The Pitch That Worked Too Well
For roughly two decades, American public schools accepted a bargain they didn’t fully read. Technology companies offered hardware, software, and an intoxicating vision of modernized learning – and school districts, strapped for funding and hungry for solutions, said yes. Natasha Singer’s new book, Coding Kids, reconstructs how that arrangement took hold, tracing the specific deals, personalities, and institutional pressures that drew public education into a deep and largely unexamined dependency on private corporations.
The book arrives at a moment when that dependency has curdled into backlash. Parents are pushing for phone bans. Legislators are scrutinizing student data practices. School boards that once competed to be seen as tech-forward are now fielding complaints about screen time and algorithmic grading. Singer’s reporting gives that backlash a history – and, more uncomfortably, a logic.
How the Courtship Happened
Singer is a technology reporter whose work has consistently focused on the institutional machinery behind consumer-facing products. In Coding Kids, she applies that same lens to education, examining how companies cultivated relationships with administrators, lobbied for curriculum changes, and positioned their products as civic goods rather than commercial ones. The argument wasn’t just “buy our software.” It was “prepare your students for the economy, or fall behind.” That framing made resistance feel irresponsible.
Public schools, by design, are accountable to communities in ways that corporations are not. They hold school board elections. They publish budgets. They answer to parents at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday. The companies that moved into classrooms operated under no such scrutiny. Singer’s account makes clear that this asymmetry – democratic institution meets private vendor – created conditions where schools were consistently the more vulnerable party in the negotiation, even when they believed they were getting a deal.
What Got Traded Away
The losses Singer documents aren’t always dramatic. Some are structural: when a district adopts a proprietary platform, it often loses the ability to move away from it without significant cost and disruption. Data migrates badly. Teachers retrain slowly. The switching costs become a form of lock-in that no one explicitly agreed to at the signing ceremony. What looked like a free tool in year one becomes load-bearing infrastructure by year five.
There’s also the question of what happened to the curriculum itself. Singer tracks how the push for coding education – backed by companies with an obvious interest in producing a pipeline of technical workers – reshaped what schools taught and how they framed success. Learning to code was packaged as a form of civic empowerment, a way to give every kid access to the future. The fact that it also served the hiring needs of the tech industry was treated as a coincidence rather than a design.
Student data sits at the center of several of the book’s sharpest passages. When schools adopt third-party platforms, they generate enormous quantities of information – about how individual students learn, where they struggle, how long they spend on particular tasks. That data has value, and the question of who owns it, who can sell it, and who can use it to build other products is one that most purchase agreements answered in favor of the vendor. Parents signing permission slips for field trips had no idea they were also consenting to the commercial ecosystem their children’s keystrokes were entering.
Singer is careful not to frame every tech company as predatory or every administrator as naive. Some of the relationships she examines were genuinely motivated by a desire to help students. The problem isn’t malice – it’s that the structural incentives pushed in one direction, and the institutions that were supposed to push back often didn’t have the legal expertise, the time, or the political will to do so. A superintendent managing a budget crisis and a teachers’ strike isn’t positioned to negotiate data licensing terms with a team of corporate lawyers.
The Backlash and Its Limits
The current wave of ed-tech skepticism is real, but Singer’s book implicitly raises questions about whether it’s aimed at the right targets. Banning phones in classrooms addresses one symptom without touching the underlying procurement relationships. A school can confiscate every device at the door and still be running its attendance, grading, and communication systems through platforms built by companies whose interests don’t automatically align with those of the students inside.
Legislation has moved in some states to tighten rules around student data. The Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, known as SOPIPA, passed in California in 2014 and has since influenced similar laws elsewhere. But enforcement is uneven, and the pace of product development in ed-tech consistently outstrips the pace of regulatory response. Singer’s account suggests the gap won’t close through awareness campaigns alone.
What the Book Actually Demands of Its Readers
Coding Kids belongs to a tradition of institutional criticism that asks readers to hold two uncomfortable ideas simultaneously: that the people who made these decisions weren’t necessarily wrong to want better outcomes for their students, and that the decisions themselves produced real harm. That’s a harder argument to make than simple villain-and-victim storytelling, and Singer’s reporting earns the complexity. She has spent years covering the companies involved – her work has appeared in The New York Times, where she has written extensively about the technology industry’s relationship with public institutions – and the book reflects that depth of sourcing.
The ed-tech moment Singer is describing didn’t end. The same companies that built the infrastructure of the 2010s classroom are now positioning artificial intelligence tools as the next phase of educational modernization. The pitch is familiar: efficiency, personalization, better outcomes for every student regardless of background. School districts are already in early conversations about AI tutoring platforms, automated essay grading, and tools that flag at-risk students before teachers notice anything is wrong. The contract negotiations happening in district offices right now will shape classrooms for the next decade, and the administrators sitting across the table from vendor representatives are working with the same structural disadvantages Singer spent a book documenting.
Whether anyone in those rooms has read it is another question entirely.
