Silicon Valley parents are leading a backlash against tech in the classroom
By Delilah Brumer,
Staff Writer
Aug 24, 2026
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/silicon-valley-parents-backlash-tech-classroom-22387244.php
Palo Alto parent Candice Wei calls for stricter …technology restrictions in schools during the public comment period of a Palo Alto Unified School District board meeting on Aug. 18.
Palo Alto parent Candice Wei calls for stricter technology restrictions in schools during the public comment period of a Palo Alto Unified School District board meeting on Aug. 18.
Delilah Brumer/S.F. Chronicle

Palo Alto parent Tilli Bannett is a venture capitalist who invests in tech companies, but at a recent school board meeting, she challenged district leaders to remove most tech from classrooms.
“I came here to ask of you, where is the evidence for your technology?” said Bannett, who has three kids in the Palo Alto Unified School District. She acknowledged the irony of the situation, but she was not alone in her views, even among the other tech workers at the meeting.
Bannett is part of a group of parents urging California schools to restrict artificial intelligence, digital learning games and other technology, building on momentum from a largely successful statewide push to ban cellphones in classrooms. The fight is especially pronounced in Silicon Valley, where the same parents who have for years developed and marketed tech are some of the most vocal advocates for reining it in.
The affluent, high-achieving Palo Alto Unified School District is now caught up in that debate. The movement to make learning more analog stems from frustration over the use of apps, laptops, AI, Youtube and other tech on K-12 campuses, despite concerns about mental health, distractions, online bullying and digital addiction.

Certain school technology restrictions have seen widespread support from teachers, parents, politicians, administrators and even students. A recent state law, for example, required districts to adopt cellphone policies and spurred many schools to ban cellphones from the first to the last bell starting this academic year though other districts have instituted more permissive policies.
But as advocates push for more restrictive tech policies, schools are left to answer an increasingly critical question: How do they balance limiting the harmful aspects of technology with preparing students for a digital world?
More than a dozen parents filed into Palo Alto Unified’s first school board meeting of the academic year on Tuesday, carrying signs that lamented AI. They brought a petition with more than 200 signatures calling on the district to fully ban cellphones.
Many of the parents, including Leor Melamedov, work in tech. Melamedov, a parent of two preschool-age kids who will soon attend public schools in Palo Alto, said she won’t let her kids watch Youtube or play digital games. She worries that their friends may get them hooked on screens during playdates. And she makes sure to never utter the word “ChatGPT” in front of them. Yet she has spent her entire career doing marketing for tech companies.
“The way I square it is this: The tech that I work with is geared toward adults,” Melamedov said. “Me, and other adults, our brains reached their development and learned critical thinking and capacity and focus before AI and before digitization was everywhere. Tech is not the enemy, but kids need to learn critical thinking, and experience that cognitive struggle, first.”
THE DISTRICT RECENTLY INSTITUTED BELL-TO-BELL CELLPHONE BANS FOR ITS YOUNGER STUDENTS, WHILE ALLOWING HIGH SCHOOLERS TO USE THEIR DEVICES DURING LUNCH. IT ALSO ADOPTED AN AI POLICY THAT EMPHASIZES TRANSPARENCY AND ACADEMIC INTEGRITY, BUT LEAVES THE FINAL SAY TO TEACHERS OVER WHETHER STUDENTS CAN USE AI FOR A CLASS, AND IF SO, IN WHAT CAPACITY.
Some parents say they want more restrictions on generative AI, as well as a move back to pen-and-paper homework and computer labs, instead of students doing most classwork and homework on laptops.
Tom Culbertson, president of the Palo Alto teachers union, said teachers’ views on education technology restrictions vary, but they “are ready to discuss how to move forward given changes in how students interact with technology in their private lives and how families are feeling about it.” He added that teachers’ input has not been central enough to policymaking.
“Most educators have pivoted to integrating technology into their classroom practices, representing a massive investment of time that cannot simply be undone tomorrow,” he said in a statement.
Candice Wei, parent of a kindergartener and a middle schooler, has called for more stringent tech rules. Wei, who works as a private college counselor, said she sees many students who are tempted to offload assignments and essays to generative AI, at the expense of their learning.
Some professors and researchers have argued that a compromise between harnessing tech innovation and minimizing harms is key in classrooms. Dan Schwartz, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, wrote in a 2024 report: “Technology … offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching. But … a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly.”
Researchers have mixed opinions on the impacts of tech on kids’ mental health, but the amount of time students spend on devices has been a concern. On average, kids ages 11 to 17 are on their phones for about 4.5 hours per day and get 240 notifications per day, with a quarter of them during school, according to a 2023 study by the University of Michigan and Common Sense Media.
School leaders are pushing back against tech too, with more than 1,000 school districts across the country involved in lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and other social media companies, arguing the companies’ products are intentionally addictive for kids.
A district spokesperson said in an emailed statement that “In Palo Alto Unified, technology is used to support instruction, not replace it.”
“We aim to be intentional rather than restrictive,” the spokesperson added. “Outside of a few legal requirements and state-mandated assessments, we trust our teachers to choose the tools, online or off, that work best for the students in front of them.”
Parents’ screen-time resentment is simmering in other school districts. Melamedov and Wei are chapter leaders in a rapidly expanding organization called Schools Beyond Screens, founded by parents in Los Angeles who worked with the state’s largest school district to implement bell-to-bell cellphone bans and grade-level screentime limits.
“We have parents out there who are motivated,” Wei said.
In nearby Sunnyvale, Miranda Arly, a marketer at a software company, said she hopes to enroll her soon-to-be kindergartener in whichever nearby district has the most restrictive tech policy.
“There's great uses for tech to help our world,” said Arly, who previously worked at Google and whose husband also works in tech. “However, that doesn't mean we need to unleash it on our children who are so young and just now wiring their brains to interact with other people and to learn in a conventional manner.”
Roughly a dozen students in the audience at Tuesday’s meeting expressed tepid support for the existing cellphone policy — or indifference. Aiden Farr, a sophomore at Henry M. Gunn High School, said the district’s current cellphone policy is a good middle ground between a bell-to-bell ban and unfettered access.
“People just complain about it because they like their phones a lot, but I think it’s better for the overall academic success of the school,” he said.
Rowena Chiu, a Palo Alto school board member and parent of four kids in the district, said she is receptive to concerns about tech in schools, but that high school students should be afforded greater freedom than younger kids, especially because they will soon transition into college, she added.
Wei said she and other parents hope to work with district leaders to implement more robust tech policies.
“It is not us versus the teachers,” Wei said. “This is not us versus the schools. This is everyone for the children.”
Aug 24, 2026

Silicon Valley parents are leading a backlash against tech in the classroom

Families in Palo Alto and other cities have cited the distracting qualities of technology in a push to further restrict it in schools.

www.sfchronicle.com

Silicon Valley parents are leading a backlash against tech in the classroom
By Delilah Brumer,
Staff Writer
Aug 24, 2026

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/silicon-valley-parents-backlash-tech-classroom-22387244.php

Palo Alto parent Candice Wei calls for …stricter technology restrictions in schools during the public comment period of a Palo Alto Unified School District board meeting on Aug. 18.
Palo Alto parent Candice Wei calls for stricter technology restrictions in schools during the public comment period of a Palo Alto Unified School District board meeting on Aug. 18.
Delilah Brumer/S.F. Chronicle

Palo Alto parent Tilli Bannett is a venture capitalist who invests in tech companies, but at a recent school board meeting, she challenged district leaders to remove most tech from classrooms.
“I came here to ask of you, where is the evidence for your technology?” said Bannett, who has three kids in the Palo Alto Unified School District. She acknowledged the irony of the situation, but she was not alone in her views, even among the other tech workers at the meeting.
Bannett is part of a group of parents urging California schools to restrict artificial intelligence, digital learning games and other technology, building on momentum from a largely successful statewide push to ban cellphones in classrooms. The fight is especially pronounced in Silicon Valley, where the same parents who have for years developed and marketed tech are some of the most vocal advocates for reining it in.
The affluent, high-achieving Palo Alto Unified School District is now caught up in that debate. The movement to make learning more analog stems from frustration over the use of apps, laptops, AI, Youtube and other tech on K-12 campuses, despite concerns about mental health, distractions, online bullying and digital addiction.

