Schools are catching onto tech’s playbook

0:02Welcome to The VergeCast, 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.

0:42And 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. 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.

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3:09You can hear it all here by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Natasha Singer, welcome to The Vergecast. 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 I found these articles in The New York Times from like 1912. And Thomas Edison had invented this thing that showed moving pictures, right?

3:55And 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. 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.

4:33And like, it's so interesting to me that like we have this tradition in the United States of 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've got to get one in every school because it's going to transform education. It's going to democratize learning. is going to make kids creative, right? And then decades later, we have Google, like we've invented the Chromebook and it's cheap and it's sturdy and it's going to democratize access to education and give kids really great career skills.

5:11And 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 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 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.

5:50So it's like this combination of good intentions, but also there's a business motive underneath. Yeah, definitely. 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 learning? So there was a study in Peru. there was a program called One Laptop Per Child, where nonprofit groups and tech companies tried to get one laptop per child in countries around the world.

6:31And 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, OK, 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.

7:21And 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. 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.

8:01And you talk about a former Microsoft executive named Hadi Pratovi, who comes up with this idea to launch a movement around getting kids to learn code with a viral YouTube video. And none of us know how to read and write code. 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. In that clip, you hear from the Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am, you hear from NBA star Chris Bosch, and then you hear from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. This video just blows up. But Partofi didn't really have a plan of what to do after he stoked all of this enthusiasm.

8:44So 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 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 Heidi did, and like he's a brilliant, charming, charismatic person who is an unbelievable strategist. And he used the 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.

9:27So as you point out, he starts, 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 this enthusiasm because suddenly parents and teachers and kids are going, wow, like, this is fun. Look at all these billionaires who started these companies. Maybe I could be the next Steve Jobs or I could be the next Bill Gates. It becomes a phenomena, and Code.org really makes coding a household word in the United States. But then, having sort of ginned up all this enthusiasm, the task is, how do we make this actually scale in schools?

10:09How do we get computer science into schools? And here I have to say, a lot of researchers and education groups and others had been working to get computer science in schools for decades. and there were programs across the country trying to do this, but they didn't operate on this scale of Code.org, but also they didn't have this startup-y view about how you could change education. They had a view that, like, you put something in a school, you study it, if it improves outcomes, you put it in another school, it was like traditional education research. And you want that. You want to have the outcomes.

10:40But Hadi's, you know, an entrepreneur, and so, like, let's build it first. And so he came up with the idea for this thing, Hour of Code. We want to get 10 million students to do the Hour of Code. Hour of Code. Hour of Code. The Hour of Code. Hour of Code. Hour of Code. Hour of Code. The Hour of Code. He wanted to get millions of kids across the world in their schools to all code at the same time. And his argument was, if we just get kids coding for an hour, using lessons that are fun and engaging, then it will demystify coding. And it won't seem so scary if you're somebody who's like not a hacker stereotype, right?

11:19Because at the time, you know, with a Facebook movie and other things, like the stereotype of a computer scientist was like Mark Zuckerberg. And so if you were a girl or a kid from a low-income family or, you know, black and brown students, right, you didn't see yourself in computing. And so he starts the Hour of Code and he launches it in December. There's something called Computer Science Education Week. It was 2013. and he got buy-in from Microsoft and Google and Apple. Many of the companies held Hour of Code tutorials in their stores. Schools across the world held these events and it became like a coding holiday.

11:59And I don't know if you've ever been to a school where there's an Hour of Code, but I did a lot of Hour of Codes for this book, right? And it's infectious. You do a little thing and then it works and you just want to do another little thing. Like you can like code a droid to go through a maze or you can code Ilsa, the princess from Frozen, to skate around the ice. But like one of the most popular ones is this hour of cold called Dance Party. And you can make your own like animated music video. And what you see if you go to classes where this is happening is like kids get out of their seats and they're dancing around to the videos they made and then they want to make another one.

12:31And so this is kind of a startup technique to like grow your audience and get them fascinated. And at the same time, you know, the second viral thing that Code.org did, then they developed at the same time lessons for schools. So you could have a semester or year long computer science program. And they trained teachers and they went from state to state advocating for states to pass laws to fund computer science, train computer science teachers, require schools to teach computer science. And they also got about a dozen states to pass laws requiring computer science as a graduation rate. So Code.org, backed by Google and Microsoft, really made computer science one of the most desirable subjects at a time in public schools.

13:20It's really interesting here because in your book, we see that at the same time, there was kind of this competing effort that was led by academics and, you know, this very methodical approach to getting more kids to take computer science in schools. So can you describe what the researchers you wrote about who were trying to come up with the idea for AP computer science principles, what they were trying to do and how their approach differed from Code.org's? Yes. There was an amazing researcher at the University UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, named Jay Margolis, who is one of the central characters in the book.

14:00And she and others had this idea that, like, there are a lot of kids who don't have computers at home or maybe never coded before and don't even see themselves in this industry. and we need to have a broader-based course that is not centered on programming to get them interested in this and show them they can do this. And so they developed a course called Exploring Computer Science, which was a broad-based course that taught kids, like, how does the internet work? What is a computer? Is your phone a computer? That taught them a little bit of data science that asked them to think about the consequences of tech for society and then also taught them how to code.

14:38But it was like you need context to understand the power of tech and the power of these companies and the power of computer science to get kids who've never coded before into it. And so then you asked about AP Computer Science. There was a program officer at the National Science Foundation, and her name is Jan Cooney. And her job was at the college level to broaden the participation of students in computer science because it was a field dominated by white and Asian men. And she, you know, her job was to get more women into computer science, more African-American students, more students with disabilities, more low-income students, more Latino students into computer science.

