Schools are catching onto tech’s playbook
The Vergecast
This episode of The Vergecast explores how big tech companies have long embedded their products into U.S. classrooms through initiatives lik
Key takeaways
- Tech companies have historically promoted their products as transformative for education, from Edison's projectors to modern AI tools, often driven by both idealism and business interests.
- Studies like One Laptop Per Child in Peru show that simply providing technology does not improve learning outcomes, yet many schools adopt tech without rigorous evidence of effectiveness.
Main topics
- The history of tech in education
- Code.org and the rise of computer science in schools
Notable quotes
We see it already. Last year was like, oh, we can't have code-a-thons anymore because kids don't need to code. We'll have prompt-a-thons.
Conclusion
While big tech continues to push its latest innovations into schools, educators are beginning
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:02) Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of deep lobbying. I'm Lauren Feiner, The Verge's senior policy reporter. Code.org was the splashy nonprofit that led a massive celebrity-laden campaign in the 2010s for kids across the U.S. to learn computer science and gain skills they needed for the workforce. But at the same time, there was a modest group of academics seeking to introduce a new type of computer science course into schools. They had a goal of expanding the kinds of students who entered the field. In a new book, Coding Kids, New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer charts the path of both of these efforts and explains how a tech industry-created computer science curriculum became commonplace in many schools and what that means now that those same companies are laying off engineers and prioritizing different skills in the AI era. I wanted to hear more from Natasha about what she's observed over the years covering tech's immersion into public schools. and whether school districts are prepared for industry efforts to replicate the success for AI. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. Speaker 1 (1:03) I'm Senior Reviews Editor Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 10th, 2026. An anthropic researcher quit, saying the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, but are recklessly pursuing development anyway. A current anthropic employee agreed and said there was a greater than 10 % chance of that happening. Notably, there was no mention of a plan to stop that. A couple weeks ago, I would have said this is the same tired, oh no, our AI is too powerful, please give us more money, playbook. But that was a couple autonomous hacking swarms ago. Speaking of AI, reporter Emma Roth tried Meta's new Muse AI agent, which launched yesterday. Meta says it can take the busy work off your plate by helping with your emails, planning your trips, doing your shopping, and more. Emma says it's creepy. Mark Zuckerberg says you can trust Muse. Yes, trust Muse. Muse is your friend. You don't need to do your own emails. Muse can do them. Jimmy Kimmel's interview with Texas Democrat James Tallarico, who is running for U.S. Senate, will not air on television thanks to threats from the FCC. Brendan Carr is such a dummy. And finally, Apple posted a TikTok implying an iPhone and an iPad mini. We're about to do it. We saw it and you have to see it too. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 10th, 2026. Speaker 4 (2:22) I'm Ina Garten. On my new podcast, Happy Hour with Ina, I'm inviting really interesting guests to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with chefs, actors, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. Subscribe to Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be available every Wednesday starting September 16th. Speaker 6 (2:59) Have you ever wondered why a band as big as Fleetwood Mac would break up? Well, I'm Will Anderson, and this week on my music history podcast, The Monday Music Club, we dive into that question and all the drama surrounding Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and the rest of Fleetwood Mac. Jump in and listen to this week's episode. All you have to do is search Monday Music Club right now, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (3:20) All right, Natasha Singer, welcome to The Verge Cast. Thanks for having me, Lauren. So I want to start back in the early 1910s, because this push that you described to use tech to improve education is really nothing new. And you write about how even Thomas Edison had some ideas about how technology would revolutionize education. Can you tell me a little bit about what his idea was there? So Speaker 8 (3:45) I found these articles in The New York Times from like 1912. And Thomas Edison had invented this thing that showed. moving pictures, right? And it was a projector. And he just thought, this should be in every school because books are boring and they're like rote and teachers teach them in boring ways and my machine will be super engaging and we should just throw out all the books and put these projectors in every classroom and we'll show films about people and news and animals and kids will be riveted and they'll want to come to school. Speaker 2 (4:22) And what I found fascinating about that is for the next, you know, more than a