Certain school technology restrictions have seen widespread support from teachers, parents, politicians, administrators and even students. A recent state law, for example, required districts to adopt cellphone policies and spurred many schools to ban cellphones from the first to the last bell starting this academic year though other districts have instituted more permissive policies.
But as advocates push for more restrictive tech policies, schools are left to answer an increasingly critical question: How do they balance limiting the harmful aspects of technology with preparing students for a digital world?
More than a dozen parents filed into Palo Alto Unified’s first school board meeting of the academic year on Tuesday, carrying signs that lamented AI. They brought a petition with more than 200 signatures calling on the district to fully ban cellphones.
Many of the parents, including Leor Melamedov, work in tech. Melamedov, a parent of two preschool-age kids who will soon attend public schools in Palo Alto, said she won’t let her kids watch Youtube or play digital games. She worries that their friends may get them hooked on screens during playdates. And she makes sure to never utter the word “ChatGPT” in front of them. Yet she has spent her entire career doing marketing for tech companies.
“The way I square it is this: The tech that I work with is geared toward adults,” Melamedov said. “Me, and other adults, our brains reached their development and learned critical thinking and capacity and focus before AI and before digitization was everywhere. Tech is not the enemy, but kids need to learn critical thinking, and experience that cognitive struggle, first.”
THE DISTRICT RECENTLY INSTITUTED BELL-TO-BELL CELLPHONE BANS FOR ITS YOUNGER STUDENTS, WHILE ALLOWING HIGH SCHOOLERS TO USE THEIR DEVICES DURING LUNCH. IT ALSO ADOPTED AN AI POLICY THAT EMPHASIZES TRANSPARENCY AND ACADEMIC INTEGRITY, BUT LEAVES THE FINAL SAY TO TEACHERS OVER WHETHER STUDENTS CAN USE AI FOR A CLASS, AND IF SO, IN WHAT CAPACITY.
Some parents say they want more restrictions on generative AI, as well as a move back to pen-and-paper homework and computer labs, instead of students doing most classwork and homework on laptops.
Tom Culbertson, president of the Palo Alto teachers union, said teachers’ views on education technology restrictions vary, but they “are ready to discuss how to move forward given changes in how students interact with technology in their private lives and how families are feeling about it.” He added that teachers’ input has not been central enough to policymaking.
“Most educators have pivoted to integrating technology into their classroom practices, representing a massive investment of time that cannot simply be undone tomorrow,” he said in a statement.
Candice Wei, parent of a kindergartener and a middle schooler, has called for more stringent tech rules. Wei, who works as a private college counselor, said she sees many students who are tempted to offload assignments and essays to generative AI, at the expense of their learning.
Some professors and researchers have argued that a compromise between harnessing tech innovation and minimizing harms is key in classrooms. Dan Schwartz, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, wrote in a 2024 report: “Technology … offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching. But … a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly.”
Researchers have mixed opinions on the impacts of tech on kids’ mental health, but the amount of time students spend on devices has been a concern. On average, kids ages 11 to 17 are on their phones for about 4.5 hours per day and get 240 notifications per day, with a quarter of them during school, according to a 2023 study by the University of Michigan and Common Sense Media.
School leaders are pushing back against tech too, with more than 1,000 school districts across the country involved in lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and other social media companies, arguing the companies’ products are intentionally addictive for kids.
A district spokesperson said in an emailed statement that “In Palo Alto Unified, technology is used to support instruction, not replace it.”
“We aim to be intentional rather than restrictive,” the spokesperson added. “Outside of a few legal requirements and state-mandated assessments, we trust our teachers to choose the tools, online or off, that work best for the students in front of them.”
Parents’ screen-time resentment is simmering in other school districts. Melamedov and Wei are chapter leaders in a rapidly expanding organization called Schools Beyond Screens, founded by parents in Los Angeles who worked with the state’s largest school district to implement bell-to-bell cellphone bans and grade-level screentime limits.
“We have parents out there who are motivated,” Wei said.
In nearby Sunnyvale, Miranda Arly, a marketer at a software company, said she hopes to enroll her soon-to-be kindergartener in whichever nearby district has the most restrictive tech policy.
“There's great uses for tech to help our world,” said Arly, who previously worked at Google and whose husband also works in tech. “However, that doesn't mean we need to unleash it on our children who are so young and just now wiring their brains to interact with other people and to learn in a conventional manner.”
Roughly a dozen students in the audience at Tuesday’s meeting expressed tepid support for the existing cellphone policy — or indifference. Aiden Farr, a sophomore at Henry M. Gunn High School, said the district’s current cellphone policy is a good middle ground between a bell-to-bell ban and unfettered access.
“People just complain about it because they like their phones a lot, but I think it’s better for the overall academic success of the school,” he said.
Rowena Chiu, a Palo Alto school board member and parent of four kids in the district, said she is receptive to concerns about tech in schools, but that high school students should be afforded greater freedom than younger kids, especially because they will soon transition into college, she added.
Wei said she and other parents hope to work with district leaders to implement more robust tech policies.
“It is not us versus the teachers,” Wei said. “This is not us versus the schools. This is everyone for the children.”
Aug 24, 2026

Silicon Valley parents are leading a backlash against tech in the classroom

Families in Palo Alto and other cities have cited the distracting qualities of technology in a push to further restrict it in schools.

www.sfchronicle.com

Philadelphia IBT 623 Sec. Treas. Richard Hooker Jr. On UPS, IBT & IBT 2026 Election
https://youtu.be/lNnXtiAMLT0
Philadelphia IBT 623 Secretary Treasurer Richard Hooker at a meeting in New Orleans during the Teamster National Black Caucus talked about UPS, the IBT and the 2026 election.… This meeting took place on August 13, 2026 and had reports on the attack on Black representation, resegregation and fascism.
Labor, Unions & The Fight For Black Representation, Against Redistricting, Slavery & Fascism In NOL
https://youtu.be/dSAFeh1wLm8
New Orleans Activists At Pop Up Speak Out Against ICE Attacks, Concentration Camps & Fascism
https://youtu.be/szzZnbuCAew
CA Teamsters, AI, Union Democracy & Workers Power
https://youtu.be/ShXk-cRxVGg
Cameras At UPS, AI & Infrared Torture With IBT 190 UPS Driver Eric Johnson
https://youtu.be/xkQuUrN4g2E
Teamsters Demand Stop The Torture! Infrared Cameras Out Of Our Cabs NOW!
Teamsters Speak Out On AI In Cal
https://youtu.be/vD3Igqb-Ru8
Teamsters In Southern California Speak Out On AI,The Class Struggle
https://youtu.be/Ld55pZVykKQ
IBT Pres Sean O'Brien Tells Members He Stopped AI & Robots At UPS
https://youtu.be/yBa_2gDRz0Q
UPS Installs On-Truck Surveillance Cameras
https://www.tdu.org/ups_installs_surveillance_cameras
IBT Pres SOB Using AI
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5638970-teamsters-substack-newsletter/
Teamsters, AI, Health & Safety & Union Democracy With IBT 396 Steward Hannibal Agular
https://youtu.be/WN3D4TB1mgM
"Out Of Control" Truckers, AI Robotics, IR Cameras, UPS, & Teamsters With Eric Johnson IBT 190
https://youtu.be/QcsHR2YjZKo
California Teamsters Demand Fair Elections & Demand That CA AG Rob Bonta Close Down Unilect
https://youtu.be/SPp-vOV8Ip8
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

www.youtube.com

youtu.be

Petition To Urge SEIU California to endorse Tax Billionaires Now Initiative
The Issue
…https://www.change.org/p/urge-seiu-california-to-endorse-tax-billionaires-now-initiative-prop-40?utm_source=688270_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2dcf4b3e0b4d4d0e98fa4cee91d598b0&utm_term=itbl&utm_content=20260206_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&share_id=jpCCq52yrt
As we look towards an uncertain future, it's crucial to acknowledge the impending crisis that threatens to devastate public health funding in California and all the USA. I am a member of SEIU, and like many of my fellow union members, I am deeply concerned about the impacts of the Federal government's HR1, the "Big Beautiful Bill" designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of those who rely on Medi-Cal. These cuts, slated to start in January 2027, will force state and local governments to divert funds from all public services, affecting millions who depend on mediating care for survival.
The Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Proposition 40, offers us a tangible solution. By taxing billionaires, who have garnered unparalleled wealth, we can secure vital funding for Medi-Cal. Without this initiative’s endorsement and success, we face the grim reality of severe shortages in medical services, adversely affecting not just members of SEIU, but all Californians who rely on essential health services.
The looming financial crater from HR1’s unjust policies will not exempt any SEIU member organization. It is imperative that SEIU California uses its influence to advocate for equitable economic policies that ensure the rich contribute their fair share. By endorsing Prop 40, SEIU California would stand up for its members and all state residents by fighting to preserve the essential services that keep our society healthy and functioning.
The stakes have never been higher. We must act now to protect our communities from the calamitous cuts set to take effect in just a few months. Your voice has power: by urging SEIU California to take a stand with Prop 40, you help protect Californians from these impending threats to our public health system.
SEIU-UHW has already stood up for all SEIU members and all Californians by bringing Prop 40 to the November ballot. By spending more than $33 million, SEIU-UHW has been looking out for all SEIU California members and public services. Without Prop 40, all public services by the State and local governments will be forced to cut back to back-fill the catastrophic cuts to Medi-Cal because of the size of Trump's 2025 HR1 Medicaid cuts. All public sector services and funding will be affected by this $20 billion per year federal hit.
Gov. Newsom has no plan to bridge the shortfall, forcing local governments to try to makeup much of the shortfall. And Newsom refuses to back single payer. Even the California Democratic Party has rebelled and has endorsed Prop 40.
Join me in demanding SEIU California's endorsement of this critical initiative. Let us send a clear message that protecting public services starts with fair taxation. Sign this petition to urge SEIU California to endorse the Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Prop 40. Together, we can ensure a fair funding future for health services in our state.

