Back-to-school with Big Tech

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 one hundred 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 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

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (46 minutes, 7,692 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.