How Google took over U.S. classrooms
Tech giant has outmanoeuvred rivals with a powerful combination of low-cost laptops and free apps
CHICAGO— 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 Googlepowered 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 thirdlargest 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. And it has outmanoeuvred Apple and Microsoft with a powerful combination of low-cost laptops, called Chromebooks, and free classroom apps.
Today, more than half of primaryand secondary-school students in the U.S. — more than 30 million children — use Google education apps such as Gmail and Docs, the company said. And Chromebooks, Googlepowered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, now account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools.
“Between the fall of 2012 and now, Google went from an interesting possibility to the dominant way that schools around the country” teach students to find information, create documents and turn them in, said Hal Friedlander, former chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education.
In doing so, Google is helping to drive a philosophical change in public education — prioritizing training children in skills such as teamwork and problem-solving while de-emphasizing the teaching of traditional academic knowledge, such as math formulas. It puts Google, and the tech economy, at the centre of one of the great debates that has raged in U.S. education for more than a century: whether the purpose of public schools is to turn out knowledgeable citizens or skilled workers.
Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.
Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.
Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts — but schools encourage them to do so.
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. “Personal Gmail accounts may serve ads,” he said, but files in Google Drive are “never scanned for the purpose of showing ads.”
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 travelling around the U.S. 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.
Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising — much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people’s data.
Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Bram Bout, director of Google’s education unit, pointed to a Google privacy notice listing the cat- egories of information that the company’s education services collect, such as location data and “details of how a user used our service.”
Bout said student data in Google’s core education services (including Gmail, Calendar and Docs) “is only used to provide the services themselves, so students can do things like communicate using email.” These services do not show ads, he said, and “do not use personal data resulting from use of these services to target ads.”
In 2006, Casap persuaded Arizona State University officials to scrap their costly internal email service and replace it with a free version of the Gmail-and-Docs package that Google had been selling to companies. In one semester, the vast majority of the university’s approximately 65,000 students signed up.
Northwestern University, the University of Southern California and many others followed.
This became Google’s education marketing playbook: Woo school officials with easy-to-use, money-saving services. Then enlist schools to market to other schools.
Casap decided to try the strategy with public schools.
As it happened, officials at the Oregon Department of Education were looking to help local schools cut email costs, said Steve Nelson, a former department official. In 2010, the state officially made Google’s education apps available to its districts.
Google then developed a growth strategy aimed at teachers, who could influence the administrators who make technology decisions.
At Chicago Public Schools, the teacher-centric strategy played out almost perfectly.
In 2012, Jennie Magiera, then a fourth-grade 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.
Since adopting Google apps, Chicago schools have saved about $1.6 million annually on email and related costs, a district spokesperson said.
In 2014, Google’s education juggernaut hit a speed bump in Chicago Public Schools.
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 district- wide, she said, before determining whether it complied with local student-protection policies.
In an emailed statement, Bout said of the company’s core education services, “In all cases, the use of these services is tied to the approval of an administrator who is responsible for overseeing a school’s domain.”
Google envisioned Classroom as a kind of “mission control” dashboard where teachers could more efficiently manage tasks such as 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, involving about 275 teachers and several thousand students, to run for the entire school year. Every month, Hahn said, she collected teachers’ feedback and sent it to Google.
One immediate problem administrators identified: School board policy required employees to keep records of cyberbullying and other problematic comments. But Classroom initially did not do that. If a student wrote something offensive and a teacher deleted it, there was no archive.
Google eventually added an archiving feature. The next fall, the Chicago district switched on Classroom. Teachers there later vetted other Google products, effectively becoming a test lab for the company.
Rochelle, the Google executive, said that it was important for the company to have large, diverse sets of educational users giving feedback.
“Our goal is to build products that help educators and students,” Rochelle said. “Teachers tell us they appreciate the opportunity to get involved early and help shape our products to meet their needs.”