI literacy.
Juravich: And parents over the years through lawsuits and advocacy, they're pushing back against some of these things. They're pushing against classroom laptops, phone use. Now AI is involved as well. They're concerned about the prevalence. They're concern about mental health. Physicians and lawmakers are pushing back too. There's a lot going on. But does it seem like enough of a counterbalance or is it all too little too late at this point?
Singer: You know, it's been kind of an astonishing year for watching what's happening with parents' concerns about tech in schools. And I think that there's, you know, context, which was we saw parents and physicians concerned about social media, and there was a huge effort to clamp down on social media in schools, and then there was this concern about cell phones and were they distracting in class and were they being used to bully kids, and we've seen most of the states in the United States pass new laws or policies. To prevent kids from using their cell phones during class or the whole day long. But I think once we got social media and cell phones out of the schools, parents and teachers were like, actually, Chromebooks are like a big phone. And all the things we were worried that kids were doing on their phones, like bullying each other and accessing YouTube and playing games all day are happening.
And so what's extraordinary, I think, is that we're seeing a parent pushback against this across the United States. Like when I talk to you. Earlier in the year, I had been to Kansas where one middle school had cut back on all day Chromebook use to what they were calling intentional tech use. Like you could use your computer for specific tasks. But since I spoke to you, we've seen like Los Angeles Public Schools, which is the second largest school district, parents pushed the school board and then the schoolboard pushed the district to make major changes like they're gonna eliminate giving iPads and Chromebooks to kids in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade. And then they're going to limit the time kids can use these devices. There are going to be major curbs in elementary and middle school. So that's a massive change and it's happening across the country.
Juravich: Yeah, recently there was a story out of Southwestern Pennsylvania where one school district has decided to no longer give Chromebooks to grades K through 2. And they're going to pull back on the idea of using Chromebooks in all of elementary school. But for the most part, it was K through two. But that got me thinking because Chromebooks are now used for state testing, right? Because so, like, the kid has to know how to use it in order to succeed on the state test. So have we backed ourselves into a corner here where we need the technology because all the state testing, there's no more filling in the bubbles. It's all on the computer now.
Singer: So I think that's a really good point. And there are some researchers who say, it's much more important for kids to have tactile experiences in the early grades and to learn how to make friends and to learning how to collaborate and to to learn to negotiate. And if they have to take a state test, the teacher can spend a couple of hours in the weeks before, teaching them how to take test on a computer. The laptop doesn't have to be the central focus of how education is disseminated, right? And in schools I visited that have pulled back, they have used the computers to do specific tasks, as opposed to it being the fallback knee-jerk system by which kids learn.
Juravich: The subtitle of your book is, "Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools." And that's an attention grabber because I didn't realize just how much involvement these tech companies had in schools. I mean, it's not just handing out laptops to every kid. There's writing curriculum. There's advanced placement courses. You're an education and technology reporter. Did anything surprise you? What did you learn about big tech in schools that you didn't know?
Singer: I think that once I put all the pieces together, I was surprised by how some companies influence nearly every step of the education supply chain. And we don't have any other industry that has this level of influence in schools. And it starts with, you've got Google and Microsoft and Apple providing the devices for schools, for students and the device operating systems, and then the communication system. So you're gonna be using like... Gmail, if you're a student. And then you're gonna be writing your essays on Google Talks or Microsoft Word. And you're going to be doing your presentations in like, you know, Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides. Like all the parts, both the like productivity parts, the software and the hardware, and then sometimes other things like, you know the data analytics systems and the cloud computing that schools use are provided by these huge tech companies.
And then, you now, because they are the infrastructure now on which many schools operate. The companies also then began creating their own curriculums and funding non-profits to provide curriculams. And that includes like digital citizen curriculoms and learning how to be kind online curriculms and then learning how the code curriculims. And now the big tech companies, including newcomers like OpenAI that makes ChatGPT are training teachers on these tools and providing video online lessons for students to learn how to use. Google's Gemini AI. And so on top of that, like on top of the providing the products and then training the teachers and providing company branded curriculum, some big tech companies go from state to state lobbying state legislators to pass laws to make it mandatory to teach AI literacy or to fund computer science or to create education standards for the subjects that the tech industry wants kids to learn.
