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

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Natasha Singer chronicles how classroom technology, from laptops and smart boards to AI tutors, advances the tech industry's interests far more than those of students and teachers, and why that matters now more than ever.--Greg Morrisett, dean of Cornell Tech

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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, 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

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Coding Kids reveals how tech corporations positioned themselves as education saviors.... Natasha Singer shows how urgency to incorporate AI in education has been carefully manufactured--through glossy curricula, philanthropic branding, and policy pressure--to secure corporate power, not student opportunity.--Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology

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Essential reading. Natasha Singer's Coding Kids is the best possible introduction for an urgent and necessary conversation about the ways technology reshapes reality.--Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation

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A necessary book for anyone trying to understand the powerful role of technology in the schools.--Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System

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Coding Kids reveals how the new norms surrounding educational technology came into being--and who benefits from the push to get every student to study computer science. (Hint: It's not the kids.) This is a must-read for parents, educators, and policymakers.--danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

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Are tech giants key to training the workforce of the future--or promoting narrow tech literacy over genuine education? Singer's thought-provoking critique will resonate with parents, educators, administrators, and even tech executives... A revelatory look at how tech companies convinced public educators to embrace coding classes--and AI.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Publisher Marketing:

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.

Contributor Bio:Singer, Natasha
Natasha Singer has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade. Her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting.