Back-to-school with Big Tech

**Terry Gross** (0:00)
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 when 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** (1:32)
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 going to 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 have to lock down the computer. So that might cost like $12 per kid per year. So they're 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 the Google apps for your schools, then you get Gemini, Google's chat bot. And 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 make PowerPoints or how to analyze data or how to code that the companies have funded or have made themselves. And those are often free.

**Terry Gross** (2:51)
How do the companies compete with each other to convince schools or, you know, school boards to buy their products as opposed to their competitor's products?

**Natasha Singer** (3:02)
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, the 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 chat bot, is one of the newcomers. And education is 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 an initial period of a year or so.