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

by Natasha Singer

The inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America.

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.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Technology, Politics

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 8, 2026

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Rating 3.5 stars

This is a book advocating critical thinking about what Big Tech is doing while they are helping educate our children. That is good, but I'm not entirely sure why Big Tech in our schools is bad. It seems inevitable and in many ways it is good for Big Tech and the students. So... since it is inevitable, it is good that we teach our kids to think critically about what is actually going on here.

Big Tech has a vested interest in promoting their hardware/software to students and academics because students eventually become consumers and they will buy what they are familiar with rather that learn a different system. The school systems benefit by getting good products that work well and that cost a lot less than (or are free) compared to the crappy, expensive stuff that schools used to use... and it was expensive and difficult to use.

The problem, of course, it that when one company tries to help students there is also a tendency to promote the product... often beyond it's capabilities. An example is AI. While learning how to prompt AI to produce things that can be useful, it pulls the students away from learning critical things... like how to write a sentence. As long as you have AI doing it for you, it probably doesn't matter... like when calculators came out. Slide rules helped you think and estimate, but calculators helped you focus on your end goal without spending so much time on the process. As long as you had a calculator, no problem, but as we know, when the battery dies or we lose connection with the Internet, we are suddenly stuck.

OK... enough ranting. I don't think I said anything that the book didn't say.

Any problems with this book? Yes. It focused a lot on how minorities are missing out on computers because minorities are poor or working after school. There are a lot of hidden assumptions about that. I was thinking... Hey, India isn't exactly living in the lap of luxury either. They work hard and a lot of good tech people come from India. And I am a minority, straight outta Compton. I was in Big Tech. If you are running a Dell computer, I'm willing to bet you are running some of my code right now. My family was poor. I worked after school. I didn't even turn on a computer until I was in college, but I manged to work my way into some really sweet tech jobs creating computers.

So... the book had too much crying about minorities as if it was the school's job to hobble the white kids until the minorities (like me) could catch up. I caught up just fine. Some of my friends got some help, but the help they were given wasn't really help. It was support for their self-esteem rather than a good kick in the backside so they could get to work like they should.

The book is a mixed bag, but the general idea is correct. Think critically about what you are doing when you accept help from Big Tech. You are their future customer, and they will suck every drop of blood from you if you let them. Don't let them.

I might read this book again for reference.

[Bob H · Rating 5 out of 5]

With AI now a public concern, notably in American schools and university, this book fills in much background. It's not a spoiler to say that AI itself comes up late in the book. This book is a broader history of tech in its evolving forms -- computer science courses, computer programming courses, coding courses -- over decades. Throughout the first half of the book, we see the imbalances in race, economic class, and gender in these classes and among young tech workers, and we learn that some of the women in these early tech years noticed it. Some, notably people like Jane Margolis, one of a number of pioneering observers, switched from computer study to demographics. It started with anomalies in college admissions and undergraduate computer classes, and trace back to imbalances in middle and high schools. Economic class factors into this: students who are having to work after school or look after family, we find, are less able to compete in tech while kids who grew up tinkering with Commodore or early Apple computers had a considerable head start.

We also find that computer tech, and, more and more, AI, is something that schools and colleges didn't necessarily adopt, but had tech infiltrating in the form of product placement, free online hookups, free laptops, free software and apps. Online apps and AI were more and more creeping into curricula and classroom work. This book ably describes this, and the narrative is peopled not just with the star tech executives but less-known pioneers, like Ms. Margolis, and innovators like Ali and Hadi Partovi, and groundbreaking firms like code.com. Indeed, code.com threads through the book, and its story is worth knowing.

In all, this book spans wide areas of education, computer and social history and couldn't be more timely. Highly recommend.
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Advance review copy provided by the Amazon Vine program.

[Lauren Avance · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. The research was there. My biggest beef was just that it's not so much about the impact tech in schools has on kids and it's about how big tech companies used their money and influence to gain more money and influence by convincing schools that they were needed.

[Readery · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptionally deep history of computer scientism, and of how tech companies built a playbook for colonizing public education with their own tools and ideas. Reading it is like watching a company town go up, except what you see first is the free, mandatory Chromebook, while unproven theories of pedagogy take root almost unnoticed. The author shows how some boys were steered into computer science while girls' interest in how technology affects society was pushed to the margins. The book also gives voice to women in computing who raised early, deeper concerns about the disparities that were emerging.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an advanced copy of this book that I got for free at a library conference, so I’m not sure how much was edited and changed for the official publication. The information in the book is great and so important. I didn’t prefer the organization of the content and it was hard for me to get through it. But the information and overall point of the book is good and important

[Cherie · Rating 2.75 out of 5]

Listened to this in audiobook format (and didn't love the voice). This is a very in-depth (maybe too in-depth for your casual listener, but good for educators and those concerned about schooling) look at how big tech shifted the way that tech is taught in schools and the way big tech used their money to shift public school education.

[Ryan Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so relevant and so incredibly timely. As children have laptops in their schools and in increasingly use AI for communication. Without a doubt there is a place for computer, computers, and artificial intelligence, but it is up to our society to figure out exactly what that is.

[Erin Speese · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have any interest in public education and technology, this is a must read. Singer clearly documents the way Big Tech embedded itself in the public education system while maximizing profits.