Over Labor Day weekend, the Springfield Public Schools in western Massachusetts stopped. A cyberattack entered a system serving 23,000 students across some 60 schools, and classes stayed closed for four days. Staff members could not retrieve students’ contact information, transcripts or medical records. Internal telephones went down. So did security cameras and copy machines. Teachers and students could not use district laptops or sign in from home to e-mail, Microsoft 365 Education, PowerSchool, assignments, schedules, slide decks, readings, handouts or quizzes.

A district F.A.Q. then offered what it called an interim measure: students and teachers could use books, notebooks and paper while the technology was restored.

The word could did some work there. Meg Magrath-Smith, an instructional leader for English language arts and social studies at one Springfield school, sent colleagues a message on the second day of the outage. They would probably “be teaching like it’s 1999,” she wrote. Then she corrected herself: “Except not, because in 1999 we had copy machines and transparency machines”—the overhead projectors of an earlier American classroom. Teachers then also had textbooks. Her school, like many in the United States, no longer does.

The Springfield intrusion belongs, according to Jessica Winter’s account in The New Yorker, to a yearslong rise in ransomware attacks against K-12 systems. Schools hold student data of potentially significant value and often lack the resources to defend it. But the lasting condition made visible during those four days was older than the attack. Public education had placed much of its daily machinery inside the software of a small number of enormous technology companies.

Google leads that market, with Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education reaching what Winter describes as a super-majority of districts. Apple and Microsoft have smaller shares. The distinction matters less than the arrangement itself. “Google and Apple and Microsoft have become the scaffolding on which many U.S. schools function,” Natasha Singer writes in Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools. “The tech industry’s growing role in the classroom has become too big and too integral, it seems, to interrogate.”

Singer, a technology reporter for The New York Times, has chronicled Silicon Valley’s movement into education for years. Her book, as Winter presents it, is an even-tempered account of a public system’s capture by private corporations—an example of what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff defined as surveillance capitalism. The legal record accompanies the narrative. In 2014, Google acknowledged that it had scanned students’ e-mail on its education platform in order to target advertising. More recently, it settled a class-action suit alleging that the platform improperly collected and stored the voices and faces of students in Illinois; Google admitted no wrongdoing.

Microsoft now faces a proposed class action in Washington State alleging that it “collects, extracts, and generates vast troves of student data, converts that data into hyper-detailed psychographic profiles of students, and uses that data for its own commercial and other purposes, enriching itself at students’ expense.” Microsoft has previously said that its student data is used solely for educational purposes. In Springfield, the immediate problem was a hostile system denying access. In these suits, the systems themselves stand accused.

Against that record, Winter argues, the ordinary American school day remains startling: most K-12 students spend many or most of their school hours using Google and Microsoft hardware or software. Those platforms are increasingly supplied with generative-A.I. tools, which research indicates can contribute to cognitive atrophy and weaken a shared hold on reality. Her review describes the arrangement as conflicting with students’ rights to privacy and to a free education and as a threat to intellectual and social-emotional development. The companies’ products, meanwhile, maintain their place in the classroom.

Singer begins the history in 2013—the year of Edward Snowden, Vine and the Xbox One—with the founding of Code.org. The nonprofit’s purpose was to put computer programming into K-12 schools. Its principal funders were Microsoft and Google. Its introductory video, What Most Schools Don’t Teach, presented Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates and Will.i.am, who was credited as “Now Taking Coding Classes.” The message carried the authority of economics: “1 million of the best jobs in America may go unfilled,” the video warned, “because only 1 in 4 schools teach computer science.”

The video eventually drew more than 16 million views. Code.org did not then have, as Singer notes, “its own programming lessons, or any other tangible education product or service.” By the end of 2013 it had created the annual Hour of Code, offering free drag-and-drop tutorials involving Disney princesses, Minecraft blocks and Barbie in classrooms and in Apple and Microsoft stores. Code.org later collaborated with the College Board on instructional material for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles, introduced in 2016. Millions of teachers and students have used its videos and worksheets.

Gates appears in the book as more than a celebrity cameo. Beginning in 2009, his foundation put $290 million into a multiyear effort to measure teacher effectiveness, relying heavily on standardized-test scores. A RAND Corporation analysis published in 2018 found that the program did little to improve either teacher or student performance while imposing substantial administrative burdens. The Gates Foundation was also a lead funder of inBloom, a $100 million nonprofit that proposed a centralized store of student data. The planned database would include Social Security numbers, disciplinary records, test results and even parents’ marital status.

That data was to sit on Amazon cloud servers and be available to third-party vendors developing customized educational products. In 2014, after widespread objections from parents, inBloom closed. Winter counts its absence as a significant omission from Coding Kids, which gives more space to the promotional rise of Code.org. The memory matters. The database came first; the market for student information was already legible before the programming video became a civic commonplace.

There was another assumption inside the slogan. Children were told that learning to code would prepare them for the prosperous work of tomorrow. The industry that made the promise has since used generative and agentic A.I. to automate much of the writing, testing and correction of code. Students who encountered programming during the Hour of Code now enter a bleak market for new computer-science graduates, a market also narrowed by technology-sector layoffs and federal-workforce cuts. The future arrived with fewer places in it.

Students and teachers may use books, notebooks and paper while technology teaching tools are restored.