Juravich: In your book, you quote Christy Crawford, Senior Director for Computer Science and AI Education for New York Public Schools. She was talking at a Las Vegas Teachers Conference and she said, product placement belongs in the movies, not in the classroom. But it sounds like from what you just said, product placement is everywhere. I mean, how much product placement is in the average classroom today?
Singer: Well One of the things that's remarkable is we haven't until this year really asked deep questions about tech company marketing and product placement in schools. And if you make comparison to other subjects, like if I said to you, Oh, McDonald's is training our nutrition teachers. Oh, ExxonMobil is providing our climate lessons for students, right? Or like, Oh, Purdue Pharma, you know, right, is teaching, you would know that that was a Yeah But like, you know, and we would say, you know, probably teachers and parents and students would be like, I actually don't want an exile exxon mobile environmental science curriculum, right? But like Oh yeah, tech industry is the expert. So let's have them teach digital citizenship, right. But like some of the companies that want to teach digital citizenship have had to settle federal charges of violating the kids' privacy law. Like there are companies that, um, you know, with their consumer tools, parents have a lot of problems with. They don't want their kids on YouTube all day long in school or out of school and yet Google is the major tech brand in schools and Google owns YouTube.
So there's like this disconnect where for some reason we don't ask the questions and you know you know that before this I was a pharmaceutical industry reporter and in medicine medical researchers and doctors and journalists who cover pharma all the time are looking at how is Pfizer and Johnson& Johnson and Merck influencing medical education. And medicine and they do and there are studies about like drug companies providing free lunch to doctors and even if the lunch costs less than twenty dollars the doctors prescribe more of that company's drug and yet again like yeah so these are like the normal questions you would ask in in the pharmaceutical industry and medicine. And so all I'm doing in my book and in my day job is I'm asking the same questions I asked about drug companies medicine about tech companies in schools. And like the differences that the tech companies perceive it as critical or even like you're, you know, negative or like you, um, a pessimist or whatever. But like, I think tech is important in schools. I think we want kids to learn computer science. My book is an argument for computer science, I think that it's important for kids to understand how AI works. But I also think it's important to ask, is the curriculum being warped by all this tech money? What is being emphasized when we're taking tech money in schools and tech products? And like what is being overlooked because industry funds what helps industry.
You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking with New York Times reporter, Natasha Singer, who covers technology in schools and the tech industry's influence in education. And her new book is titled, "Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools." You mentioned it earlier, but I don't think we actually called it the tech hype, hype cycle. But can you tell me where AI fits into that now? Explain the tech, hype, hype cycle, which I'm having trouble saying. Yeah.
Singer: Right. So one of the things I see in my reporting over the decade is these, as I said, cycles of the tech industry saying to schools, you must use this stuff. And if you don't, kids will be left behind. And so, you know, the nickname for this is the tech hype cycle. And one of the things that's fascinating right now is you see the tech companies that pushed for every kid to have their own device in schools or pushed for ever school to teach computer science and every kid to learn to code are using the exact same playbook for AI with very similar language, which is... Schools, if you just teach every kid to use a chat bot, or if you give every kid an AI tutor, then education will be democratized, the AI will customize learning to your child, and they will learn crucial career skills to prepare them for the AI-driven future.
Juravich: Well, yeah, that worries me. Okay.
Singer: So there's a combination of creating the urgency and the fear that kids will be left behind if we don't teach them AI immediately. And the second thing is like promising that we're going to prepare them to be AI ready or for the AI driven future. And again, one of the things that's fascinating as a journalist is to listen to the language the tech industry is using and who is mimicking the tech-industry language, sometimes because you just hear it and you just repeat these terms. But like if you think about, you know. Tech company saying this is the first generation of AI natives. And again, I just think it's important to make comparisons to other fields. So you'll hear it like when Pepsi came up with a commercial for the Pepsi generation, like we know that this is productizing kids. But when we say AI natives, we're like, oh yeah, AI natives right. But like we're productizing children again.
