Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial InequalityRacially and economically segregated schools across the United States have hosted many interventions from commercial digital education technology (edtech) companies who promise their products will rectify the failures of public education. Edtech's benefits are not only trumpeted by industry promoters and evangelists but also vigorously pursued by experts, educators, students, and teachers. Why, then, has edtech yet to make good on its promises? In Access Is Capture, Roderic N. Crooks investigates how edtech functions in Los Angeles public schools that exclusively serve Latinx and Black communities. These so-called urban schools are sites of intense, ongoing technological transformation, where the tantalizing possibilities of access to computing meet the realities of structural inequality. Crooks shows how data-intensive edtech delivers value to privileged individuals and commercial organizations but never to the communities that hope to share in the benefits. He persuasively argues that data-drivenness ultimately enjoins the public to participate in a racial project marked by the extraction of capital from minoritized communities to enrich the tech sector. |
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Academy Schools access to technology analysis Analytics Angeles behavior Big Data Black Panther Party California captured chapter charter schools classroom CMO-LAX communities of color community control community members community organizers contemporary counselors Crooks cultural dashboards data collection data professionals data scientist data-driven datafication datalogical enframing dataveillance demands dents described devices Digiorno digital data digital technologies dynamic edtech forms frequently high school https://doi.org inequality interviewed iPad justice talk kinds labor LAUSD leadership learning minoritized communities Naviance nology Number Seven orga organizational political precarity Principal Montoya public education public schools Quezada race racial formation racial project racially segregated racism regimes school administrators School District scores smartphones social justice Sojoyner South Los Angeles South Park standardized testing STLs strategy studies surveillance tablet computer program tablet computers tactics teachers tech sector tion University Press urban schools visualization