century, these prominent tech innovators have been making similar arguments. You just have to change the product that they're pushing. And like, it's so interesting to me that like we have this tradition in the United States of Speaker 8 (4:39) these like charismatic, powerful innovators who believe the thing they made is going to transform education for the better. And then we see that, you know, decades later with Steve Jobs. Apple is a new company. It's the early 1980s. They've invented these very compelling desktop computers. And Steve Jobs is like, we got to get one in every school because it's going to transform education. It's going to democratize learning. It's going to make kids creative. Right. And then decades later. we have Google, like we've invented the Chromebook Speaker 2 (5:07) and it's cheap and it's sturdy and it's going to democratize access to education and give kids really great career skills. And now we have AI, right? And if we just give every kid their own chatbot, it's going to democratize learning and customize learning and teach kids these important career skills. And so it's remarkable that we have these Speaker 8 (5:24) cycles of tech in schools and we have these brilliant innovators. I would say the vast majority of them men. who think that their products can transform learning. And they are hopeful and they are well-meaning, but it's also their business Speaker 2 (5:42) imperatives, right? Edison wanted to sell more projectors, right? Apple, you know, wants to sell more iPads to schools. Google and Microsoft want more schools to use their AI products. So it's like this combination of good intentions, but also there's a business motive underneath. Yeah, definitely. Speaker 3 (6:00) So I wanted to dive in a little bit into what we actually know about whether adding all this technology into schools actually helps. Does it actually improve the learning process? And you write a little bit about this in your book. So can you share a little bit about what we actually know about whether this actually helps Speaker 2 (6:20) learning? So there was a study in Peru. There was a program called One Laptop Per Child where Speaker 8 (6:28) Nonprofit groups and tech companies tried to get one laptop per child in countries around the world. And so countries like Peru and Uruguay tried this. And in the Peru study, it involved more than 500 rural schools looking at if you give every kid a laptop, what happens over a decade. And they found that it did not improve learning outcomes. It definitely increased the use of computers by students, and it improved their using computer skills. But it did not affect... educational outcomes. And Uruguay found something similar. And so you could say, okay, that's like Uruguay or that's Peru, but like maybe that doesn't have worldwide implications. But I was talking to UNESCO and they pointed to a report they put out a few years ago in which UNESCO, which is, you know, the United Nations Education Agency, said that there was little rigorous evidence that digital technology improves educational outcomes. And more than that, they said there are very few studies that are rigorous about educational technology and that most of those studies are funded or done by the companies wanting to sell their tools to schools. And there was also a line in the UNESCO report that was talking about, you know, when teachers adopt new tech, a lot of the time they're not asking, show me a rigorous study that this thing will improve educational outcomes. Speaker 3 (7:49) That's really fascinating. Yeah. So with that kind of context in place, I wanted to kind of go back to the creation of Code.org. And, you know, it's the Obama era. Tech CEOs are basically celebrities. And you talk about a former Microsoft executive named Hadi Pertovi, who comes up with this idea to launch a movement around getting kids to learn code with a viral YouTube video. Speaker 7 (8:15) And none of us know how to read and Speaker 3 (8:17) write code. Speaker 7 (8:18) Man, I don't care. I think it's cool. And, you know, I'm learning a lot. Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. Speaker 3 (8:26) In that clip, you hear from the Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am. You hear from NBA star Chris Bosh. And then you hear from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. This video just blows up, but Partovi didn't really have a plan of what to do after he stoked all of this enthusiasm. So can you talk about what his approach was like to this problem? The tech industry had identified as a lack of coding talent and how that was informed by VC and Speaker 2 (8:57) startup norms. Hadi Partovi had worked at Microsoft. He'd also started startups, and he was an early investor in... things that were startups at the time, like Facebook and Uber. And so what Speaker 8 (9:10) Heidi did, and like he's a brilliant, charming, charismatic person who is an unbelievable strategist. And he used the Speaker 2 (9:20) strategies that like you normally use in startups, like audience generation and viral marketing, but he applied it to education. And I haven't seen anybody do it at that scale. So as you point out, he starts, Speaker 8 (9:32) he launches this group. Code.org with his twin brother. And they make this video on YouTube and it goes viral and has all these tech celebrities. And then it generates all