Or if we say let's prepare kids for the AI driven future, which is part of, um, what Google's education marketing is. Teachers use our Gemini tools and prepare kids for the AI driven future. First of all, it's very deterministic. It assumes the AI, the future will be AI driven. It skips over all kinds of questions about the extent to which we as Americans, as society, as humanity, as parents, as a community, as students, as teachers, do we want the future to be driven by AI? And second of all we have no idea what the future is gonna look like because AI is changing every five minutes. So to promise that we're gonna prepare kids for the AI future when like last year we were saying, oh my God, every kid needs to learn how to prompt a chat bot, right? Absolutely crucial. And now AI is great and like prompting is really useful but you can get pretty good results without knowing how to specifically prompt. And now we're saying, oh my god, every kid need to learn how to vibe code or they won't be able to like get a job, right. And like, what are we gonna be saying three months from now?
So I think like. The idea that we must quickly pivot to whatever the tech industry wants this week and then pivot two weeks from now to what they want, which is gonna be different, is giving schools whiplash. So one of the questions I see education leaders asking and teachers is like, what are the durable skills that we can give kids to deal with tech that will help them this week, next week and in the future think about every new technology that comes along? How do we deal with this? What are the benefits? What are risks? Do we want this? Who's making this? Who's profiting from this? Is this good for my community? What are effects gonna be? What is the cost to the environment like? All those questions you can ask no matter what technology the tech industry wants to put in schools next week.
Juravich: And who asked those questions? Is it supposed to be the superintendents of school districts? Is it suppose to be the state board of education? Like who needs to make that decision of how we're educating our kids and which tech companies are allowed to have a say?
Singer: Well, I think that this is like the fundamental question that Americans have been asking about education for more than a century, which is what is the purpose of public schools, right? Is it to train kids in useful career schools? Is it train kids to benefit the prevailing industry of the day? Is it help kids become productive citizens and active voters who are knowledgeable? Is it to help kids be creative, find their passions, help their communities? You know, I think most parents and educators would say we want all of the above, right? But like, again, when an industry is driving education, then we're going to skew towards what the industry is paying for and what the industries funding and what the industry's telling us is urgent.
And just a quick example, like we saw this huge drive for computer science. I think computer science is really important and it's really good that many more schools began offering it. But we also then did not have a huge push for data science. Which is an equally important and maybe more important subject in schools because it teaches you how to use data, how to think about data, how to make things with data, how to watch TV and see if people are manipulating data, right? And that did not have trillionaire company sponsors or like tech billionaires saying data science, every kid needs to learn data science. But so it's also like not just what is emphasized but what are we overlooking? Because we are listening to what some of the most powerful companies in the world want for schools.
Juravich: And coming up, we're gonna talk more about that history of teaching computer science in schools, teaching coding in schools. We're also gonna get involved on how tech leaders got involved in designing advanced placement courses and working with the college board. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Technology is pervasive in public schools from the very devices being used to the actual lessons they're being taught, supplied by the very tech giants whose products are being blamed for harming a generation of young people. How did schools come to rely so heavily on Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the like, giving them a foothold in the education system using curriculum that they devised, and some would say all but elbowing educators out of the way. And still with us, New York Times reporter, Natasha Singer. Her new book is titled, "Coding Kids, Big Text Battle to Remake Public Schools." Thanks for being here today, Natasha.
Singer: Thank you, Amy.
Juravich: So I wanted to jump to a part of your book where you highlight a person, one person with big ideas about computers and education was Hadi Partovi. And you liken him to a P.T. Barnum, big ideas, marketing genius, catchy slogans, the ability to promise and deliver big. And Partovi dreams up this worldwide event called the Hour of Code. And he says he's gonna get President Barack Obama involved and I'm gonna play some audio. Here is President Obama and the message that he gives to young people promoting this coding event.
Speaker 3: Don't just buy a new video game. Make one. Don't download the latest app. Help design it. Don't play on your phone. Program it. No one's born a computer scientist, but with a little hard work and some math and science, just about anyone can become one. This week is your chance to give it a shot. And don't let anyone tell you you can't. Whether you're a young man or a young woman, whether you live in a city or a rural area. Computers are going to be a big part of your future. And if you're willing to work and study hard, that future is yours to shape.
Juravich: Now that seems like a lovely message, but having discussed what we talked about in the previous part of the show, it now has me worried. So tell us more about this push for kids to learn coding at a young age and whether or not that was an important part of childhood.