Sign the Petition

Urge SEIU California to endorse Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Prop 40

www.change.org

Petition To Urge SEIU California to endorse Tax Billionaires Now Initiative
The Issue
…https://www.change.org/p/urge-seiu-california-to-endorse-tax-billionaires-now-initiative-prop-40?utm_source=688270_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2dcf4b3e0b4d4d0e98fa4cee91d598b0&utm_term=itbl&utm_content=20260206_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&share_id=jpCCq52yrt
As we look towards an uncertain future, it's crucial to acknowledge the impending crisis that threatens to devastate public health funding in California and all the USA. I am a member of SEIU, and like many of my fellow union members, I am deeply concerned about the impacts of the Federal government's HR1, the "Big Beautiful Bill" designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of those who rely on Medi-Cal. These cuts, slated to start in January 2027, will force state and local governments to divert funds from all public services, affecting millions who depend on mediating care for survival.
The Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Proposition 40, offers us a tangible solution. By taxing billionaires, who have garnered unparalleled wealth, we can secure vital funding for Medi-Cal. Without this initiative’s endorsement and success, we face the grim reality of severe shortages in medical services, adversely affecting not just members of SEIU, but all Californians who rely on essential health services.
The looming financial crater from HR1’s unjust policies will not exempt any SEIU member organization. It is imperative that SEIU California uses its influence to advocate for equitable economic policies that ensure the rich contribute their fair share. By endorsing Prop 40, SEIU California would stand up for its members and all state residents by fighting to preserve the essential services that keep our society healthy and functioning.
The stakes have never been higher. We must act now to protect our communities from the calamitous cuts set to take effect in just a few months. Your voice has power: by urging SEIU California to take a stand with Prop 40, you help protect Californians from these impending threats to our public health system.
SEIU-UHW has already stood up for all SEIU members and all Californians by bringing Prop 40 to the November ballot. By spending more than $33 million, SEIU-UHW has been looking out for all SEIU California members and public services. Without Prop 40, all public services by the State and local governments will be forced to cut back to back-fill the catastrophic cuts to Medi-Cal because of the size of Trump's 2025 HR1 Medicaid cuts. All public sector services and funding will be affected by this $20 billion per year federal hit.
Gov. Newsom has no plan to bridge the shortfall, forcing local governments to try to makeup much of the shortfall. And Newsom refuses to back single payer. Even the California Democratic Party has rebelled and has endorsed Prop 40.
Join me in demanding SEIU California's endorsement of this critical initiative. Let us send a clear message that protecting public services starts with fair taxation. Sign this petition to urge SEIU California to endorse the Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Prop 40. Together, we can ensure a fair funding future for health services in our state.

Sign the Petition

Urge SEIU California to endorse Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Prop 40

www.change.org

Petition To Urge SEIU California to endorse Tax Billionaires Now Initiative
The Issue
…https://www.change.org/p/urge-seiu-california-to-endorse-tax-billionaires-now-initiative-prop-40?utm_source=688270_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2dcf4b3e0b4d4d0e98fa4cee91d598b0&utm_term=itbl&utm_content=20260206_starter_onboarding_4_v2_var_C&share_id=jpCCq52yrt
As we look towards an uncertain future, it's crucial to acknowledge the impending crisis that threatens to devastate public health funding in California and all the USA. I am a member of SEIU, and like many of my fellow union members, I am deeply concerned about the impacts of the Federal government's HR1, the "Big Beautiful Bill" designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of those who rely on Medi-Cal. These cuts, slated to start in January 2027, will force state and local governments to divert funds from all public services, affecting millions who depend on mediating care for survival.
The Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Proposition 40, offers us a tangible solution. By taxing billionaires, who have garnered unparalleled wealth, we can secure vital funding for Medi-Cal. Without this initiative’s endorsement and success, we face the grim reality of severe shortages in medical services, adversely affecting not just members of SEIU, but all Californians who rely on essential health services.
The looming financial crater from HR1’s unjust policies will not exempt any SEIU member organization. It is imperative that SEIU California uses its influence to advocate for equitable economic policies that ensure the rich contribute their fair share. By endorsing Prop 40, SEIU California would stand up for its members and all state residents by fighting to preserve the essential services that keep our society healthy and functioning.
The stakes have never been higher. We must act now to protect our communities from the calamitous cuts set to take effect in just a few months. Your voice has power: by urging SEIU California to take a stand with Prop 40, you help protect Californians from these impending threats to our public health system.
SEIU-UHW has already stood up for all SEIU members and all Californians by bringing Prop 40 to the November ballot. By spending more than $33 million, SEIU-UHW has been looking out for all SEIU California members and public services. Without Prop 40, all public services by the State and local governments will be forced to cut back to back-fill the catastrophic cuts to Medi-Cal because of the size of Trump's 2025 HR1 Medicaid cuts. All public sector services and funding will be affected by this $20 billion per year federal hit.
Gov. Newsom has no plan to bridge the shortfall, forcing local governments to try to makeup much of the shortfall. And Newsom refuses to back single payer. Even the California Democratic Party has rebelled and has endorsed Prop 40.
Join me in demanding SEIU California's endorsement of this critical initiative. Let us send a clear message that protecting public services starts with fair taxation. Sign this petition to urge SEIU California to endorse the Tax Billionaires Now Initiative, Prop 40. Together, we can ensure a fair funding future for health services in our state.

www.change.org

www.change.org

How Big Tech Captured American Schools
Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/business/schools-big-tech-google-microsoft.html
…
By Natasha Singer
This article is an adapted excerpt from “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools” by Natasha Singer for W.W. Norton & Company.
Aug. 23, 2026
Updated 7:13 a.m. ET
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.

These workshops have upsides. Big Pharma seminars can be useful for keeping physicians up-to-date on the latest patient remedies, and Big Tech workshops can similarly help educators keep current on the newest software tools. But Silicon Valley’s efforts to capture the attention of education professionals and provide student training materials can also double as marketing or indoctrination. They enable some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to spin rosy technology stories for administrators, teachers and students, giving them a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks.

Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked.

Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

A woman behind a lectern talks to an audience and a nearby screen says “Level up learning with Minecraft Education.”
Teachers in New York learned about Minecraft Education, a Microsoft product for schools based on the company’s popular world-building game.Credit…Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
The day after the Microsoft-led workshop in Manhattan, the American Federation of Teachers, a national union with 1.8 million members, made a major announcement. The union was starting an ambitious program to train teachers nationwide on A.I., with $23 million in funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Publicly, Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, was bullish. In an interview at the time, she said the partnership would help educators learn to use chatbots “safely, wisely and ethically,” while also getting them a seat at the table with behemoths like Microsoft and OpenAI as they developed and refined their A.I. products.

I pointed out to Ms. Weingarten that the union-industry deal might also present a fox-henhouse problem for schools. While her organization was calling for safeguards to protect children from A.I. risks, some trade groups representing Big Tech were working to block A.I. safety laws. She acknowledged the dissonance. “We are in it for the good of students and for the good of the country and for the good of families and to make sure educators actually play their rightful role,” she said. “Some of the companies that we’re engaged with are in it for profit. Those are two fundamentally different goals.”

After Ms. Weingarten announced her union’s deal with Big Tech companies, a few teachers and professors publicly warned that the spread of A.I. chatbots could undermine their profession, by outsourcing and automating core tasks like giving students feedback on their work. One of the more forceful educators was Lois Weiner, an education professor emerita at New Jersey City University and a retiree member of the U.F.T., who argued on Bluesky that the national union was selling out to corporate interests.

“This isn’t an alliance,” Ms. Weiner told me. “We aren’t sitting at the table. We’re the meal.”

Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn.

Tech companies finance national polls and research reports to help make products like A.I. chatbots, and courses like computer science, more urgent priorities for students and school districts. They advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students. They supply or sponsor teacher training and free course materials for students. They fund the National PTA, teachers’ unions and other prominent groups.

This playbook allows the companies to shape the American education system in ways that benefit them. Apple, for instance, offers a free Advanced Placement Computer Science curriculum that teaches high schoolers to code in Swift, its programming language for developing iPhone apps. Microsoft offers a competing curriculum: AP Computer Science Principles with Minecraft Education.

To some ears, the course names sound innocuous. But there is no Raytheon-branded AP Physics course, DuPont AP Chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course.

This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas.

This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

In researching my book, I spoke to tech industry leaders who have helped drive significant changes in schools. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, told me the dynamic began because public schools often seemed ill-equipped to teach crucial modern subjects and prepare students for the ever-evolving demands of the job market. He also suggested I consider where schools might be without support from corporations like Microsoft.

“Philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because the public sector has failed to do what it’s supposed to do,” Mr. Smith said. He allowed that the situation wasn’t ideal. “It’s filled the gap out of necessity,” he said. “It’s not the way we should want public education to work.”

Brad Smith, in a dark suit and purple tie, gestures while talking.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said that tech corporations are involved in education out of necessity. “The public sector has failed to do what it’s supposed to do,” he said.Credit…Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Maggie Johnson, the head of Google.org, the company’s corporate giving arm, made similar arguments. She said that the company had provided free educational materials and training in subjects like coding and data analytics for millions of underserved students, including middle schoolers and those in rural areas.

It is possible for Big Tech’s intentions in education to be both well-meaning and oriented toward long-term profit. How you feel about any one program depends on your broader views on the technology industry. Public sentiment on these companies has shifted profoundly, from a generally positive disposition in the 2000s and early 2010s to a growing distrust as the downsides of social media, compulsive screen use and corporate power became more apparent.
T

The tensions could be seen about a decade ago, in December 2017, when Google introduced free coding exercises for schools to use during Computer Science Education Week. The lessons were called “Create your own Google logo,” and they taught students how to use simple coding blocks to make the letters in the company’s logo change color, spin and bounce. The company already ran a wildly popular annual artwork contest, called Doodle for Google, for which tens of thousands of students created logos on different themes. Ms. Johnson said the Google lessons were a great way to get students excited about programming.

That was true. But the lessons also had the feel of brand-washing. At the time, journalists had begun reporting on how Google’s YouTube Kids platform had shown inappropriate, lewd and violent content to children. Separately, the company had begun removing thousands of videos of children, which had been targeted by child predators, from YouTube. Making multicolored Google logos hop and pirouette was a distraction from those headlines.