15:15And she realized that the problem was not at the university level. It was happening much earlier in high schools and middle schools. And she had seen what the researchers were doing at UCLA and developed and funded, you know, this exploring computer science course. And she's like, we need this at the high school level. We need a new AP course that will get high school students introduced to computer science. And at the time, you know, there was a decade old computer science course called AP Computer Science A, and it was just pure programming, right? It's like you take Russian and you learn Russian language and Russian syntax, but like you're not going to read the great Russian novels, right?

15:53You're not going to learn Russian history. You're just going to learn like, you know, is the Cyrillic character in the right place? And so that AP course, you know, the programming course, was very non-diverse. Like the majority of the students were boys. And, you know, it was very narrowly attuned to we're going to teach these high schoolers to program and then they'll major it in college. So Jane Cooney goes to the College Board, which runs the AP program, which, as you know, is like basically one of the few national programs that sets standards for high school courses. Getting a new AP course, you know, is a huge thing.

16:31The College Board doesn't launch new courses very often. But Trevor Packer, who was head of the AP program, felt like, yeah, the AP computer science course we teach now is, what he said, horrifically non-diverse. We need to try something new. And so he greenlights an effort to create this new course. And Jan Cooney at the National Science Foundation funds it. And it's much more broad based and it's designed to be an on-ramp. And they launched it, you know, and hundreds of thousands of kids have taken it now. And it is a much broader approach to computer science than the standard programming class.

17:05Where have these two things ended up? Like, how has the success of the AP Computer Science Principles and Exploring Computer Science curricula gone compared to the success and, you know, scale of Code.org? Code.org became one of the largest providers of AP Computer Science Principles curriculum. And one of the efforts, you know, from Code.org, from the National Science Foundation, from the Exploring Computer Science group, from everybody was there actually aren't enough people who can teach computer science, right? because it's a specialized area. Like, you don't suddenly start teaching physics if you don't know physics.

17:41Well, what Code.org did was it created these packaged curriculums. So even if you'd never taught it before, if you were a math teacher or a biology teacher or even like a school technology specialist, you would be able to teach this course. And many teachers I talked to decided to teach the Code.org course. One of the most unusual things, though, about this AP course was the College Board approved a number of curriculum providers to provide these box curriculums to teachers. It doesn't do that in any other subject, right? In other courses like English or biology, the College Board has standards and tells teachers what they need to teach kids to take the exam.

18:24And then the teachers develop the curriculum. But because, you know, they wanted to grow computer science, they approved box curriculum and including, you know, approving university courses that have been developed for AP computer science and the code.org course. The College Board began approving box curriculums from tech companies like Microsoft and Apple. So there's an Apple AP computer science course that teaches kids to program in Swift, which is Apple's programming language, and another one from Microsoft, which is like learn to code using Microsoft's Minecraft for education. And what's striking about this is, you know, like you can imagine that parents would not want, say, Pfizer AP biology, right, or Northrop Grumman AP physics, right, or ExxonMobil environmental science AP.

19:18So it's striking that, like, the College Board approved the Apple course and Microsoft courses for AP, something it does in no other subject. Yeah, and why do you think it did do that? And, you know, was it just that these were seen as more benevolent actors at the time? Or what was different from other industries where maybe the College Board would have said no way? So I talked to the College Board about this. And Trevor Packer said, we wanted to grow this course and we vetted all these curriculums and they're all rigorous. And we didn't distinguish between a university that developed a curriculum for AP computer science principles and a tech company.

20:03We looked at the rigor of the course. And it's democratizing, the College Board argues, because if you're a well-resourced suburban high school in which every kid has a MacBook, the Apple AP course might be perfect for you because your kids are using Apple devices. And so the College Board said it was a choice. You know, I think there is, though, a way you might be able to read the story of Code.org and the tech company's development of this curricula versus the curricula developed by academics as kind of a way that bureaucracy and academia maybe moves too slowly. And the way that tech is structured to move quickly and disrupt may actually, you know, kind of bring these skills to students more quickly and prepare them in time for the challenges of the modern day.

20:57So I'm curious how you think about that way of reading the situation and, you know, if there is kind of context missing from that sort of interpretation. You know, I talked to tech industry executives and interviewed them for my book, and their argument was schools need to teach modern subjects like computer science and AI literacy, and many of them are not equipped to do so. And we came in and we provided tools and teacher training and we sponsored curriculums and we developed our own curriculums to help schools teach kids the skills they need today. And I think that that's a really important argument.

21:32It's just that that is the same argument the pharmaceutical industry makes, which is we need to teach doctors how to use the latest pills because, you know, we need health care to be up to date. And of course, we want doctors to know how to prescribe the latest drugs and use the latest medical devices. But what we see is that medicine actually studies the impact of big pharma on medical education and the health care industry. And it often warps what doctors prescribe, like they prescribe much more of the medicines that the industry is marketing to them and teaching them to use. And also, it affects how doctors think about different diseases, you know, what things they prioritize.

22:16And so the point of my book is not to say that what the tech industry doing is doing in schools is bad. It's to say we're not actually asking questions about this, even the like obvious questions about what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks that medical researchers ask about how big pharma is influencing medicine. Like when you ask these questions, like what is beneficial about a big tech curriculum and what might be left out or glossed over or what context is missing? Or are we diminishing kids' critical thinking because the curriculums are designed to make them really enthusiastic about tech and be docile consumers and docile employees?

22:55Like when you ask those questions, you're perceived as a critic in tech. But when you ask them in medicine, you're perceived as like a normal person asking normal questions. And so one of the points of the book is just to say, like, we ought to be asking more questions about this. Frontier AI didn't just accelerate cyber attacks. It multiplied them. Before an attack shows up, it's already moved through the network. And while seeing these attacks early matters, stopping them takes fusing security into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense.

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