Singer Says Tech Companies Pushed Coding in Schools, and Data Science Lost Out
Reporter Natasha Singer argues children missed a chance to learn to judge numbers because tech firms pushed the subject that benefited them.
Fresh Air · Back-to-school with Big TechFor a decade, Natasha Singer, who writes about technology for The New York Times and recently published a book about Silicon Valley in classrooms, has been pressing Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, on why tech companies reshaped what children learn.
Smith told her that private philanthropy stepped in because public schools were failing to teach modern subjects fast enough. Computer science was not being taught, the industry helped, and that was certainly better than nothing, he said.
Singer argues the help came with a tilt. “There aren’t trillion-dollar companies pushing for data science,” she said.
That history suggests, in this story’s reading, the coding boom was not a neutral judgment about what children most needed. Around 2011 and 2012, Singer said, executives at fast growing companies including Google and Microsoft began saying publicly that they could not find enough software engineers, and they blamed public schools for not teaching enough children to code. It became, in her telling, a kind of national emergency, with a winning promise to parents and teachers that coding would lead to high paying jobs and let children change the world.
Schools embraced it. Code.org, a nonprofit group funded by Google, Microsoft, and others, put coding on the map for families, more children studied it, and more students majored in computer science in college. About ten years on, AI systems able to produce software code arrived, company funding for school computer science waned, tens of thousands of workers were laid off, and new computer science graduates struggled to find jobs.
Data science, Singer argues, lost out in that bargain. She describes it as a subject that teaches children to work with data sets, to understand when statistics in the news are right or wrong, to see how data can be manipulated by researchers or trolls on social media, and to read a science paper and judge whether a result is statistically significant. Children can even learn math and some coding along the way.
Smith conceded her point, she said, agreeing schools should push for “new subjects, not just computer science,” in Smith’s words. Except, in Singer’s words, “the tech industry pushed for the thing that benefited them.”
Questions people ask
What is the difference between coding and data science in school?
Coding teaches students to write instructions that computers follow, often in languages like Python. Data science teaches students to collect numbers, look for patterns, and test whether a claim holds up, which helps in reading polls, medical studies, and news charts.
What is Code.org?
Code.org is a nonprofit that provides free coding lessons and teacher training and organizes the Hour of Code. Major funders have included Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech companies and executives, and its campaigns helped make computer science a regular school subject.
Is data science not already popular with students?
No. Many colleges now offer data science majors, and employers hire data analysts in health care, finance, government, and marketing. But supporters say the field has lacked the same school-level advocacy, funding, and promise of tech jobs that drove the coding expansion.