Singer: So somewhere around 2011, the leaders of big American tech companies began sounding this alarm that they couldn't hire enough talented software engineers and it was urgent for the American economy. And if public schools would just do their job and teach every kid computer science, kids would then be able to have access to high-paying, high-powered tech jobs. And so it starts in 2011, Eric Schmidt, who was then the chairman of Google. Went to the UK and gave this national prominent lecture in which he said, Britain, you're losing your really important wartime heritage as coders and decoders, and if you want to stay competitive, you must teach every kid computer science. And the UK goes into this tizzy and their headlines in the newspapers like, see, chairman of Google condemns the British education system, and you have the prime minister of the UK saying, Eric Schmidt is right, we have to teach every kid programming.
And then this moves to the United States and Microsoft executives in 2012 began saying the same thing, which is we're gonna lose our American competitiveness to China if we don't teach computer programming and that it's schools that are at fault and that kids will have this magical option of becoming software engineers and having these great jobs. And so Hadi Partovi, who was an employee at Microsoft and then also went on to. Found startups and be an angel investor in companies like Dropbox and Facebook and Uber was this brilliant, charming entrepreneur who is just a phenomenal marketing strategist. And he was turning 40 and he wanted to do something big in his life that would benefit the world. And he decided that like he'd seen that it was hard for companies to compete to hire the best computer science grads from Harvard and Stanford and Berkeley and elsewhere. And he had learned computer science and it had produced this wonderful career. And so he felt, you know, both from a personal point of view, he wanted to give back by getting every kid to code. And also he wanted to help the tech industry solve this problem of it was too difficult to hire great software engineers.
And so, he starts a nonprofit group called Code.org with his brother. And one of the things they do is, you know Code.Org comes up with this event called The Hour of Code. And the idea is that we'll get millions of kids across the world just to do an hour of coding in their schools at the same time. And it should be fun and compelling. And, you know, instead of being sort of maybe afraid to try coding or computer science, because the stereotype at the time of hackers was Mark Zuckerberg, right? Some white, rich dude in a hoodie who dropped out of Harvard. And so if you are a lower income, you know from a lower-income family, or if you're a girl, or if are... You know, African American or Latino, you might not have seen yourself in coding. And so there were really well-meaning ideas behind the drive to get kids to code.
So the Hour of Code, they developed these really fun lessons that used brands the kids knew, like Angry Birds, right? Or Plants vs. Zombies. And later on, they incorporated, you know they got money from Disney. So there were lessons where you could get. Elsa, the princess from Frozen, you could code her to like spin across the ice, or you could code, you know, monsters to go through a maze or whatever. And these lessons were really, really fun. And code.org, you Google helped and Microsoft helped and Apple helped these coding lessons in stores. Like it became this kind of mass celebration and millions and millions of kids around the world did these lessons at the same time.
And one of the reasons in that passage you read, I had compared Hadi Partovi to T.T. Bornum is. Because there were circuses before Barnum came along, but he had this idea of making extravaganza where you would have all kinds of different animals and people and magicians and clown cars. And they had this like wagon train that went from city to city that was a hundred wagons long with the exhibits and things they would have at these circuses. And so I read a book about the history of the circus. And it said that like. P.T. Barnum had created this new idea of gigantism, of like having a gigantic event, and it changed American entertainment forever. And so Partovi, I think, changed the scale of what an education event could be with the Hour of Code. And it is now like an annual event in December during American Computer Science Education Week that kids look forward to. Like, are we gonna get to do the Hour of Code this year? And it really spurred enthusiasm for computer science in schools. On a scale nobody had ever seen before. Like what they accomplished in terms of like scale and enthusiasm was astonishing.
Juravich: Yeah, the idea of having computer science in schools made a lot of sense back then, you know, and teaching the kids and then they could major in it in college and they could get a great job. And I've heard all of those pitches, but I did a show recently about how computer science majors are going down now because of AI. Like AI can code. You can tell a chat bot to do it for you. So, are you, I mean, do you feel like this is another example of that tech? Hype cycle, you know, where we're, so we're coming, we're coming down now, right? So is it so this, this drive to have kids learn coding in schools is a part of what got so much tech in all of our schools. And now we're coming out on the other side, not needing them all to know how to code.