Google became the dominant tech platform in U.S. schools,eclipsing Apple and Microsoft, in part by offering a convenient package: free apps like Gmail along with sturdy, low-cost laptops called Chromebooks. Last year, Chromebooks accounted for 59 percent of the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research firm.
Image
Students sit at classroom desks, and each is typing on a laptop computer.
Students in a Chicago elementary school work on Google-powered laptops. Chromebooks accounted for an estimated 59 percent of the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools last year.Credit…Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times
The story of how Google came to conquer the classroom is a case study of the company’s power. From modest beginnings, it created a mammoth interlocking ecosystem that can drive shifts in teaching and learning — and create customers for life.

A campaign called “Gone Google” from the early 2010s illustrates the company’s marketing prowess. Google was just starting to convince universities and school districts to switch from costly legacy software to its free suite of apps. A 19-page marketing guide from Google described the offering as a “celebration of curiosity-fueled, technology-enabled learning” in which students could “learn together with affordable devices and familiar platforms.” The company encouraged education leaders to promote their conversions, and soon, school districts around the country began announcing that they had “Gone Google.”

Google sold school leaders on a similarly feel-good argument for Chromebooks: The laptops would empower students and democratize learning. Schools in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin that bought Chromebooks all included variations of the same Googlesque sentence on their sites or student handbooks: “The individual use of Chromebooks is a way to empower students to maximize their full potential and prepare them for college and the workplace.”

The schools’ enthusiasm helped obscure a long-term Google goal: hooking students early on services like Gmail and Chrome. The real revenue, made from amassing consumers’ data and showing ads based on their online activities, would come later.

Winning over schools and students with free apps was also a useful way for Google to curate and soften its image as regulators began to investigate the company’s data practices. In 2019, for instance, Google agreed to pay $170 million to resolve complaints by regulators who said YouTube had illegally harvested children’s personal data and used the details to target them with ads.

Since then, millions of schoolchildren have tried colorful animated lessons from Google called “Be Internet Awesome.” The program aims to teach students how to keep their data private and be kind online — and positions Google as a friendly, trustworthy privacy protector.
Image
A diploma-like document says in big letters “You're Internet Awesome.”
Schoolchildren who complete Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” lessons can get a “certificate of internet awesomeness” from the company.Credit…Google
Schools have spent tens of billions of dollars on classroom technology products over the last decade. Yet laptops and learning apps have generally not proven to significantly improve students’ educational outcomes. Some parents and school leaders who feel the industry oversold them on devices have soured on screens in schools, a phenomenon I’ve come to call Chromebook remorse.

Some schools have now started limiting classroom laptop use. This year, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest U.S. public school system, agreed to eliminate the use of school-issued iPads and Chromebooks for students in prekindergarten through first grade.

“Ten years ago, we bought the narrative from the tech companies that the only way to prepare our students for the future was to hand each of them a Chromebook or an iPad,” Lila Byock, the founder of a parent group called Schools Beyond Screens, said at a recent Los Angeles school board meeting. “Now we know better.”

Even Ms. Weingarten, who touted her union’s deal with Microsoft and OpenAI to train teachers on chatbots in 2025, has partially reversed course, in line with the rapidly changing politics of A.I. This year, she publicly called for elementary schools to hold off using A.I. with students.

One revealing story about Silicon Valley’s sincerity in the classroom involves the push to teach children coding.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google, delivered a lecture in Scotland in which he excoriated British schools for failing to teach computer science, the study of programming and concepts like algorithms. Britain would not be able to compete globally, he suggested, if more kids did not learn to code.
Image
Eric Schmidt, wearing a tie and jacket, gestures while speaking.
Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google, speaking in Scotland in 2011. He criticized British schools for failing to teach students computer science. Credit…David Moir/Reuters

A year later, Microsoft issued a similar public admonition for the United States: Tech companies could not find enough talented software engineers to maintain their explosive growth — a hiring shortage that threatened the American economy. Microsoft said the problem was that too few high schools taught computing.

The message took off in 2013, when a nonprofit called Code.org posted a YouTube video, starring Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, that promoted coding as an empowering, lucrative skill for students. “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in the video. “The whole limit in the system is that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”

The video went viral, kicking off a nationwide learn-to-code drive in schools. With funding and expertise from Microsoft and Google, Code.org helped convince dozens of states to enact new laws and policies boosting computer science in public schools. The courses had positive effects, teaching students important skills like logic, abstraction and problem-solving. But some also cast tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators — often without pushing students to consider the industry’s consequences and harms.
Image
President Barack Obama, wearing a baseball cap that says Code, watches as a young girl types on a laptop.
President Barack Obama joined a Code.org event in 2014. With funding from Microsoft and Google, the nonprofit group promoted computer science classes in public schools.Credit…Pool photo by Andrew Harrer
“In other disciplines, we don’t have industry driving K-12 curricular or policy decisions,” Bryan Twarek, a vice president at the Computer Science Teachers Association, a nonprofit group with nearly 10,000 teachers as members, told me. “And we probably shouldn’t.” His candor seemed startling, given that the group’s biggest donors include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Big Tech needed an army of coders — until it didn’t. Software engineers are increasingly turning to A.I. tools to generate code. So are many other people with no prior coding experience. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are pouring billions into building enormous data centers to fuel A.I. services, even as they lay off thousands of employees. Some recent college graduates who majored in computing are struggling to find tech jobs.

Now some of the same corporations that sold schools on computer science are pushing them to teach A.I. and investing billions of dollars in the effort. And tellingly, this year, Code.org changed its name to CodeAI.

But something different is happening this time in schools: pushback. A groundswell of teachers, parents, researchers and local government leaders say they aren’t buying the idea of new, and educationally unproven, A.I. tools as the next fulcrum for learning.

Some are embracing a broader approach to tech education, one that not only teaches algorithms and app-making, but also asks students to examine how individuals and society are affected by the industry’s disruptions. To see this strategy in person, I visited Alicia Streight, a math teacher at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, Calif. In addition to teaching traditional topics, Ms. Streight asks her students to analyze how social media influencers manipulate statistics to spread disinformation.

A few years ago, she also started a weekly class to encourage middle schoolers to examine all kinds of innovations in their lives: TikTok, meat substitutes, ChatGPT. She helped her students consider questions like: “Where did this come from? Who’s building this? Who’s profiting? Who’s benefiting? How is this going to affect me? How’s this going to affect my family? What’s going to happen in 10 years?”

Rather than being coded by industry, Ms. Streight’s students were learning to decode popular products and ask fundamental questions about the powerful companies behind them. With A.I. spreading at astonishing speed, Ms. Streight argues that it’s more imperative than ever to give students durable analytical skills.

Educators have come up with a term for this pedagogical approach: “technology civics.” After all, public schools have long taught civics as an essential subject for students to understand and navigate government power in their lives. The new discipline will help them understand and navigate Big Tech, and equip them for a world increasingly shaped by machines.

How Big Tech Captured American Schools

Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply…

www.nytimes.com

How Big Tech Captured American Schools
Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/business/schools-big-tech-google-microsoft.html
…
By Natasha Singer
This article is an adapted excerpt from “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools” by Natasha Singer for W.W. Norton & Company.
Aug. 23, 2026
Updated 7:13 a.m. ET
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.

These workshops have upsides. Big Pharma seminars can be useful for keeping physicians up-to-date on the latest patient remedies, and Big Tech workshops can similarly help educators keep current on the newest software tools. But Silicon Valley’s efforts to capture the attention of education professionals and provide student training materials can also double as marketing or indoctrination. They enable some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to spin rosy technology stories for administrators, teachers and students, giving them a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks.

Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked.

Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

A woman behind a lectern talks to an audience and a nearby screen says “Level up learning with Minecraft Education.”
Teachers in New York learned about Minecraft Education, a Microsoft product for schools based on the company’s popular world-building game.Credit…Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
The day after the Microsoft-led workshop in Manhattan, the American Federation of Teachers, a national union with 1.8 million members, made a major announcement. The union was starting an ambitious program to train teachers nationwide on A.I., with $23 million in funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Publicly, Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, was bullish. In an interview at the time, she said the partnership would help educators learn to use chatbots “safely, wisely and ethically,” while also getting them a seat at the table with behemoths like Microsoft and OpenAI as they developed and refined their A.I. products.

I pointed out to Ms. Weingarten that the union-industry deal might also present a fox-henhouse problem for schools. While her organization was calling for safeguards to protect children from A.I. risks, some trade groups representing Big Tech were working to block A.I. safety laws. She acknowledged the dissonance. “We are in it for the good of students and for the good of the country and for the good of families and to make sure educators actually play their rightful role,” she said. “Some of the companies that we’re engaged with are in it for profit. Those are two fundamentally different goals.”

After Ms. Weingarten announced her union’s deal with Big Tech companies, a few teachers and professors publicly warned that the spread of A.I. chatbots could undermine their profession, by outsourcing and automating core tasks like giving students feedback on their work. One of the more forceful educators was Lois Weiner, an education professor emerita at New Jersey City University and a retiree member of the U.F.T., who argued on Bluesky that the national union was selling out to corporate interests.

“This isn’t an alliance,” Ms. Weiner told me. “We aren’t sitting at the table. We’re the meal.”

Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn.

Tech companies finance national polls and research reports to help make products like A.I. chatbots, and courses like computer science, more urgent priorities for students and school districts. They advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students. They supply or sponsor teacher training and free course materials for students. They fund the National PTA, teachers’ unions and other prominent groups.

This playbook allows the companies to shape the American education system in ways that benefit them. Apple, for instance, offers a free Advanced Placement Computer Science curriculum that teaches high schoolers to code in Swift, its programming language for developing iPhone apps. Microsoft offers a competing curriculum: AP Computer Science Principles with Minecraft Education.

