How Big Tech Captured American Schools; The New York Times, August 23, 2026

 Natasha Singer, The New York Times; How Big Tech Captured American Schools

"One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The educators were there for a workshop on the school technology of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots.

The Microsoft team gave a presentation on their Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks like generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans. Microsoft instructors also screened an A.I. explainer video that their Minecraft Education division had produced for children. The animated clip, based on the company’s blockbuster world-building game, featured a cheerful narrator and a cute Minecraft duck. Even if some schoolchildren weren’t old enough to use A.I., one of the Microsoft workshop leaders told the teachers in attendance, at least they could start learning about it.

As a journalist covering technology in schools, I had observed similar workshops for teachers and students that were funded or led by corporate giants like Amazon, Apple, Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Taking in this one, at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, I was struck by how similar the sessions were to training I’d seen years earlier, while reporting on the health care industry: seminars for doctors, organized by pharmaceutical companies, that aimed to get physicians to prescribe the latest brand-name drugs.

“Industry funds what helps industry,” Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology professor at Georgetown University Medical Center who studies drug industry influence on medicine, told me recently, as I was reporting a book about A.I. and computer science education in schools."