Singer: Right, so I would say two things. First of all, Code.org then came along not just with this one-off, but like created year-long computer science curriculums for schools that were really popular and were free. But at the same time, then the tech industry comes along and piggybacks on that. And so, you know, the College Board created this new advanced placement computer science course called Computer Science Principles. It was supposed to be more welcoming. Than a older course that was just pure programming. And so the more welcoming course taught other things, not just coding, but also like a little bit of data science, a little of thinking about the implications of things like YouTube for society. And it became hugely popular. And then the college board greenlit courses from companies, like there's now an Apple AP computer science course that teaches kids how to program in Swift, which is Apple's programming language for iPhones.
Juravich: So you can get AP credit and do an Apple course. Is that, yeah.
Singer: And Microsoft also, there's AP computer science principles with Minecraft, which is Microsoft's education game. And so, you know, Code.org created an amazing model and then tech companies were able to, you know, create their own company branded computer science curriculums for schools. And again, like just the comparison, we don't have Raytheon AP Physics. We do not have Pfizer AP Biology, but we do have tech branded AP computer Science. And so. That leads to your point about, is this another point in the hype cycle? Because, um, I also have interviewed a lot of students who majored in computer science, including somebody who was at Ohio state who recently graduated. And one of the things he said to me was like, I was shown the code.org videos with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates telling me I should learn to code. I did the hour of code. Like pretty much every adult I met since elementary school told me if you just to computer science. You will have this fabulous, interesting, high-powered, high paying job, and you'll be able to change the world. And so this student then went to Ohio State and majored in computer science and taught undergrads, you know, he TA'd, and then he graduated. It was really, really hard to find a job because suddenly AI is around and these new AI coding tools can produce code. And so there's less need for junior programmers. And so, this is the question. The same companies that promised you'd get an amazing job if you did computer science are now less interested in computer science and are saying, if you just learn AI, you'll get a fabulous job.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News, and we're talking with New York Times reporter Natasha Singer about her new book titled, "Coding Kids, Big Text Battle to Remake Public Schools." And you just mentioned, you know, that there's no AP biology class called the Pfizer biology class, but you know we have this Apple related AP class or Microsoft related class that the college board up until then had never endorsed an AP curriculum from a specific provider before. So tell me about. The need versus wanting these tech companies to make the curriculum, because it was basically understood that teachers lacked the knowledge in computer science, the field was evolving so quickly, the teachers couldn't keep up, they needed these industries to make these courses. Is that how it was presented?
Singer: Uh Yes, I would say it has a slightly wider lens, which is that, you know, advanced placement courses are basically the only national curriculum we have for high schools. And normally, if you're teaching AP English or AP History, the College Board doesn't provide a boxed curriculum. Teachers submit their curriculum, the college board has standards about what's going to be on the exam, and the college Board vets the curriculum and says it's fine. When they created this new course, AP Computer Science Principles, it was a brand new course, so there wasn't a history of teachers teaching this for decades. And the National Science Foundation funded different universities, like the University of Washington and University of Texas at Austin, to develop different curriculums that teachers might use. And Code.org developed its own curriculum, which many, many teachers use.
But the College Board felt like they wanted to have as many curriculams as possible so that teachers would have choices. And when I talked to the College board about like, why did you approve the Apple AP Computer Science or the Microsoft? Computer science. The college board said because we didn't distinguish between university providers of the class or you know nonprofits like code.org or Apple because we just vetted did what the curriculum cover meet in a rigorous way the standards we set for this course and so they said they didn't see a difference and I said have you read some of these curriculums because like the Apple one, their sentence is like, learn to make this photo app. Which you can use on your iPhone and maybe even your Apple Watch. Or like, how does Apple Maps know how to give you traffic directions, right? And like, that is different than the code.org course.
Juravich: You write about how industry money and the power and the status can lead schools to teach lessons that may serve short-term interests of tech companies too, more than the long-term interest of young people. And one of the examples you cite that I thought was interesting is in 2023, a class in Boston used Alexa, the voice activated assistant. Can you tell me about that class and what ended up happening?
