What We Lost When Big Tech Took Over the Classroom

It’s surprising that the inBloom debacle doesn’t appear prominently in “Coding Kids,” which arguably devotes too much of its real estate to the starry, fake-it-till-you-make-it likes of Code.org. “What Most Schools Don’t Teach” eventually logged more than sixteen million views and drove heavy traffic to Code.org’s website, even though, as Singer writes, Code.org did not yet “have its own programming lessons, or any other tangible education product or service, to offer its eager audience of teachers and students.” By the end of 2013, Code.org had managed to launch an annual event, the Hour of Code, which offered free “tutorials”—drag-and-drop puzzles featuring, say, Disney princesses or Minecraft voxels or Barbie—in classrooms and in Apple and Microsoft retail stores. The organization later worked with the College Board to develop “instructional resources” for a new Advanced Placement class, Computer Science Principles, which launched in 2016. And millions of public-school teachers and students have used Code.org’s videos and worksheets.

Educators and parents who oppose the encroachment of Big Tech into schools are sometimes criticized for lacking a vision of the future that isn’t either dystopian or Luddite-lite. Yet the techno-vangelists of Silicon Valley aren’t necessarily gifted with foresight, either. The objective of the “Learn to code” messaging blitz of the twenty-tens was to equip children with the skills they would need for the tech-industry jobs of tomorrow, but this goal has been significantly thwarted by the tech industry itself, in which generative and agentic A.I. has streamlined much of the work of writing, testing, and correcting code. Kids who might have caught the programming bug during an Hour of Code in the twenty-tens are now entering a dismal market for recent computer-science graduates, as A.I. has made many entry-level tech jobs obsolete. (Tech-sector layoffs and federal-workforce cuts have also contributed to the dismal employment picture.)

This trajectory is embodied by Code.org’s most famous champion, Barack Obama. In 2013, Hadi Partovi, a co-founder of Code.org, persuaded the President to record a video to kick off Computer Science Education Week and the first Hour of Code. “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future—it’s important for your country’s future,” Obama said in the video. The following year, Obama visited a high school in Newark to participate in an Hour of Code, where he donned a Code.org baseball cap and used a laptop decorated with a Code.org sticker. By 2025, however, Obama was opining that “unless you are really good—like, one of the top one per cent in terms of understanding how to code—you’re better off with a liberal-arts education.” Partovi, who is an alumnus of Microsoft, has remarked that A.I. has obviated much of the “busywork of computer science.” In June, his organization announced that it was “entering its next chapter,” and rebranded itself as CodeAI.

The nonprofit’s website currently features a list of top donors: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the private-equity firm Vista, the Gates Foundation, and the Ballmer Group, the last of these named for another former Microsoft C.E.O. and centi-billionaire, Steve Ballmer. Each of these oligarchic fun houses has staked a significant share of its future wealth—and, together, the future of the global economy—on the rapid expansion of A.I. technology.

The coding missionaries of the twenty-tens made errors both practical and philosophical. They were wrong, obviously, about computer-programming skills as a guarantor of students’ future employment prospects. But that miscalculation was, itself, premised on the unexamined assumption that a K-12 public education should be essentially vocational and therefore—almost by definition—aligned with corporate interests. In 2021, David Banks, then the incoming chancellor of New York City Public Schools, gave a speech in which he lamented that the city’s schools were producing graduates who “don’t even have the skills to go into industry.” Teachers, he went on, were failing to address an urgent question: “What is it like to work at a place like a Google or a Microsoft?”