What We Lost When Big Tech Took Over the Classroom

Natasha Singer's book "Coding Kids" tracks how public schools were bewitched by private corporations, setting the stage for the ed-tech backlash of today. Over Labor Day weekend, Springfield Public Schools, a district in western Massachusetts that serves twenty-three thousand students across some sixty schools, fell prey to a cyberattack that shuttered classes for four days. Staff members lost access to students' contact information, transcripts, and medical records; internal phone lines, security-camera systems, and even copy machines went down. Teachers and students couldn't use their school-issued laptops or log into their e-mail or other school applications from home devices. Springfield's schools use the Microsoft 365 Education and PowerSchool software platforms to house most of the stuff of everyday learning--schedules, assignments, slide decks, readings, handouts, quizzes--but everything stored there was now out of reach.