Singer: Yes, it was 2023 and Chat GPT had just come out in late 2022 and it was becoming a huge thing and Amazon has a program called Amazon Future Engineer which is an education program and it had given I think two million dollars to MIT to develop lessons around Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant and the idea was kids would learn to program Alexa and in so doing learn some AI. And so I went to an event at a Boston public school called Dearborn STEM, where Amazon was gonna lead lessons in programming Alexa. And it was a clash between, you know, how Amazon saw itself and the tech industry sees itself and like this school where students had been learning to use like open source tools, not tech company branded schools. And their computer science and robotics class, the kids had already done things like, they made fake videos of themselves with AI, like saying things they didn't say, so they would understand what a deep fake is. And it was horrifying to be able to make themselves say stuff they didn't say, so they understood then what it would feel like if somebody else did that to you.
And then their own class came up with what they thought should be laws that should be passed for AI. And they also knew how to like program robots and things. So the kids have like a deep background already. And the school is in Roxbury, which is one of the lowest income neighborhoods in Boston. It's a largely African-American neighborhood. And so here comes Amazon saying, Alexa is really important and it will democratize access to AI. We're gonna teach you cutting edge skills. But at that moment, AI was not, Alexa was not a cutting edge AI skill, right? It's like, Alexa uses all kinds of AI technology, but it was not generative AI, which was the hot thing that, you know, And second of all, Alexa is not a trendy thing for kids, right? Kids are on Snap, they're on Discord, they are on Reddit, they're in YouTube, they on Insta, right. But Alexa is something that many kids were using.
And I went around to the kids in the class and said, does your family have Amazon Prime? No, we can't afford it. Does your family? Use Alexa. No, we don't have it. And I finally found one kid who was like well My aunt has Alexa and I asked it to make fart noises Of course, okay Yeah, so they had a class learning how to program Alexa to ask questions and it was fun and it interesting And so the chapter is not suggesting that this was a bad thing or a waste of kids time it's always useful to learn how to Program a different technology and understand how it works and they had fun, you know, they programmed it to tell jokes They programmed it two tell the weather You know, it was really, really fun, but you know, it was not the cutting edge thing that it was billed as. And second of all, after that, you know Amazon changed Alexa to have generative AI capabilities and they shut down this program that they had said to kids was cutting edge.
And so what did kids learn from this, right? Like there was a mismatch between like the relevancy for teens, which it wasn't relevant. From the skill that was being taught, which was not about generative AI, which was the hot thing of the day. And then Amazon also decided it wasn't the thing of day and shut it down. And so I think it raises questions about why are we choosing certain industry-funded programs? And I interviewed a professor who was like, you sort of have to stop before you even do that and say to yourself like, why are you even introducing a brand, a product like Alexa in the classroom, as opposed to some kind of larger, perennial, open-ended skill that can be applied to any technology.
Juravich: We are talking with New York Times reporter Natasha Singer and her new book is "Coding Kids, Big Text Battle to Remake Public Schools." Coming up, we're gonna talk about how everything old is new again, why new advances in technology back in Thomas Edison's day caused a stir in education, and is the same thing happening today with AI. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich.
Juravich: Back in the day, Thomas Edison hailed his moving pictures as superior to books in helping students learn. In a 1912 interview with the New York Times, he was quoted as saying, I'd like to see every last school book thrown out of the schools. Now that didn't happen, but the anecdote illustrates that technology and its impact on education predates today's debates and discussions. We're talking this hour with New York Times reporter, Natasha Singer, and her new book is titled, "Coding Kids, Big Text Battle to Remake Public Schools." Thanks again for being here, Natasha.
Singer: Thanks again, for having me back.
Juravich: So you call Edison the Bill Gates of his day. I found his comment to that reporter back in 1912 quite interesting. I mean, I'm sure there's more to that story, but why was he thinking that his moving pictures were superior to books?
