The Big Tech Backlash

Thoughts on what's driving a potent grassroots revolt

Reader: one of the few developments that gives me genuine hope these days is the fast-moving backlash against all things edtech. Uniting the oddest of bedfellows across partisan lines, and tapping into a broader frustration with what’s been called the “enshittification” of, well, everything, this emerging movement feels as potent as it does unpredictable. Let’s take a look, shall we?

The backlash is here—and it’s potent

First, let’s set the stage. “The Ed-Tech Backlash is Here,” as a recent EdWeek story put it. For a glimpse of what it looks like, let’s start in New York City where, just this week, parent opposition stymied the opening of what would have been the first AI-themed high school in a district that has been notably “bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits.” As for the parents? Not so much. As public education advocate extraordinaire Leonie Haimson observed: “The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years.” And NYC isn’t the only place where parents are forcing tech rollbacks. As tech writer Natasha Singer reports, Team Backlash is notching impressive wins, including in LA, the first district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade, and limit screen time for older kids.

Odd bedfellows

Quick! Which cause now unites Hugh Grant, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Oprah Winfrey? If you answered “getting screens out of schools,” you’d be correct. But the unusual allies I’m more interested in aren’t media moguls, right-wing showboats or rom-com heartthrobs (Will Thacker!!) What’s so interesting about this fast-moving movement is that “pressure is coming from every direction,” as the Boston Globe’s Christopher Huffaker reported this week about Massachusetts.

[P]arents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington. The Melrose teachers union, for example, is calling for device restrictions as part of contract negotiations that make paper the default option for testing and reading assignments. In Winchester, one School Committee member is calling for a recently formed technology committee to consider banning personal laptops in certain grades. And Northampton elementary school parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time.

This is about more than just screens

First, let’s pause here momentarily to acknowledge that “parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time” may be the most depressing education-related sentence you’ll read today… Now back to the main event. As is so often the case when we’re fighting over school in this country, there’s something larger at stake here. As my podcast co-host, education historian Jack Schneider observed in our recent episode about Silicon Valley’s vision for schools, people are also objecting to the way in which edtech turns schools into ‘black boxes’—privatized and proprietary.

 When the size of that black box is getting bigger and bigger inside our schools, it suggests to us that that a larger and larger share of this thing that is technically ours is not ours any longer to inspect or understand or adapt or control.  And I think that people are sensitive to the fact that when you look all around our society, what used to be ours is increasingly theirs.

This is also about standardized testing

Of course, the erosion of community influence over schools didn’t arrive with Chromebooks, which is exactly Jack’s point. Think about, say, the Common Core, which united similarly strange bedfellows against the Obama Administration’s attempt to redefine school through federal standards and tests. Which brings us to a lesser discussed aspect of the backlash vs. edtech: the near universal loathing of standardized tests. As the Globe concedes, “[f]or certain purposes, schools have few alternatives to screens. Most standardized tests, including the state’s MCAS exams beginning in Grade 3, are taken on computers.” Add in the test prep and the practice tests and for an awful lot of students, tests-on-screens are school. Indeed, much of the enthusiasm of education reformers for edtech was that it enabled students to be tested constantly. And while the ‘discourse’ among pundits, policy makers and hot takers is all about returning to the glory days of high-stakes testing, in the real world, politicians spar over who hates the tests more.

Billionaires and budget crunches

The grassroots revolt against tech in schools arrives at a particularly vulnerable time for public education. Voucher programs, including the new federal program, are on the march. Enrollment is dropping, thanks to a demographic cliff. And rising costs are putting a squeeze on school district budgets. With layoffs and school closures happening just about everywhere, expensive edtech programs and the companies and tech moguls who profit from them make an increasingly juicy target. “We’re seeing this decrease in school funding, statewide, and we’re seeing districts making cuts to staff,” Leslie Means, head of the teachers union in Melrose, Mass. told the Globe. “We’re continuing to see the ed-tech industrial complex get rich.” Not that long ago, Means would have come across as just another left-wing union leader who hates capitalism. No longer. Antipathy towards tech ceos is on the rise, and so is the appetite for taxing tech billionaires and their companies. This, by the way, is a big part of what gives the edtech backlash its potency. When teachers and parents say ‘enough,’ they’re not just reacting to excessive screen time or the arrival of Khanmigo, but to big tech domination more generally.

Don’t forget the data centers

I certainly haven’t, and neither should you, because the backlash to these electricity and water sucking literal black boxes is another grassroots revolt that is bringing together unlikely allies and upending politics. The question is will the opposition to data centers and the movement against edtech begin to overlap? My bold prediction is ‘absolutely,’ based on the fact that we already see signs of a convergence. In Virginia this week, public education advocates released a big report documenting the financial toll that tax credits for data centers have had on the state’s public schools. (Spoiler: the giveaway to data centers cost the state more than $1 billion, of which nearly $300 million would have gone to schools.) And in Texas, which will soon surpass Virginia as the largest data center market in the world, water rates are skyrocketing, even as water supplies dip dangerously low. Rising anger regarding what the Texas Observer describes as the “grim costs” of the data center boom feeds into already simmering public resentment over the willingness of GOP officials to sell off the state’s goods—including its schools—to the highest, most connected bidder.

A walled garden for me, grimy screens for thee

Atop my reading pile is the new book by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The authors argue that Muskism represents a new form of capitalism in which the techno-elite occupy a sort of walled garden, while the rest of us scrum for scraps. As always, I’m interested in the implications for education. Musk himself attempted (and has so far failed) to launch a STEM school. But the best example of the walled-garden vision for schools may be the illegal school compound operated by Musk’s fellow tech titan and education disruptor Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has been denounced after a school he and his wife established for children from low-income families in East Palo Alto announced in April that it will be shutting down, leaving students and their parents confused and angry. But it turns out that a mile away, behind a high wall of hedges, the billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were running a private school out of a house at their Palo Alto compound for two of their daughters and a dozen other children. And they were doing it in violation of city code.

The anti-tech movement now sweeping schools is also a movement against Muskism, with its vision of “fortress futurism” in which the welfare state is stripped for parts and technology is employed to entrench social hierarchy. At least some of the activists who want to free kids from the tyranny of screens understand that public education stands in stark contrast to the walled garden—a hedge-rowed enclave for me, a grimy screen for thee… A new reason to fear and loathe Musk, his Silicon Valley fellows, and their Trumpian allies arrives seemingly everyday. The fast-moving backlash to edtech serves as a hopeful reminder that they haven’t won yet.