Who Gets to Think?

How Billionaires, Screens, and AI Are Rewriting Education

Oct 28, 2025

We can all sense that something is truly wrong in public education. Headlines about students bringing guns to schools, America’s falling international ranking in math and literacy, teachers quitting by the masses, but underneath the violence and headaches of teaching kids is a quiet mission to tear it all apart.

The perpetrators? You guessed it, billionaires.

They’re doing it with algorithms, venture capital, and glossy promises about innovation

From TikTok investor Jeff Yass bankrolling school vouchers in Texas (while also working to remove liberal Justices from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court) to the DeVos family’s (yes, former head of the Department of Education DeVos) American Federation for Children funneling millions into campaigns nationwide, a new kind of privatization is underway, one that looks less like selling off schools and more like reprogramming them. Under the banner of “personalized learning” and “AI for education,” Silicon Valley and its billionaire allies have convinced districts to spend tens of billions on software and digital tools that promise efficiency but deliver dependency.

A WBUR report found schools are pouring up to $41 billion a year into edtech systems that often go untested or unused. It’s the perfect business model: starve public schools of funding, then sell them the technology to survive the starvation.

This business model is further evolving. In recent UNASB sessions, AI continues to emerge in conversation - from fears around data centers being built in neighborhoods, to concerns of students losing critical thinking skills, sounding alarms around Peter Thiel lecturing about the antichrist, and even new research revealing how teenagers are in ‘relationships’ with chatbots. It is clear there is a crossover between billionaires’ desire to privatize schools while unleashing unregulated AI technology on us all.

The Trap of Schools Being “Tech-Ready”

Public school systems are deeply underfunded and politically targeted, so they can’t afford to opt out of contracts made in the tech-ready rush. Instead they have to prove these tools were worth it in the first place. Meanwhile, the same billionaires pushing digital dependence actively work to ensure public schools themselves barely survive by bankrolling voucher schemes, funding politicians who deregulate education systems, promote “school choice” to drain money from classrooms, and even start-up their own profitable schools.

It’s a trap disguised as progress: public schools spend money to modernize, get blamed for poor outcomes because of poor rollout, money gets pulled back, public money is reinvested in private education ventures.

Inside the Virtual Classroom

I recently had a conversation with a virtual charter school teacher, she shared just how grim the circumstances have become. Thousands of students, kids who need to work, who have too many recovery credits, or who’ve been pushed out of traditional public schools, have enrolled in this virtual high school that is run like a business. With a marketing team, a CEO, and quarterly metrics to meet, their goal is simple: churn out as many diplomas as possible, regardless of learning.

The teacher shared that kids are openly copying and pasting from ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot so blatant that their answers aren’t even responding to the questions the teachers asked.

“My students can’t even answer the question: what’s your favorite food? without some kind of outside influence.” Then she laughed and said, “cheating used to be a skill. You had to use your brain to cheat.”

How We Got Here

Before the pandemic, laptops were supplements used as tools, not teachers. Then COVID hit, and every kitchen table became a classroom. Children learned to click before they learned to write. Parents learned to juggle Zoom links in a panic. Now throw ‘AI’ on top of it all with a sprinkle of billionaire influence and we find ourselves in quite the mess.

We told ourselves technology was saving us. I was personally going to student’s homes to set up hotspots and teach parents how to log in to Seesaw. We fought to close the “digital divide,” to get every child a device. While hindsight is 20/20, what we didn’t realize then was that tech wouldn’t close the device, it would widen it. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: screen time is the new class divide.

The Great Divide

When I worked at an elementary school, we made GoFundMe’s to get an extra iPad in the classroom and begged our district for one-to-one laptops for all students. The wealthy schools already had them. Now, the wealthiest parents are paying to keep them away.

Tech executives, the ones designing the apps students can’t escape, send their own children to schools where phones are banned and handwriting is sacred. The contradiction is breathtaking. Instagram recently spent tens of millions launching a “teen-safe” version of its own platform, while Meta insiders quietly enforce strict screen limits at home. The same people building “personalized learning” software make sure their own children learn from humans, not algorithms.