Singer: It's so fascinating. And one of the really gratifying things about being able to take some time off from the times and work on this book is I got to do this historical research and I went into the New York Times archives and plenty of other archives and they covered Edison like the Bill Gates of his day, like every pronouncement was covered in depth. And so it also made me feel like, you know, we have this century old, at least tradition in the United States of like charming, brilliant innovators thinking that whatever they make will transform schools. And so here's Edison, it's 1912, his lab has invented this thing called the kinetoscope, which is a moving picture machine. There's like an early projector and then they make smaller ones and they're showing these reels of current events and personalities. And he just decides that like books are inert and they are boring and they all the same and teachers teach them all the way, to all the kids. And no wonder kids are skipping school and not paying attention because. Books are not engaging. But my amazing moving picture machine will educate students through their eyes and through their emotions. And so we should just throw out all the books, and we'll do all the teaching by moving pictures, and it will transform education and kids will be engaged, right, and they'll learn the technology of the day.
And So it was really amazing to see that, like, if you just change the word moving picture and stick in AI, Bill Gates has said almost the same thing, Sam Altman at OpenAI. Sundar Pichai, the head of Google, they're all saying AI will be these powerful tutors that will customize education to every kid and will engage them and be much more engaging in what we do now and will transform education. It's the same thing. The dudes are saying we've invented this thing and it will be revolutionary. And I wrote this book from the point of view that everybody had good intentions, right? This is a descriptive book. That brings readers inside the playbook that tech companies use to influence schools. And I think these tech executives believe that AI will transform education. I don't think they think it's a flim flam. I also think that like the tech industry doesn't look back, they look forward. They don't really think history is important most of the time, but like it's a combination of they have good intentions.
Second of all, it's hubris. My thing is finally gonna revolutionize education. And sometimes you see the same tech billionaire pick different things. So like, I don't know, 15 years ago, Bill Gates was saying, big data will transform education. And if we just collect all the data of school kids, and look at these patterns, we will be able to democratize learning and customize, right? And then it was like, lessons on video will transform education and massive open online courses, and then it wasn't like one laptop or shot, right. So, so you also see that the billionaires promote one thing in schools and then they go on to the next innovation. So combination of good intention, hubris, and then there's the profit motive because after all AI is a product and they are saying we want our products to transform schools. And Edison was saying the same.
Juravich: I feel like we're at a crossroads right now, though, because we talked at the very beginning about some schools, including Los Angeles, wanting to pull back on how much Chromebook usage and how much time the kids are spending on screens and go back to face-to-face conversations and heaven forbid, actual books. But at the same time, we're saying AI is the future and kids need to know how to working with a chat bot on making their education experience individualized and better. How can we do both at the same time? How can pull back on screens and lean into AI at the time?
Singer: So I think for me, I feel like there's this really interesting larger context happening that helps explain this and maybe will get us to an answer, which is I think there's a feeling among the American public, Democrats, Republicans, and centrists, that big tech has had runaway influence on our society. Like we hoped social media would be good and it's turned out to us and disinform us. And so we see this huge pushback in communities against big tech companies building massive data centers. We see a pushback against flock surveillance cameras. And I think the parent pushback against tech in schools is similar. Like we've given the tech industry runaway influence in the classroom and on children.
And what we saw last week was the mayor of New York City give a press conference saying we are gonna put in a one-year moratorium on AI in schools while we figure out what is risky. What might benefit kids, what might interfere with critical thinking, right? We are not going to just jump on the bandwagon. And one of the things he said that I thought was really astonishing was, The tech industry is trying to tell us that AI is both beneficial and inevitable in education. We do not agree. And for more than a decade, governors and mayors and superintendents have been saying, technology will be transformative. And this is more like a precautionary approach. In fact, we heard the UN secretary general say something similar over the summer. He said like, we don't give kids medicine that hasn't been tested. We test toys before we give them to kids, yet we're rolling out AI to children in schools.
And so I think how we reconcile this is we're at a moment where parents want to see evidence from schools that AI tools actually benefit their kids' outcomes. That if there's a tutoring bot, it actually improves education and that it's safe. And I think one of the larger concerns in society, but particularly with children is. These AIs are charming and powerful and you wanna keep talking to them and they have this synthetic empathy that is hard to distinguish. You can forget that you're talking to a machine. And do we wanna interpose this artificial entity between kids and teachers, between kids and parents, between children and each other? And so I think there's a really large question at stake since we know that we have concerns about how social media changed childhood. Do we just want to put AI in schools and allow it to change education without knowing what the outcomes are?
