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In her new book, Coding Kids: Big Tech鈥檚 Battle to Remake Public Schools, , a veteran business reporter for The New York Times, traces Big Tech鈥檚 bid to persuade schools to embrace their products, with industry-sponsored curricula and tools growing at astonishing speed. She also introduces readers to a group of educators and researchers fighting for a broader vision of computer science that looks beyond commercial digital tools.

A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley鈥檚 campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma鈥檚 influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.

鈥淣ever has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,鈥� she writes.

As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students 鈥渙nly half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.鈥� 

In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple鈥檚 programming language for building iPhone apps. It鈥檚 as if schools embraced a 鈥淩aytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,鈥� she writes.

Singer finds both problematic and promising moves by tech over the past decade or more. While she calls out the nonprofit for skewing the idea of computer science to coding that often helps serve corporate interests, she lauds its founder, Iran-born entrepreneur , for making coding appealing and fun to millions of young people, telling 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo that U.S. public schools likely wouldn鈥檛 offer computer science at this scale if not for Partovi.

鈥淚 don’t know anybody else that’s been able to do that,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 think that did change the world.鈥�

Ahead of the book鈥檚 release on Tuesday, Toppo and Singer talked about her findings and the lessons that the tech industry is now taking into the fight to get into schools. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book spends a lot of time with Partovi and Code.org. Would you say it is basically a positive influence?

Natasha Singer: Code.org catalyzed computer science in schools. They also partnered with a lot of big tech companies and brought in commercial things 鈥� the Hour of Code has the lessons and Elsa the lessons and the Microsoft lessons and the Code Your Own lessons, and so it also brought in a kind of commercialism that I have questions about. I don’t think we would have computer science at this scale in schools if not for Code.org.

One of the key takeaways of this book is that there are other ways to do computer science in schools. In fact, if there’s a hero, it’s , who says Code.org and other groups are mostly just getting middle-class white boys interested in coding. Can you tell us about her? 

Jane Margolis is an incredible researcher. She grew up in Berkeley, Calif., during the ’60s, and she went to UC Berkeley. She was a Vietnam War protester and then she was a labor activist. She worked for the telephone company 鈥� at the time, it was Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, and there she saw these gender biases at work because she worked as an operator, the person who sat at the switchboard with all those wires plugging in calls. Male employees were allowed to be linemen, and they would go outside and climb these telephone poles and install phones, and she was trying to unionize the women to say that job should be open to everyone. Her view was that women need to have technical skills and equal opportunity to technical careers. Eventually, she goes to Harvard and gets a Ph.D in education, and she’s looking at gender disparities. Harvard has this government department, and it was inhospitable to women, and so she did her thesis about why boys were shouting down girls and pushing girls out of political science. 

She starts in computer science in the ’90s at Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon, as you know, is at the forefront of computer science education and robotics and computer vision. They were one of the first to start a dedicated college of computer science, as opposed to a major. But a couple of years in, they realize that only 7% of the people majoring in computer science are girls, and they can鈥檛 figure out why. 

, who’s the associate dean at Carnegie Mellon, hires Margolis, and together they do a study looking at why it is that women are not going into computer science and are dropping out. And they find there are all these factors, one of which is that families are buying personal computers. She found by interviewing male and female students that the boys would be like, 鈥淥h yeah, my dad or my uncle went to Radio Shack and brought home this TRS-80 computer and put it in my room, so I fooled around and learned to code, and then my neighbor came over 鈥� he’s a software engineer.鈥� So by the time the boys show up at Carnegie Mellon, many of them have already taken computer science in high school. They know what they’re doing. And some girls have no experience, so they’re already feeling behind by Day One. 

It wasn’t just that girls were left out. It’s that when girls tried to take computer science in high school, often the guidance counselors would say to them, “Oh, you don’t really want to do this,” or “You’re not going to do well,” or “It’s going to hurt your grade-point average.” There were all kinds of socio-cultural things going on 鈥� sexism and a whole bunch of other stuff that dissuaded girls. 

And so they wrote this report at Carnegie Mellon, and they did all kinds of things to attract girls to computer science. There had been a requirement that if you wanted to major in computer science, you had to have taken it in high school. But of course, girls were dissuaded from taking it in high school. So one of the things that Carnegie Mellon did, they looked at other students who might have been good at math or sciences but didn’t necessarily take computer science, or who were leaders in their schools 鈥� perseverance qualities that make you good at computer science. Within a few years, the percentage of girls taking computer science shot up. 

And then Jane Margolis was like, “O.K., we now understand how to get more girls in computer science, but the percentage of African-American students, Latino students, lower-income students is even worse. She then becomes a researcher at UCLA. She works with Los Angeles public schools. They find similar problems of Black and brown and low-income students being dissuaded from taking computer science. So they come up with a course to make computer science more welcoming. 

Her whole idea is that if you do not grow up with a computer in your house, or you don’t know how to code, and you show up to computer science class and the first thing is computer programming, and the second thing is computer programming, and the tenth thing is computer programming, you may be turned off before you even know what it is.

So they created a class to explain to students who were first-timers: How does the internet work? How does a computer work? What is a motherboard? What is a central processing unit? And how are you using tech in your life? And do you know how an email gets to you? How are platforms 鈥� at the time it was more like and Facebook 鈥� shaping your life as a student? And then eventually, when they learn a whole bunch of stuff about how the technology works and why it’s interesting, then they start programming. 

And it’s not programming for programming’s sake. They made wearable computers 鈥� they had wristbands that had LED lights so they could make creative patterns. They could spell out their name, these wristbands, but they had to use computing to make it work. They had to program the designs. They made a lot of progress with this course, not just in Los Angeles but in Chicago. It was called Exploring Computer Science, and it began to grow slowly. 