To some ears, the course names sound innocuous. But there is no Raytheon-branded AP Physics course, DuPont AP Chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course.

This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas.

This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

In researching my book, I spoke to tech industry leaders who have helped drive significant changes in schools. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, told me the dynamic began because public schools often seemed ill-equipped to teach crucial modern subjects and prepare students for the ever-evolving demands of the job market. He also suggested I consider where schools might be without support from corporations like Microsoft.

“Philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because the public sector has failed to do what it’s supposed to do,” Mr. Smith said. He allowed that the situation wasn’t ideal. “It’s filled the gap out of necessity,” he said. “It’s not the way we should want public education to work.”

Brad Smith, in a dark suit and purple tie, gestures while talking.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said that tech corporations are involved in education out of necessity. “The public sector has failed to do what it’s supposed to do,” he said.Credit…Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Maggie Johnson, the head of Google.org, the company’s corporate giving arm, made similar arguments. She said that the company had provided free educational materials and training in subjects like coding and data analytics for millions of underserved students, including middle schoolers and those in rural areas.

It is possible for Big Tech’s intentions in education to be both well-meaning and oriented toward long-term profit. How you feel about any one program depends on your broader views on the technology industry. Public sentiment on these companies has shifted profoundly, from a generally positive disposition in the 2000s and early 2010s to a growing distrust as the downsides of social media, compulsive screen use and corporate power became more apparent.
T

The tensions could be seen about a decade ago, in December 2017, when Google introduced free coding exercises for schools to use during Computer Science Education Week. The lessons were called “Create your own Google logo,” and they taught students how to use simple coding blocks to make the letters in the company’s logo change color, spin and bounce. The company already ran a wildly popular annual artwork contest, called Doodle for Google, for which tens of thousands of students created logos on different themes. Ms. Johnson said the Google lessons were a great way to get students excited about programming.

That was true. But the lessons also had the feel of brand-washing. At the time, journalists had begun reporting on how Google’s YouTube Kids platform had shown inappropriate, lewd and violent content to children. Separately, the company had begun removing thousands of videos of children, which had been targeted by child predators, from YouTube. Making multicolored Google logos hop and pirouette was a distraction from those headlines.

Google became the dominant tech platform in U.S. schools,eclipsing Apple and Microsoft, in part by offering a convenient package: free apps like Gmail along with sturdy, low-cost laptops called Chromebooks. Last year, Chromebooks accounted for 59 percent of the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research firm.
Image
Students sit at classroom desks, and each is typing on a laptop computer.
Students in a Chicago elementary school work on Google-powered laptops. Chromebooks accounted for an estimated 59 percent of the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools last year.Credit…Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times
The story of how Google came to conquer the classroom is a case study of the company’s power. From modest beginnings, it created a mammoth interlocking ecosystem that can drive shifts in teaching and learning — and create customers for life.

A campaign called “Gone Google” from the early 2010s illustrates the company’s marketing prowess. Google was just starting to convince universities and school districts to switch from costly legacy software to its free suite of apps. A 19-page marketing guide from Google described the offering as a “celebration of curiosity-fueled, technology-enabled learning” in which students could “learn together with affordable devices and familiar platforms.” The company encouraged education leaders to promote their conversions, and soon, school districts around the country began announcing that they had “Gone Google.”

Google sold school leaders on a similarly feel-good argument for Chromebooks: The laptops would empower students and democratize learning. Schools in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin that bought Chromebooks all included variations of the same Googlesque sentence on their sites or student handbooks: “The individual use of Chromebooks is a way to empower students to maximize their full potential and prepare them for college and the workplace.”

The schools’ enthusiasm helped obscure a long-term Google goal: hooking students early on services like Gmail and Chrome. The real revenue, made from amassing consumers’ data and showing ads based on their online activities, would come later.

Winning over schools and students with free apps was also a useful way for Google to curate and soften its image as regulators began to investigate the company’s data practices. In 2019, for instance, Google agreed to pay $170 million to resolve complaints by regulators who said YouTube had illegally harvested children’s personal data and used the details to target them with ads.

Since then, millions of schoolchildren have tried colorful animated lessons from Google called “Be Internet Awesome.” The program aims to teach students how to keep their data private and be kind online — and positions Google as a friendly, trustworthy privacy protector.
Image
A diploma-like document says in big letters “You're Internet Awesome.”
Schoolchildren who complete Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” lessons can get a “certificate of internet awesomeness” from the company.Credit…Google
Schools have spent tens of billions of dollars on classroom technology products over the last decade. Yet laptops and learning apps have generally not proven to significantly improve students’ educational outcomes. Some parents and school leaders who feel the industry oversold them on devices have soured on screens in schools, a phenomenon I’ve come to call Chromebook remorse.

Some schools have now started limiting classroom laptop use. This year, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest U.S. public school system, agreed to eliminate the use of school-issued iPads and Chromebooks for students in prekindergarten through first grade.

“Ten years ago, we bought the narrative from the tech companies that the only way to prepare our students for the future was to hand each of them a Chromebook or an iPad,” Lila Byock, the founder of a parent group called Schools Beyond Screens, said at a recent Los Angeles school board meeting. “Now we know better.”

Even Ms. Weingarten, who touted her union’s deal with Microsoft and OpenAI to train teachers on chatbots in 2025, has partially reversed course, in line with the rapidly changing politics of A.I. This year, she publicly called for elementary schools to hold off using A.I. with students.

One revealing story about Silicon Valley’s sincerity in the classroom involves the push to teach children coding.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google, delivered a lecture in Scotland in which he excoriated British schools for failing to teach computer science, the study of programming and concepts like algorithms. Britain would not be able to compete globally, he suggested, if more kids did not learn to code.
Image
Eric Schmidt, wearing a tie and jacket, gestures while speaking.
Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google, speaking in Scotland in 2011. He criticized British schools for failing to teach students computer science. Credit…David Moir/Reuters

A year later, Microsoft issued a similar public admonition for the United States: Tech companies could not find enough talented software engineers to maintain their explosive growth — a hiring shortage that threatened the American economy. Microsoft said the problem was that too few high schools taught computing.

The message took off in 2013, when a nonprofit called Code.org posted a YouTube video, starring Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, that promoted coding as an empowering, lucrative skill for students. “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in the video. “The whole limit in the system is that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”

The video went viral, kicking off a nationwide learn-to-code drive in schools. With funding and expertise from Microsoft and Google, Code.org helped convince dozens of states to enact new laws and policies boosting computer science in public schools. The courses had positive effects, teaching students important skills like logic, abstraction and problem-solving. But some also cast tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators — often without pushing students to consider the industry’s consequences and harms.
Image
President Barack Obama, wearing a baseball cap that says Code, watches as a young girl types on a laptop.
President Barack Obama joined a Code.org event in 2014. With funding from Microsoft and Google, the nonprofit group promoted computer science classes in public schools.Credit…Pool photo by Andrew Harrer
“In other disciplines, we don’t have industry driving K-12 curricular or policy decisions,” Bryan Twarek, a vice president at the Computer Science Teachers Association, a nonprofit group with nearly 10,000 teachers as members, told me. “And we probably shouldn’t.” His candor seemed startling, given that the group’s biggest donors include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Big Tech needed an army of coders — until it didn’t. Software engineers are increasingly turning to A.I. tools to generate code. So are many other people with no prior coding experience. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are pouring billions into building enormous data centers to fuel A.I. services, even as they lay off thousands of employees. Some recent college graduates who majored in computing are struggling to find tech jobs.

Now some of the same corporations that sold schools on computer science are pushing them to teach A.I. and investing billions of dollars in the effort. And tellingly, this year, Code.org changed its name to CodeAI.

But something different is happening this time in schools: pushback. A groundswell of teachers, parents, researchers and local government leaders say they aren’t buying the idea of new, and educationally unproven, A.I. tools as the next fulcrum for learning.

Some are embracing a broader approach to tech education, one that not only teaches algorithms and app-making, but also asks students to examine how individuals and society are affected by the industry’s disruptions. To see this strategy in person, I visited Alicia Streight, a math teacher at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, Calif. In addition to teaching traditional topics, Ms. Streight asks her students to analyze how social media influencers manipulate statistics to spread disinformation.

A few years ago, she also started a weekly class to encourage middle schoolers to examine all kinds of innovations in their lives: TikTok, meat substitutes, ChatGPT. She helped her students consider questions like: “Where did this come from? Who’s building this? Who’s profiting? Who’s benefiting? How is this going to affect me? How’s this going to affect my family? What’s going to happen in 10 years?”

Rather than being coded by industry, Ms. Streight’s students were learning to decode popular products and ask fundamental questions about the powerful companies behind them. With A.I. spreading at astonishing speed, Ms. Streight argues that it’s more imperative than ever to give students durable analytical skills.

Educators have come up with a term for this pedagogical approach: “technology civics.” After all, public schools have long taught civics as an essential subject for students to understand and navigate government power in their lives. The new discipline will help them understand and navigate Big Tech, and equip them for a world increasingly shaped by machines.

How Big Tech Captured American Schools

Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply…

www.nytimes.com

SF Mayor Lurie's PUC Cited By Cal-OSHA For Putting LIUNA 261 Workers Lives In Danger & Firing Them For Making Health & Safety Complaints
Sunday, August 23, 2026

https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/51038?view_id=22&meta_id=1189832&redirect=true

…SAN FRANCISCO HAS CHOSEN TO DEFY THE LAWS AND PUT INNOCENT WORKERS IN HARMS WAY – SAN FRANCISCO WAS A UNION CITY – NO MORE – SFPUC HAS BEEN EXPOSED – THE MANY RESERVOIRS CONTAMINATED – DEFERRED MAINTANENCE.