And at the same time, as you point out, the majority of high school students are already using off-the-shelf commercial chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT. And so schools also feel if we do nothing, then schools are not gonna know anything about these tools and they're gonna be using them in ways that could be damaging to them. And we as schools at least have to step in and give them some guidance and teach them how to use these things in ways that could be beneficial. So that they aren't swayed and steered by these powerful machines.
Juravich: We are talking with New York Times reporter Natasha Singer. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. And her new book is "Coding Kids, Big Text Battle to Remake Public Schools." And you've mentioned it a couple of times, but there is just this huge settlement that Metta made with lots of states, including Ohio. And they're paying states to resolve lawsuits over Facebook and Instagram being addictive. Do you predict we're gonna see lawsuits over something like Chromebooks and schools, too much screen time and education? AI ruining our childhood?
Singer: Well, there are already a few lawsuits from families against AI companies saying that their Children some of them teenagers Spent months talking to chat bots formed relationships with chat bots were veering towards self-harm and the parents alleged that the chat bots Encouraged the children to harm themselves and even die by suicide. So we're already seeing some of those Kind of lawsuits. I think that the settlement of Metta with the states over, you know, what the states say were addicting kids to social media platforms. The thing that's interesting there is, to me, not the $17 billion settlement, but that Metta agreed to make some fundamental changes that it had agreed to before, and that parents have wanted, which is like turning off notifications in the middle of the night, young people, turning off by default notifications during the school Like they're basic things that parents have been asking for a long time that meta agreed to do and if they happen that will be a big change.
Juravich: With the wisdom of hindsight here, was there any point in time at which education could have kept the tech leaders from completely dominating certain parts of curriculum? Like, could we have pulled back or is it just a, I feel like it's a situation where it's like resource poor schools feel important, they get the tech, maybe they get it for free or a big discount and how do they say no? But I think it's part of the
Singer: this larger picture like there was America had a romance with tech and with tech giants we were the innovation envy of the world we there was a moment you know where Bill Gates before you know he flew on Epstein's plane or Mark Zuckerberg before you no parents felt that social media was detrimental to childhood where we revered these figures and we revering these companies and so if you're in a culture where you know those are our icons, it makes sense for schools to say, these are the experts, they know how we should be using the technology and how kids should be using the technology. And I think it was very hard to resist the narrative because the narrative was altruistic. Schools, if you just teach kids to use these tools, they will have better outcomes. Like, how could you say no to that? So I think that like, we're having this moment now.
We're having moment now where parents are questioning. The knee-jerk use of technology in schools, and the knee jerk rolling out of AI. And they wanna see intentional technology use. They wanna see evidence that the technology is beneficial, but they also wanna see a lot of parents, a wider kind of tech education in which students question the power of these companies over us, the power of these tools to steer us and looking at the design decisions. That make us stay on longer or keep coming back or like at the end of using an AI to answer your question, it's like, the AI is saying to you, would you like me to do X, Y, and Z next? That interrupts a kid's thinking about what they wanna do next. Like, I think that, you know, there is a push for a broader kind of tech education in schools that will, you knows, designed to try to give kids agency as they go into this machine-fueled world.
Juravich: We only have about a minute left, but what do you hope people get from your book? I mean, who do you help reads it? Because I can see it being beneficial to parents who are worried about tech in schools. I can it being to school districts. Maybe every superintendent needs to read it. I mean in like 30 or 40 seconds, who do hope reads the book?
Singer: For me, I wrote this for parents, grandparents, students, teachers, principals, superintendents, governors, legislators, anybody who cares about tech in schools, like whether you're for tech in schools and you think we need more AI, whether you are agnostic or whether you think that we've gone overboard, you have to understand how big tech power operates in schools because like we know how Amazon took over retail, we know how Uber disrupted the taxi industry. This is about how big tech has reshaped schools to its own benefit, and wherever you stand, I think it's just worth knowing how it works.
Juravich: We've been talking about big tech in schools with New York Times reporter Natasha Singer. She covers technology in schools and the tech industry's influence in education. And her new book is titled "Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools." Thank you so much for your time today. Amy, thank you so. And if you missed any part of today's show, you can listen back at wosu.org slash All Sides. Subscribe to our podcast. Every episode is in our mobile app. Thanks for listening. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.