Then the tech industry comes along and says, “We have this crisis: We need more programmers and software engineers, and every kid needs to learn to code.” And a lot of those courses were programming-centric, and I have to say some of them also included social aspects such as the ethical use of computing. But this notion that we live in a world surrounded by machines and it’s crucial for young people to understand how these things work in order to have agency and navigate them, that’s the idea that Jane Margolis was arguing for 20 years ago.

I want to ask about this story from 2015 that you tell about the course, which brought together the National Science Foundation, Code.org, Apple, and others. Can you briefly tell that story?

There was a leader at the National Science Foundation named . She was running a program called . And she was charged with broadening participation at the university level 鈥� that is, getting more women and African-American students and Latino students and students with disabilities and Native American students and others in computer science, because they’ve been historically marginalized. And she’s watching what Jane Margolis and others are doing in Los Angeles and around the country. And she realizes that the problem starts before kids get to college. 

So she gives millions of dollars to universities to develop different AP courses. The kind of course she envisioned to broaden participation in computer science didn’t exist at universities because universities took hardcore first-semester computer science that was designed to weed out people, and so she funded different universities, including UT Austin and the University of Washington and Trinity College, to develop more like Computer Science Zero, an online course that would look similar to what Jane Margolis was doing. It would teach you how the internet worked, it would teach you some data science, it would teach you some programming, it would teach you to think about the social impacts of technology. It would be a new AP course called Computer Science Principles, and you could take it as the intro. And then if you liked it you would go on and take AP Computer Science, which was much more rigorous and much more programming oriented.

So she convinces the College Board that they need to do this. And then, from Jan Cuny’s point of view, out of nowhere, The College Board announces that it’s partnered with Code.org to launch , a Code.org course, and then they announce that they have endorsed specific curriculum, including the Code.org one, but they later endorsed an AP Computer Science course from , which teaches kids to code in , Apple’s programming language for iPhone apps, and they also endorse a Microsoft course called . And Jan Cuny 鈥� NSF has funded a lot of this 鈥� is really stunned because nobody had told her beforehand that the College Board was going to . But also: Why weren’t they endorsing the ones that she funded? 

So she called The College Board and was like, “You’ve got to endorse all these courses then.” And by the way, the [AP] course was a smash success. Hundreds of thousands of kids took it. It was an introduction to computing that was broad for a lot of kids who didn’t know what it was. It did diversify who was taking computer science, although it’s still very skewed toward boys.聽

But her point was that if you are trying to make a broad course that tries to get more kids of different backgrounds into computer science, Apple products skew to higher-resourced schools and higher-resourced kids. I read some of the Apple textbook, and there are lines like, “You can use this to make an app for your iPhone or even your Apple Watch.” This Apple course assumes that you have an Apple Watch. And Jan Cuny was like, “That’s not what we were doing when we were trying to broaden participation in computer science.”

I went back to the College Board, and they said, “When you’re broadening participation in computer science, you have to broaden it to everybody, and there are schools that do have MacBooks, and so maybe this course will work for them, whereas other courses won’t. It’s an array; you don’t have to use this one. You can use all of them or different ones.”

But for me, there are anomalies with having companies operate in schools, and the AP Apple curriculum and AP Microsoft curriculum show the unusual ways that tech companies influence schools that many other industries do not.

Fast-forward to 2026: Now we’re dealing with AI, and obviously tech is reading from a similar playbook. But it feels somehow different to me. I mean, we’ve had social media trials and , and these tech bros aren’t the white-hatted heroes we used to think they were. Does this moment seem different to you?

This moment is different, but also similar. We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against , against , that there’s this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control 鈥� that tech is being enacted on them.

And then when we talk about the social media trials and the big verdicts against Meta, both the one with dozens of states where Meta now has to pay $17 billion, but also the one earlier in the summer where New Mexico got in a judgment against Meta, those companies are no longer our darlings. And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids’ compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there’s a different climate. And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say “We’ve partnered with OpenAI.” “We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School,” or “We’ve partnered with Microsoft, and we’re going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot.” It’s amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data’s going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don’t learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we’re in the sixth or eighth cycle of this 鈥� and shouldn’t we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we’ve learned about the push for all the other things that came before? 

I visited this school in Newark where two teachers had launched an AI literacy class because they were worried their high school seniors were going to graduate into a world with AI and not know anything about it. I went to the first class, and the teacher said, “We need to be honest with you. You’re the first kids we’re gonna do this class with. We don’t know how to teach this. We don’t know what you want to learn. And a year from now, this is gonna look completely different.” And there was this kind of honesty and humbleness: We, the teachers, are in it together with you, the students, and we’re gonna learn how AI works. 

They learned rigorous stuff, and they also learned to make stuff with AI. They weren’t just critical of AI, but they did it together. And if kids found something interesting, they went with that. And it’s a really hard thing for schools to know that we actually need to prepare kids about AI because they’re using it already, but in fact, we don’t know what to do yet, and this is going to rapidly change. That’s a really big challenge.

I was heartened by the chapters near the end where you go into classrooms. People are really embracing a new way to do this stuff.  

You know, I feel optimistic and upbeat about this new generation of teachers that want to equip students with broad critical thinking skills 鈥� and that involves both learning how the tech works and learning to use the tech and make stuff with AI, but also to understand the provenance of these AI tools and to understand that we have companies with more power than most countries, and we’ve never had that before. They are setting the rules we live by. So you have to understand how the tools are steering us.

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