When the SF Water Department fired the three workers, it was an act of retaliation of the worst kind.

When the workers from Union 261 went to Union 261 for help, they were told the Union could do nothing.

San Francisco was a Union City's – and we all remember Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934.

The SF Police Department fired on our longshoremen on our waterfront, killing two longshoremen, Nicholas Bordoise and Howard Sperry. Hundreds of others who protested were injured.

It is a sad day when we learn that today's Union favors the greedy and fails to stand by our hardworking Union workers.

SFPUC is a corrupt entity, an Enterprise Department, bringing in millions by charging clients for drinking water.

In recent years, the reservoirs have been contaminated, and San Franciscans have no clue that this is an emergency.

Deferred maintenance and poor leadership are responsible for this nonsense. We have a General Manager who is an attorney, not an engineer; he makes $600,000. He has no clue about the contaminated reservoirs.

At first, the SFPUC Plumbers would clean the reservoirs, a project named "Confined Space." "

Those in charge are trained and certified and must maintain strict standards: working underground, some forty to fifty feet down, the drinking water has to be drained, and the entire area, the size of a football field or two, sanitized using sodium hypochlorite, calcium hypochlorite, and Chlorine dioxide.

SFPUC has deferred maintenance and has failed to train and certify workers to date. The laborers, who for a long time were sent in harm's way – that is, until we brought it to the attention of the SF Water Department managers William Taehan, Frank Jordon – their supervisor Steven Richie – and Steve Richie's boss Dennis Herrera and Ronald Flynn.

We went before the SFPUC and spoke Truth to power.

We went before the SF Inspector General and the SF Controller.

We approached the SF Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and they investigated, and SFPUC was indicted on five counts:

www.osha.gov

1. No pre-entry training and rescue.

2. No confined Space training and rescue.

3. No testing of the air inside before entry.

4. No stand-by person.

5. No radio communication.

My name is Francisco Da Costa, and when we took up this case, the SFPU Commissioners did not respond to us because they had no clue about the "Confined Space" issues.

The SFPU Commissioner rubber-stamps and will not speak Truth to power. They bow down to folks like Dennis Herrera, who will soon retire – good riddance to bad rubbish.

Steve Richie and the Deputy General Manager, Ronald Fynn, could have done better; they failed and put the innocent in harm's way. As Director of Environmental Justice Advocacy, I led a team of experts; we met for nine months and researched the over twenty areas that the SF Water Department failed to have in place.

A judge will deal with the facts that our team has: empirical data, photographs of the Reservoir, sludge buildup of two or three feet, and other contaminants that we will reveal at the appropriate time.

The three SFPUC workers will be present and state the facts – they will also reveal the retaliation and other atrocities committed – and we have witnesses – so that the Judge can adjudicate – fair play and justice.

City and County
of San Francisco
Public Utilities Commission
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/51038?view_id=22&meta_id=1189832&redirect=true

The Racist Frame-up At Dennis Herrera's SF PUC
https://youtu.be/ci9OWBDLhTo
The Joe King Case & The Utter Corruption & Racism At The SF PUC
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/11/07/18881299.php
Corrupt Dennis Hererra Cost SF Taxpayers $2.4 + Million For Illegal Firing Of City Attorney
https://abc7news.com/post/judge-says-sf-must-pay-$24m-in-fees-to-whistleblowers-lawyers/2214788/
https://abc7news.com/post/judge-says-sf-must-pay-$24m-in-fees-to-whistleblowers-lawyers/2214788/
SF Public Utilities Commission linked to three SFPUC employees fired without cause
https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/51038?view_id=192&redirect=true
CCSF Black Workers Want Action On Systemic Racism From SF Mayor Daniel Lurie
https://youtu.be/ZNAJDFenSt0
The Fix Is In: Herrera’s SFPUC
https://westsideobserver.com/news/watchdog.html#jul21a
New audit shows serious contracting problems at the SFPUC
https://48hills.org/2024/12/new-audit-shows-serious-contracting-problems-at-the-sfpuc/
‘They must be stealing’: Equipment goes missing as SF Public Utilities employees moonlight on city time, workers say
The allegations about the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission surfaced in a new whistleblower lawsuit.
https://sfstandard.com/2022/08/18/they-must-be-stealing-equipment-goes-missing-as-employees-moonlight-on-city-time-workers-say/
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1579379453535684

Trump laying groundwork to impose national emergency by sowing election distrust
President’s speech, declassification of documents and heightened claims of noncitizen voting have experts concerned
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/23/trump-sowing-election-distrust
George …Chidi
Sun 23 Aug 2026 06.00 EDT

A series of moves by Donald Trump’s administration to sow doubt in the integrity of US elections have intensified concern among voting experts – and sparked hope among election deniers – that it could declare a national emergency.

The White House and US federal agencies have released a string of documents this summer – including disputed analyses of alleged voting by noncitzens and historical intelligence memos – stoking expectations that the US president could move to exert greater control over November’s US midterm elections.

Trump used a primetime television address in July to claim – again – that US elections were vulnerable to foreign manipulation, and repeat the lie that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen.

Trump’s speech prompted Steve Bannon, his former political strategist, to predict the US president will declare a state of emergency on national security grounds to “protect” elections.

“Take your No 2 pencil out,” Bannon, a rightwing commentator, said on his War Room video podcast on 29 July. “It’s coming. It’s coming. Just block the last week of August out. It’s coming.”

While Trump and his allies could try to use a national emergency declaration to delegitimize results of November’s results, experts say such a declaration would not supersede the constitutional restrictions on executive power on election administration. No president has ever attempted to invoke an emergency to assert control over voting.

Asked earlier this month by Wayne Allyn Root, a rightwing broadcaster, if he would “declare a national security emergency for elections”, Trump notably did not shoot down the idea.

“Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?” the president told Real America’s Voice, a rightwing cable channel. “I’ll leave it at that.”

The administration is “trying to lay the groundwork to declare some sort of emergency to nationalize elections”, said Aria Branch, a partner at the Elias Law Group, who led a lawsuit blocking Trump’s previous executive orders on election administration. “I think the president is looking for any opportunity to do that.”

‘We need to be prepared for everything’

“I mean, listen, I think it is quite obvious that the man is losing his grip in reality, so I think we need to be prepared for everything,” said Santiago Mayer, president of Voters of Tomorrow, a gen Z-led voter advocacy organization. “We have spent a long time thinking and preparing for any eventuality and anything that he might attempt. I think our focus at the end of the day is to turn out enough voters where, no matter what he pulls, it won’t succeed.”

Democratic members of US congress have been wargaming strategies to respond to executive provocations in recent months, considering scenarios such as AI-generated disinformation videos and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents being dispatched to polls. Progressive organizations in the democracy space have also been preparing for something to happen before the election.

The presence of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, at an FBI raid in Fulton county, Georgia, raised questions earlier this year. Gabbard later testified before Congress that she had been leading an investigation into claims of foreign interference in US elections. Gabbard’s team was involved in the seizure and examination of voting equipment in Puerto Rico, and spent months scrutinizing potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.

When Gabbard resigned on 30 June, Trump named his longstanding ally Bill Pulte as her acting replacement, a widely criticized move by members of both parties, who pointed to Pulte’s lack of intelligence experience. While Jay Clayton later took up the post permanently, Pulte is said to have pushed the election interference narrative in a less-visible role.

“This is why Pulte is so important,” Bannon said in July. “So, ah, Jay has got to – Clayton – has big shoes to fill. Every day we’re going to be dogging him on, like, where’s the next release on this.”

On the night of Trump’s July address, Bannon texted CNN: “We need a National Security Emergency about the midterm elections immediately – this is a powerful predicate for that.”

Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney, now a sharp Trump critic, warned of the same while speaking to PBS following the president’s July TV address. “Well, I think tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” he said.

ICE agents at polls is “a virtual certainty”, said Cobb, who questioned whether National Guard officers would also be presented. “Anything to intimidate minority voters, particularly immigrant voters, and also I think anything that allows them to try to seize voting machines, as Trump wanted to do in 2020, but [then-attorney general] Bill Barr explained to him there was just no basis for it.”

‘Noncitizen voting … is just not a widespread problem’

After Trump’s TV address, a White House “Government Transparency Task Force” – composed of members of the office of the director of national intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – began releasing declassified “election integrity” documents on the White House website.

The first tranche included declassified intelligence memos which described electronic voting machine vulnerabilities, foreign access to state voter registration data and foreign digital manipulation strategies. Much of the material was already known to the public and amounted to a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which Trump lost.

A week later, Trump and his allies quickly seized on an announcement from Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, that 6,600 non-citizens had registered to vote because of a software error. While fewer than 400 of them voted, the disclosure was used to escalate false claims that there are scores of noncitizens on the voter rolls.

On 31 July, DHS released a public notice arguing that New Jersey’s administrative errors demonstrated a need for standardized federal oversight.

The taskforce also declassified documents in a Michigan case where the FBI investigated suspected fraudulent voter registrations by a get-out-the-vote organization, in which no criminal charges were filed, and investigative material related to a data scrape of voter information in Maricopa county, Arizona.

The pace of releases has been accelerating.

On Monday, the taskforce declassified and released investigative files related to an investigation into Chinese intelligence, which disclosed how disgraced former Democratic US representative Eric Swalwell had told FBI agents how he had “occasionally hooked up” with Christine Fang, a Chinese national allegedly engaged in a political influence campaign.