This divide is not just about devices either, it is about time, attention, and protection. The ultra-wealthy have the capacity to set strict limits, hire nannies who monitor online access, attend conferences on the latest research on child development, get tutors and activities to fill days. They can afford the intentional but this is not the reality for many. This piece is written the week before the Trump administration allows federal food assistance, SNAP, to be shut down, unemployment is rising, health care expenses are at an all time high, and grocery bills have not gone down. Pair this with social media algorithms catering to disinformation click-bait, kids getting into relationships with chatbots, and you have a recipe for digital disaster.

These concerns are not hypothetical either, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has publicly defended the use of AI-powered relationships through WhatsApp bots having ‘sensual conversations’ with underaged children. Whatever keeps anybody, of any age on these apps benefits these billionaires.

The Billionaire Playbook

And if all this feels connected, it’s because it is. The same billionaire class that funds “innovation in education” is also bankrolling the dismantling of public schools.

It’s the oldest play in American policy: defund the system until it breaks, declare it a government failure, replace it with a new business, and call it a ‘market solution’. You know who these guys are obsessed with? Milton Friedman. The economist who, after Hurricane Katrina, said that God gave New Orleans a clean slate when the levees broke because it allowed private companies to commandeer their education system.

Today, public schools, which still educate roughly 90 percent of American kids, are being starved while for-profit charters multiply, vouchers funnel public dollars to private tuition, and students with disabilities lose services.

The right has mastered the rhetoric of “innovation”, “freedom”, and “choice” but in reality we know that Republican officials let billionaires rig the market. Parents are robbed of true choice as corporations get tax breaks and collect data on our children. Innovation is no more than a new addiction. The message against this must be simple: our kids are not for sale.

The Promise of AI and the Collapse of Thinking

As mentioned, a WBUR investigation found that schools now spend up to $41 billion a year on educational software, much of it unproven or unused. In some classrooms, Microsoft Copilot and other AI tools are drafting essays, solving math problems, even writing science-lab reflections.

At first, it felt like progress: adaptive learning, personalized pacing but soon, teachers noticed that “personalization” meant automation. The problem isn’t that AI exists (and let’s be honest, it isn’t going anywhere), it’s who controls it, who profits, and who’s allowed to abstain.

When wealthy parents decide their children will learn to think without chat bots or automation while public-school kids learn to depend on them, we’ve recreated the very hierarchy public education was meant to dismantle.

The danger isn’t that AI will make kids lazy. It’s that it will make them predictable. Predictable minds are easy to market to, easy to manage, easy to rule, and a generation that doesn’t learn to question is a dream for anyone trying to privatize a democracy. When we let billionaires shape the software, the curriculum, and the funding streams, we’re not just outsourcing education, we’re outsourcing their futures.

No parent across the political spectrum wants their child left behind. No teacher wants a classroom replaced with an online dashboard. The challenge, and opportunity, is how do we build a future where kids learn to engage with technology responsibly and critically while refusing to allow the elite billionaire class to continue commodifying every sector of public life.

What We Can Still Do

We can start by making it clear: this isn’t about stopping AI and technology in education. We have to decide what question we are going to answer: how do we stop kids from cheating or how do we teach kids to think?

We can’t build a future by banning technology but instead drafting policy around it and teaching resilience within it. Students deserve to learn how to use future tools, but they first need to build cognitive muscles: curiosity, discernment, and creativity.

Most importantly, this cannot be reserved for only a select, wealthy few. This must be the design for schools going forward and it cannot fall on individual teachers and parents alone. Instead it must be a public commitment. We need to elect officials who defend public education as a public good, we need to stop letting billionaires and far-right politicians frame public schools as the battleground of a culture war but remind people this is a class war.

We need to get behind policy that can unite us as a broad coalition:

Lead with curiosity and better understand how AI is impacting people’s daily lives without demonizing people wanting to make their lives easier.
Go after the attention economy that is stripping kids of childhood. Rep. Jake Auchincloss has proposed taxing social media companies the way soda companies have a sugar tax. Send the signal that we are the consumers not the products - and our kids aren’t either.
Regulate online life not just offline life. It is absurd that a child can access porn easier than I could build a shed in my backyard.
Translate all of this to K-12: transparent AI procurement; strict data privacy; age-appropriate defaults that have company consequences; phone-free school days with humane enforcements; and curriculum that teaches reasoning, evidence, and media literacy first - dependence on tools second.

The question beneath every headline about AI, education, and technology must be who gets to think because if we don’t answer it - billionaires already are.