Notes on Tech and the classroom
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?”
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Years ago, I asked three Madison k-12 Superintendent candidates if they preferred to hire the most capable teachers or whomever and tell them what to do. They answered with a mashup. Tech tools are, imho, a response to any number of real or perceived issues.
