Back-to-school with Big Tech

September 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 1982, Apple gave an Apple II computer to nearly every school in California—thousands of them—after Steve Jobs personally lobbied Congress for a tax break on donations. The campaign was called "Kids Can't Wait," and it worked in California if not in Washington. That moment, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer explains in her new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, set a lasting pattern: a charismatic tech founder convinced that his company's product would transform education, sold as altruism, delivered with a long-term business logic. "If your kid comes home from school and says, 'Mom, we're using this Apple computer in class, can we buy one?'" Singer says, "it's also gonna help not just turn kids into lifelong Apple customers, but also get parents to buy these computers for home use." Four decades later, the playbook has only scaled up.

The Coding Campaign That Pivoted to AI

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What you'll learn

1 (00:17) **Back-to-School with Big Tech: The Opening Frame** - Terry Gross introduces the episode's central question: what are tech giants getting in return for influencing K-12 education, and how much are they shaping what children are taught?
2 (01:37) **The Business of School Tech: Donations vs. Purchases** - Singer explains the complex financial model where schools buy hardware and software but also receive free services, training, and digital lessons from tech giants.
3 (04:11) **Why Education is a Crucial Market for Tech** - Singer explains the strategic importance of targeting young students to create lifelong customers, and how newcomers like OpenAI are trying to break into the established market.
4 (06:03) **The Tension Between Tech Literacy and Corporate Curriculum** - Singer describes how tech companies shape what is taught by promoting their own tools, framing a narrow "AI literacy" that benefits their products.
5 (08:22) **The Rise and Fall of the Coding Promise** - Singer details how tech giants catalyzed computer science in schools, only to pivot to AI a decade later, leaving graduates with degrees in a field where jobs are being automated.
6 (11:10) **The Payoff for Tech Companies** - Singer analyzes what Google, Microsoft, and others actually gained from the coding push, concluding the main benefit was goodwill, not a direct hiring pipeline.
7 (12:43) **COVID as a Turning Point** - Singer explains how the pandemic accelerated the adoption of tech in schools, making remote learning a necessity and cementing the role of devices and online platforms.

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Guests on this episode

Natasha Singer

Show Notes

Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have been competing for years to get their devices, software and AI into public schools, even offering free training programs for teachers and students. These brands are helping shape what and how children learn. NYT reporter Natasha Singer says, “Some teachers are using AI to generate their lesson plans and assignments and their quizzes, and then kids are using AI to do them and then teachers are using AI to grade them. So we just have bots talking to bots. Is that what we want education to look like?”

Singer is the author of Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools. She spoke with Terry Gross.

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