On Tuesday, the US Census Bureau released a brief claiming it had identified 24,000 noncitizens voting in the 2020 election in a preliminary match of 128m records. It did not reveal its methodology and was sharply criticized by democracy advocates.

“This alleged analysis based on census data fails the laugh test,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “The administration does not provide a sufficient explanation of how it arrived at these numbers – and for good reason.”

Branch, of Elias Law Group, suggested the Trump administration is “searching for” the legal basis for an executive order. “I think they believe there may be one. I think such a document just doesn’t exist, because the fact is our elections are secure,” she said. “Noncitizen voting in our elections is just not a widespread problem … All of the fear and narrative around that issue is just completely unfounded, and it’s really just to stoke fear and lay the groundwork for future action.”

In July, DHS also released an analysis arguing that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections. It did not reveal its methodology for identifying the noncitizens, either, or disclose how confident its officials were in their assessment. The tool it used to flag noncitizens on voter rolls is known to be inaccurate.

‘The founders recognized the risk of centralizing power’
Asked about the possibility of an executive order declaring a national emergency on elections, the White House did not rule it out, refusing to comment on hypotheticals.

“Extreme liberal Democrats are keeping Americans from having full confidence in their elections by refusing to vote for the Save America Act,” said Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, referring to legislation that would enforce a crackdown on voting. “The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that ensures Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country.”

The Save America Act would require states to submit their voter rolls to federal inspection, effectively give DHS the power to de-register anyone it deemed ineligible to vote. The act would also sharply curtail mail-in voting – a practice Trump repeatedly criticized, but has reportedly done himself as recently as in this week’s Florida Republican primary – and require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a narrow set of photo IDs to cast a ballot.

“I mean, we’ve been closely monitoring what the administration is saying,” said Branch, who sees the rhetoric itself as an act of intimidation.

“The constitution is extremely clear on this, and the founders recognized the risk of centralizing power over elections in the executive branch,” she added. “Very helpful, in terms of litigation to push back on these types of efforts.”

https://fb.watch/Jar2CkbAlD/

Kentucky

https://www.facebook.com/meidastouch/posts/pfbid0oyR1eSGiZ1agHAyQoCGSLESRgtnRSQRrQREp2g94YVthA1VMStV7SCxqF3cWoUZjl

As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/08/21/as-workplace-surveillance-grows-experts-say-its-good-to-know-the-ways-your-employer-is-watching/

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | Associated Press
…PUBLISHED: August 21, 2026 at 9:43 AM PDT | UPDATED: August 21, 2026 at 10:04 AM PDT

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK — College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic. A vast array of digital tools still are being used to track locations, collect data on task completion rates, and access work-issued smartphone and laptop cameras, raising concerns about how much privacy employees have relinquished, even in their own homes.

Employers have always monitored workers, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science enable them to create extensive data sets or “dossiers” that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior, said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions.

Meghan Markle Reportedly No Longer Part Of Guy Ritchie's Netflix Series 'The Gentlemen', Casting Doubts On Acting Comeback

“Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,” Negrón said.

Some of the most common workplace monitoring programs have shared names, email addresses and other personal worker data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice, according to an investigation by Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Data privacy experts and workers who say they’ve been closely monitored spoke with The Associated Press about what they see as the risks of employer surveillance and the steps employees can take to protect their personal information.

Team up with like-minded colleagues to advocate for yourself

Pharmacist Lannie Duong’s job at a medical clinic involved meeting with patients who had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. She reviewed their medical histories, blood work and symptoms, and adjusted their medications. She frequently enlisted interpreters to help her communicate with patients who had limited English language skills.

Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments, and in performance evaluations questioned why she took so long with each patient.

“Everything was counted. How many minutes you’re on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,” Duong said. “We’re just tasked to do what feels like the impossible.”

Under what she described as unrelenting pressure, Duong felt “not trusted, not appreciated, almost completely hopeless. It was so depressing.” She eventually went on medical leave and began volunteering with other pharmacists to organize a union.

“I spoke up, hoping others would voice their concerns as well, but that didn’t really pan out,” Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after the medical leave.

Many of the employers using surveillance tools do so transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how the tools are used, Negrón said. But there are also employers tracking, ranking and scoring employees in ways that are not transparent to workers, she said.

“Workers are going to have to come together because the forces of centralizing this kind of tracking and monitoring are moving too fast,” Negrón said.

Find out what kind of data your employer is collecting about you

As awareness about surveillance tools grows, some workers are pushing back on tools that track how long it takes to fulfill tasks, saying such monitoring contributes to injuries, and questioning what personal information is being collected and how it’s being used, said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.

“Unfortunately, if you are on a machine that’s been issued by your workplace, you should expect that there’s some type of monitoring,” Tsukayama said.

Researching data collection and surveillance trends in your industry is a good idea, according to Negrón. Without that knowledge, workers may find themselves unprepared when confronted with information unearthed during surveillance.

While teaching a college writing class, Arianna Anaya discovered that an administrator was reading the papers her students uploaded to the school’s learning management software and the comments Anaya made on the work. The students often wrote about intimate topics, including abuse, eating disorders and family trauma.

“The school essentially used the online learning system to allow administrators and staff to read student work that was often immensely private and personal, something we were specifically told students should not know about,” Anaya said.

A colleague who printed out the comments criticized the casual tone Anaya used with students and accused her of not sticking to the course syllabus. A few months later, Anaya’s teaching contract wasn’t renewed, although she doesn’t know the exact reason.

“It made me quite paranoid,” Anaya said. “It made me feel less safe in the world.”

Check state laws to see what’s required of employers

Some states, including New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Maine, require employers to notify workers if they’re being monitored. Maine’s law goes further, prohibiting visual monitoring in employees’ homes or personal vehicles unless that kind of observation is required for the duties of the job, said Edward Halle, a privacy and AI compliance manager.

“The question becomes, what does the law mean by ‘the duties of the job’?” Halle said. “A telehealth nurse needs a camera; the camera is the job. A productivity webcam bolted onto ordinary desk work almost certainly isn’t. Where that line falls is the first thing the Department of Labor will be asked to sort out.”

If you work in a state without a notification requirement, it’s difficult to find out if an employer is using technology to monitor your performance.

To raise the issue with managers, Tsukayama suggests coordinating with a union. If that’s not an option and you’re asking managers individually, approach the topic cautiously and take a curious tone, she advised. You could say you’ve noticed something on the computer and have questions, such as “How is this information being used within the company? How might it get out of the company?” Tsukayama said.

One place to start is asking what specific employee data your organization collects, said Aiha Nguyen, director of the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute studying the impacts of technology. If your manager doesn’t know, the information technology department may have answers, since the people working there often are the ones turning on the features, Nguyen said.

Some common software programs such as Microsoft Office and Zoom have tools that can be used for tracking worker productivity, but the tracking features aren’t always activated. Knowing whether those tracking features are turned on can be difficult, because they’re built into the programs, Nguyen said.

“It’s automatic. It’s considered something that employers have been able to say, ‘This is necessary for work. You have to use these tools,’” she said.

To help safeguard personal information, don’t use work devices to handle family matters or sensitive personal information such as medical conditions, experts advise.

“I think most people know that,” Nguyen said. “But it can become tedious to switch between phones, or people don’t really think it’s that harmful. … You don’t want to potentially put yourself at risk.”

As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching

Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during…

www.eastbaytimes.com

Boots Riley Speaks In Solidarity With Crockett10 & ILWU C & H Workers Struggle At E. Bay Court House
https://youtu.be/lguscBpKL4U
Boot Riley, film maker, musician and activist spoke out in solidarity with the Crockett 10 who have been attacked and face charges for supporting the …ILWU Local 6 C&H strike in Crockett, California.
The Superior Court in Richmond, California was holding an arraignment for the workers including felony charges but the Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton is holding off pressing the charges but is stalling on formally dropping any charges.
The C & H sugar refinery is owned by ASR and the Fangul family from Cuba who have a US monopoly on sugar and also have a record of slave labor conditions for cane workers in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Philippines. They are also have contributed tens of millions to Trump who they live next to in Florida. After making contributions to Trump he removed restrictions on the importation of sugar cane from the Dominican
Republic which had been blocked because of the labor conditions for the Haitians and Dominican plantations that the Fangul family owns and controls.
Additional Media:
ILWU Workers, Defendants & Labor Supporters Speak Out At Court Against Police Attacks & Arrests
https://youtu.be/4pBF07dQYkw
ILWU & Supporters Rally At Richmond Superior Court HouseTo Demand "Drop The Charges On Crockett 10
https://youtu.be/O5Yf7ZIP-A8
At Crockett SugarFest Workers Speak Out On ILWU 6 Strike Against Union Busting C&H Sugar Refinery
https://youtu.be/VQZbJos-cg4
The Class War Against The ILWU By C&H Fanjul Family In Crockett & The Trump Fascist Government
https://youtu.be/La1RhIs3-kw
Hawaiian Workers Join ILWU Local 6 Strike Against C&H ASR Fanjul Family Refinery in Crockett
https://youtu.be/99_qhAJ8d98
ILWU10 Workers Protest Unloading At Levin Terminal Of Ship Of Sugar To Bust ILWU6 C&H Strikers
https://youtu.be/QEkB5QUAQG8
ILWU 6 Workers Strike At Crockett C&H ASR Sugar Plant To Protect Their Contract & Conditions
https://youtu.be/PY6Rj82n_cs
ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues
https://youtu.be/ABosvjawnj4
The Sugar Babies Amy Serrano 2005 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVcyRjy52Q
Juneteenth & The Fight Today Against Resegregation & A Fascist Government-Time For Mass Action
https://youtu.be/3fTLkPEEu34
On Juneteenth, ILWU Local 10 VP Trent Willis Talks About History & Struggle For General Strike Today
https://youtu.be/-dqrEQHYzqI
Kill Tariffs Not Workers! Teamsters & ILWU Members Protest Tariffs & Trade War At The Port Of Oakland
https://youtu.be/DdIzrM2B-9w
ILWU 10 Solidarity Meeting On Palestine: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
https://youtu.be/XiPs6lccJM0
Zim Line Hit With Pickets-ILWU 10 & 34 Workers Stand Against Israeli Apartheid
https://youtu.be/2Gp503j9WSk
Mass March & Picket At Oakland Port To Stop Israel's Zim Line Ship Piraeus To Protest Crimes In Gaza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJHlnq4YIo
Danny Glover Joins ILWU 10 In Supporting Freedom For Mumia on February 16, 2023
https://youtu.be/j0qJX4zDf9s
ILUW 1984 San Francisco Local 10 & 34 Anti-Apartheid Action Against Racist South African
For More Information
ILWU 6 Crockett C&G Strike Fund
https://square.link/u/ifFpgkRO
Video By Adam Alloy
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

