Racially 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.
By:
Roderic N Crooks Imprint: University of California Press Country of Publication: United States Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
Spine: 18mm
Weight: 454g ISBN:9780520393271 ISBN 10: 0520393279 Pages: 269 Publication Date:27 August 2024 Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
Roderic N. Crooks is Assistant Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.