How Google captured nation’s classrooms
Tech behemoth has helped upend sales methods companies use to place their products in classrooms
The sixth-graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, and began composing essays.
Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the United States, with about 381,000 students, is at the forefront of a profound shift in U.S. education: the Googlification of the classroom.
In five years, Google has helped upend the sales methods companies use to place their products in classrooms. It has enlisted teachers and administrators to promote Google’s products to other schools. It has directly reached out to educators to test its products — effectively bypassing senior district officials.
Today, more than half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students — more than 30 million children — use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs, the company said. Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.
Some parents warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children’s school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults.
Jonathan Rochelle, director of Google’s education apps group, said that when students transfer their school emails and files to a personal Google account, that account is governed by Google’s privacy policy.
In 2013, Rochelle, a co-developer of Google Docs, set up a team at Google to create apps specifically for schools. To spread those tools, Jaime Casap, Google’s global education evangelist, began traveling around the country with a motivational message: Rather than tout specific Google products, Casap told educators that they could improve their students’ college and career prospects by creatively using online tools.
But that also caused problems in Chicago and another district when Google went looking for teachers to try a new app — effectively bypassing district administrators. In both cases, Google found itself reined in.
At Chicago Public Schools, the teacher-centric strategy played out almost perfectly — in the beginning. In 2012, Jennie Magiera, then a fourthgrade teacher in Chicago, wanted her students to use Google Docs. Because the district wasn’t yet using Google’s apps, she said, she independently set up six consumer accounts for her class.
Chicago Public Schools was looking to trim the $2 million a year it was spending on Microsoft Exchange and another email service. In March 2012, the district chose Google. Chicago administrators said they asked Google to sign a contract agreeing, among other things, to comply with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. That law permits federally funded educational institutions to share students’ personally identifiable information with certain school vendors, provided those companies use that information only for school purposes.
Instead, Google initially proposed abiding by its own company policies, said Edward Wagner, the district’s director of infrastructure services, and followed up by emailing links to those policies — terms that the company could change at any time. Google had hoped that Chicago would become an early adopter of Google Classroom, its new app to help teachers take attendance, assign homework and do other tasks. But Google had not anticipated Margaret Hahn.
At the time, she was the school system’s director of technology change management. Early on, she said, Google had invited teachers to try an initial version of Classroom, without first contacting the school district’s technology administrators. Now Google wanted Chicago Public Schools to switch on the app districtwide, she said, before determining whether it complied with local student-protection policies.
Google envisioned Classroom as a kind of “mission control” dashboard where teachers could more efficiently manage tasks like assigning and correcting homework. To create the app, they collaborated closely with teachers.
In May 2014, Google posted an announcement online, asking for volunteers to beta-test Classroom. More than 100,000 teachers worldwide responded, the company said. That August, Google made Classroom available to schools. That was too fast for Chicago Public Schools. Administrators there wanted to test Classroom first to make sure it complied with district policies and fit their teachers’ needs. So they set up a pilot program, to run for the entire school year.
The next fall, the Chicago district switched on Classroom. Google’s ability to test its products on such a monumental scale has stoked concerns about whether the tech giant is exploiting publicschool teachers and students for free labor. “It’s a private company very creatively using public resources — in this instance, teachers’ time and expertise — to build new markets at low cost,” said Patricia Burch, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California.