Boots Riley Speaks In Solidarity With Crockett10 & ILWU C & H Workers Struggle At E. Bay Court House

Boot Riley, film maker and activist spoke out in solidarity with th…

youtu.be

Boots Riley Speaks In Solidarity With Crockett10 & ILWU C & H Workers Struggle At E. Bay Court House
https://youtu.be/lguscBpKL4U
Boot Riley, film maker and activist spoke out in solidarity with the Crockett 10 who have been attacked and face charges for supporting the ILWU Local 6 …C&H strike
in Crockett, California.
The Superior Court in Richmond, California was holding an arraignment for the workers including felony charges but the Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton is holding off pressing the charges but is stalling on formally dropping any charges.
The C & H sugar refinery is owned by ASR and the Fangul family from Cuba who have a US monopoly on sugar and also have a record of slave labor conditions for cane workers in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Philippines. They are also have contributed tens of millions to Trump who they live next to in Florida. After making contributions to Trump he removed restrictions on the importation of sugar cane from the Dominican Republic which had been blocked because of the labor
conditions for the Haitians and Dominican plantations that the Fangul family owns and controls.
Additional Media:
ILWU Workers, Defendants & Labor Supporters Speak Out At Court Against Police Attacks & Arrests
https://youtu.be/4pBF07dQYkw
ILWU & Supporters Rally At Richmond Superior Court HouseTo Demand "Drop The Charges On Crockett 10
https://youtu.be/O5Yf7ZIP-A8
At Crockett SugarFest Workers Speak Out On ILWU 6 Strike Against Union Busting C&H Sugar Refinery
https://youtu.be/VQZbJos-cg4
The Class War Against The ILWU By C&H Fanjul Family In Crockett & The Trump Fascist Government
https://youtu.be/La1RhIs3-kw
Hawaiian Workers Join ILWU Local 6 Strike Against C&H ASR Fanjul Family Refinery in Crockett
https://youtu.be/99_qhAJ8d98
ILWU10 Workers Protest Unloading At Levin Terminal Of Ship Of Sugar To Bust ILWU6 C&H Strikers
https://youtu.be/QEkB5QUAQG8
ILWU 6 Workers Strike At Crockett C&H ASR Sugar Plant To Protect Their Contract & Conditions
https://youtu.be/PY6Rj82n_cs
ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues
https://youtu.be/ABosvjawnj4
The Sugar Babies Amy Serrano 2005 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVcyRjy52Q
Juneteenth & The Fight Today Against Resegregation & A Fascist Government-Time For Mass Action
https://youtu.be/3fTLkPEEu34
On Juneteenth, ILWU Local 10 VP Trent Willis Talks About History & Struggle For General Strike Today
https://youtu.be/-dqrEQHYzqI
Kill Tariffs Not Workers! Teamsters & ILWU Members Protest Tariffs & Trade War At The Port Of Oakland
https://youtu.be/DdIzrM2B-9w
ILWU 10 Solidarity Meeting On Palestine: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
https://youtu.be/XiPs6lccJM0
Zim Line Hit With Pickets-ILWU 10 & 34 Workers Stand Against Israeli Apartheid
https://youtu.be/2Gp503j9WSk
Mass March & Picket At Oakland Port To Stop Israel's Zim Line Ship Piraeus To Protest Crimes In Gaza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJHlnq4YIo
Danny Glover Joins ILWU 10 In Supporting Freedom For Mumia on February 16, 2023
https://youtu.be/j0qJX4zDf9s
ILUW 1984 San Francisco Local 10 & 34 Anti-Apartheid Action Against Racist South African
For More Information
ILWU 6 Crockett C&G Strike Fund
https://square.link/u/ifFpgkRO
Video By Adam Alloy
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

https://www.facebook.com/yourDigitalBrain/posts/pfbid02fqjXYBkdyS6GQ2AaUZjbmswZg4xvAgKeUALb4jhRbveMh6yWswGyPv9VmgdP22HRl

California shouldn’t let oil companies rewrite refinery safety rules
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2026/01/refinery-safety-rules-california-oil/
JANUARY 14, 2026
BY MARIE CHOI AND NICK PLURKOWSKI
A large oil refinery is illuminated against the backdrop of a twilight sky. Tall …distillation towers with staircases and platforms rise into the air, with numerous lights glowing across the industrial structure. A plume of black smoke drifts from one of the stacks, contrasting with the warm hues of the sunset. Metal pipes, walkways, and scaffolding weave throughout the refinery, creating a dense, industrial landscape.
An oil refinery in Carson on May 29, 2024. Photo by Damian Dovarganes, AP Photo
Welcome to CalMatters, the only nonprofit newsroom devoted solely to covering statewide issues that affect all Californians. Sign up for WeeklyMatters for a Saturday morning digest of the latest news and commentary from the Golden State.
This story is part of California Voices, a commentary forum aiming to broaden our understanding of the state and spotlight Californians directly impacted by policy or its absence. Learn more here.
Nick Plurkowski is president of United Steelworkers Local 5, representing workers at three Bay Area refineries
In recent months, a string of refinery fires, chemical releases and other disasters has put Californians on edge. Yet California regulators are quietly proposing to weaken the state’s safety rules in a secret deal with oil lobbyists — putting us all at greater risk.

On Jan. 15, regulators will hold a public hearing at the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board meeting in Sacramento on changes to California’s Process Safety Management regulations, an issue with life-or-death consequences for workers and nearby communities.

These regulations exist to keep people safe. After the 2012 Chevron refinery explosion in Richmond sent a massive fireball into the sky and sent thousands of residents to seek medical help, California strengthened its refinery safety rules.

The reforms established crucial safeguards: rigorous oversight of hazardous materials and processes, common-sense standards ensuring meaningful worker participation in safety processes and engineering reviews, and authority for workers to stop unsafe operations.

We represent communities living next to refineries and the workers who operate them. Together, we are sounding the alarm — California must not allow oil billionaires and their lobbyists to rewrite refinery safety rules.

Recent disasters at refineries across California — including major fires and explosions inMartinez, Benicia and El Segundo in 2025 alone — show that the risks remain serious and urgent.

As oil executives disinvest from maintenance at aging refineries, the risk of deadly disasters increases, making these regulations more important than ever.

Refinery disasters don’t just affect workers and local communities. They impact Californians across the state when we fill up our tanks. Major accidents often disrupt fuel supplies, driving up gasoline prices.

The proposed OSHA changes stem from a settlement between state regulators and oil industry lobbyists — a secret deal crafted behind closed doors, excluding workers and frontline communities. The changes would erode critical safety protections and give oil companies more control over the rules meant to hold them accountable.

The most dangerous change targets a crucial aspect of refinery safety, employee participation.

The proposal would allow oil executives to handpick workers to participate in developing safety plans and conducting critical safety reviews. In practice, that means a worker who raises concerns about corroded pipes or unsafe chemical levels could be replaced with someone more willing to stay silent.

This defies common sense. Refinery workers are responsible for the day-to-day operation and maintenance of these facilities.

They know which metals are used in each process and how much acid or additives can be used. They know which chemicals corrode and rip holes through pipes. Their knowledge is essential to preventing disasters.

Other revisions would reduce oversight of hazardous chemicals, narrowing what companies are required to analyze and fix.

These dangerous and carcinogenic substances don’t disappear just because we decide to look the other way. They remain on-site, threatening workers and surrounding neighborhoods.

Communities like Richmond and Carson are already deeply impacted by day-to-day refinery pollution. They experience elevated rates of asthma, cancer and other chronic illnesses. Explosions and toxic accidents exacerbate these risks.

The existing safety rules were built with worker input for a reason. Refinery workers want safe jobs. Refineries are inherently hazardous, and a single failure can mean severe injury or death. Workers must be able to select their own representatives who understand refining processes, prioritize environmental health and safety and who will not cave to corporate pressure.

Luckily, this deal can still be stopped. Governor Newsom’s regulators should reject these industry-driven rollbacks and work openly with workers and residents.

The future of safety at California’s refineries should be defined by public voices — not oil billionaires and their lobbyists.

Opinion | California shouldn’t let oil companies rewrite refinery safety rules

Regulators will hold a hearing Jan. 15 at the OSHA Standards Board in Sacramento on changes that will weaken safety standards for refineries.

calmatters.org