Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm April Glazer.

And I'm Meredith Broussard.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 30th.

First off, I'd like to introduce my co-host for the next two weeks, Meredith Broussard.

Meredith is a data journalism professor at New York University, where she studies the many ways

artificial intelligence is seeping into our world, both good and bad,

and how we can do a better job of explaining how AI works. She's the author of a book called

Artificial on Intelligence, How Computers Misunderstand the World. Meredith, I'm so glad that

you're co-hosting with me this week. Thank you for joining. I am really excited to be here.

Thanks so much. Yeah, I think it's

going to be a lot of fun, especially because you're just such a deep expert on so many of the

issues we cover, especially today. On today's show, we're doing a deep dive on the tech industry's

obsession with fixing public education. First, we'll talk about how Silicon Valley is snaking its

way into classrooms with the hopes of saving public education with its spirit of entrepreneurial tech saviourism.

Meredith, who happens to be a professor on much of this stuff, has some historical context on the decades-long urge amongst technologists to replace teachers with computers.

And then we'll talk to New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles about Summit Learning,

an education program funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan.

We'll also talk to Tom Henning, a parent in Wellington, Kansas,

who decided to pull his son out of a local public high school after summit learning was adopted

...