In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo quietly circulated online—an image that, for a brief moment, became something of a symbol. It showed a teenage girl camped outside a Taco Bell in California, Chromebook balanced on her lap, scavenging free Wi-Fi just to make it to virtual class. The image struck many as inspirational. But more than anything, it was revealing.

What some viewed as grit was actually something grimmer: evidence of abandonment, dressed up as resilience.

In recent years, educational technology has been widely marketed as a democratizing force. Policymakers and tech executives alike have spoken of a digital future where everyone, everywhere, can learn on demand. But in practice, this so-called “revolution” has done more to entrench inequality than dismantle it. Chromebooks and learning platforms don’t erase disparities—they digitize them, conceal them behind login portals and glossy interfaces.

And for every click, there’s a cost. Platforms like Google Classroom and Canvas monetize student data, turning engagement into analytics and analytics into profit. The classroom, once imagined as a shared civic space, is increasingly shaped by opaque code, corporate contracts, and extractive business models.

Modernization, in this context, becomes a euphemism—a way to normalize the quiet privatization of public education.

The Digital Divide: Structural, Not Technological

Much of the public discourse around the digital divide still treats it as a logistical hiccup—a matter of distributing devices or improving bandwidth. But this view is disingenuously narrow. The divide is not simply about internet speeds or screen access; it is embedded in deeper structural realities: poverty, racialized underfunding, and a decades-long retreat from public investment.

According to a 2022 Pew Research Center report, roughly one in five students in low-income households lacks reliable internet access at home. But that statistic is just the tip of the iceberg. These students are often the same ones whose schools are under-resourced, whose communities lack digital infrastructure, and whose educational experiences are shaped by a broader context of economic and social precarity.

Technology doesn’t disrupt these conditions—it mirrors them. And in many cases, it reinforces them. Meanwhile, the EdTech industry presents its solutions as scalable fixes. Tablets and dashboards replace libraries and guidance counselors. A broadband router becomes a proxy for long-term infrastructure repair. It’s a sleight of hand: public problems are reframed as private inconveniences, and the burden of adaptation is placed squarely on students and families.

This isn’t a story about access—it’s about abandonment masquerading as innovation.

EdTech’s Corporate Capture of the Classroom

Since the first wave of lockdowns, digital platforms have embedded themselves in classrooms with startling permanence. What began as emergency infrastructure is now standard procedure. Tools like Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams are presented as neutral technologies. But like any infrastructure, they shape the institutions that adopt them.

These platforms aren’t simply replacing paper with pixels. They’re redefining how education is delivered—and to whom it is ultimately accountable. Their business models rely on harvesting user data at scale: engagement scores, time spent per activity, behavioral trends. In this system, the student becomes a stream of metrics, and learning is filtered through dashboards optimized not for pedagogy, but for performance tracking.

And yet, public school systems—often cash-strapped and overwhelmed—have little room to negotiate. Faced with budget cuts and staff attrition, districts increasingly turn to prepackaged “solutions” from tech giants whose platforms double as data farms. What’s lost in this outsourcing is something harder to quantify: trust, community input, and the human freedom to shape education democratically. The logic here isn’t educational—it’s extractive.

Surveillance, Behaviorism, and Algorithmic Control

In the name of engagement and accountability, a new wave of classroom software has turned schools into digital panopticons. Tools like ClassDojo reward students with points for “positive behaviors”—compliance, quietness, punctuality—while quietly building behavior profiles accessible to teachers and parents alike. Remote proctoring tools, like Proctorio, go further still, using webcams and AI to monitor students for signs of “suspicious” behavior during exams.

These systems don’t just watch—they shape. They encode a vision of education as discipline, where students are molded by algorithms into measurable, docile subjects. Deviation is flagged. Ambiguity is punished. Risk-taking—intellectual or otherwise—is subtly discouraged.

It’s a pedagogy of surveillance, grounded less in curiosity than in compliance.

Philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of the panopticon—where surveillance becomes internalized—is chillingly apt. Today’s students learn not only content, but how to be watched. Every click and pause is part of a profile, every log-in an act of quiet acquiescence to unseen oversight.

And for teachers, too, these tools shift authority away from pedagogical judgment and toward platform logic. Teaching becomes performance. Assessment becomes automation.

Education, once imagined as liberation, begins to resemble behavioral engineering.

Global South, Same Script: EdTech Colonialism

In the Global South, the language of digital transformation is no less seductive—but its impacts are deeply uneven. Promoted as a cure-all for development, Western-designed EdTech platforms are being deployed in schools across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia—often as part of aid packages, philanthro-capitalist initiatives, or public-private partnerships.

But these aren’t neutral tools. They carry with them embedded assumptions about what counts as knowledge, who decides what’s worth learning, and in what language that knowledge must be delivered. Local culture, oral traditions, and indigenous epistemologies are sidelined in favor of preloaded, English-language content aligned with Euro-American metrics of achievement.

Meanwhile, data flows north. Student performance, biometric indicators, and usage patterns are captured and analyzed by companies headquartered in Silicon Valley or London—turning children’s educational journeys into raw material for machine learning models and product refinement.

Groups like EdTech Hub have begun to confront this reality head-on, calling for more participatory and decolonial approaches to technology in education. Their research highlights how dominant models often reinforce historical power imbalances, and how sustainable alternatives must be shaped by local stakeholders—not imposed by global funders.

Take, for example, the World Bank’s EdTech projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, which emphasize scalability over cultural fit. Or the Bridge International Academies, whose scripted lessons and tablet-based delivery systems have faced fierce backlash from educators and local communities.

Resistance, Alternatives, and Reclaiming Public Education

And yet, against this tide, resistance grows.

In cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, teachers’ unions have drawn clear lines against the encroachment of privatized EdTech. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has explicitly challenged data-driven “personalized learning” mandates, citing concerns over student privacy, algorithmic bias, and the erosion of teacher autonomy.

Elsewhere, mutual aid networks and local cooperatives are building alternative infrastructures—from community-owned broadband initiatives to grassroots curriculum development. The Detroit Community Technology Project is one such model, offering a vision of digital access grounded in autonomy, not dependency.

Some educators are turning toward open educational resources (OER), rejecting for-profit platforms in favor of customizable, culturally relevant materials. These efforts are often underfunded and underrecognized, but they represent a quiet insurgency against platform hegemony.

What unites these alternatives isn’t just resistance—they share a proactive vision of education as a public good. One where technology is accountable to people, not shareholders. One where learning is relational, not transactional. One where sovereignty, not scale, is the metric that matters.

Conclusion: Toward a Liberatory Tech Praxis

The integration of educational technology into public schooling has been neither neutral nor universally beneficial. Rather than bridging gaps, it has hardened boundaries. Instead of democratizing knowledge, it has consolidated control.

But another path is possible—and necessary.

A truly liberatory tech praxis begins with the understanding that education cannot be reformed through code alone. It requires reimagining ownership, resisting extractive logic, and insisting that technology serve the goals of justice—not just efficiency.

We must ask: who designs these systems? Who benefits from them? And who is left out or silenced by their metrics?

It is time to move beyond the fantasy of techno-solutionism. Instead, we must build educational technologies from the ground up—community-governed, critically designed, and rooted in solidarity, not scale.

As Paulo Freire reminded us, “Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity… or it becomes the practice of freedom.”

This moment demands that we choose the latter—and organize for it.

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