Rethinking Literacy, Datafication, and Racial Power in Access Is Capture: How EdTech Reproduces Racial Inequality

Access Is Capture: How EdTech Reproduces Racial Inequality, by Roderic Crooks (2024) offers literacy educators and researchers a rigorous critical framework for understanding how contemporary educational technology (edtech) initiatives reshape reading, writing, and data practices in racially stratified schools, and why more access does not automatically translate into greater justice. The book contributes to critical digital literacy and critical data studies debates, foregrounding its implications for adolescent and adult learners, teachers, and literacy researchers. It cautions that access can contribute to inequalities when it is organized through platforms and infrastructures that prioritize data extraction, surveillance, and management. Over the last two decades, literacy research has moved from viewing digital access mainly as a hardware and connectivity issue to examining how platforms, algorithms, and datafication reshape what counts as literacy, whose literacy practices are valued, and how learning is monitored and governed. Critical digital literacy and critical data studies have highlighted how the expansion of one-to-one devices, learning management systems, and analytics often intensifies surveillance and reproduces racialized hierarchies, even when framed as equity initiatives. Scholars of English language arts (ELA) have noted that digital platforms now mediate much of what counts as reading, writing, and participation in contemporary classrooms, shaping how students encounter texts, assignments, and assessments. Drawing on this, Access is Capture can be understood as part of a broader conversation about the platformization of ELA education, where the platform's structure not only activity but also access, surveillance, and opportunity. As the NCTE policy brief Digital Platforms and the ELA Classroom argues, digital platforms such as Google Classroom, Turnitin, and Flip are not neutral delivery systems but frame teaching and learning through the tasks, design, and content they privilege, shaping which literacy practices are visible, valued, and assessed in classrooms (LeBlanc et al. 2023). A central argument in brief is that dashboards and learning analytics can re-center time-on-task metrics and completion rates as proxies for literacy learning, with profound implications for how teachers interpret students' reading and writing and for how students come to understand their own literacy identities. Taken together with Crooks' analysis of platform logics, this concern with how platforms configure tasks, design, and content underscores that access to devices and platforms can simultaneously expand participation and intensify surveillance and sorting, particularly in racially stratified schools where platform logics are layered onto existing systems of test preparation, discipline, and racialized expectations. Grounded in ethnographic research in Los Angeles public schools that primarily serve Black and Latinx students, the book reveals how seemingly mundane literacy events, logging into platforms, composing assignments, navigating dashboards, are reorganized by edtech infrastructures that privilege data capture over expansive meaning-making. In these classrooms, reading and writing increasingly appear as occasions for monitoring and score production: students move through auto-graded exercises, receive automated prompts to stay on task, and see their work displayed as progress bars or behavior points that can travel beyond the classroom in the form of reports to families, administrators, or external vendors. Attention to everyday practice speaks directly to adolescent and adult literacy contexts in which devices are ubiquitous, yet students' digital reading and writing are shaped by metrics, predictive scores, and behavior data that may be interpreted through racialized lenses. By tracing the racialized effects of platform-centric curricula, Crooks explains how Black, Latinx, multilingual, and working-class students can be subjected to narrow, behaviorist literacy experiences organized around item-level skills, automated feedback, and constant behavioral monitoring rather than sustained, culturally sustaining inquiry. In such systems, reading and writing tasks are frequently broken into decontextualized drills, and students' engagement is tracked as a series of clicks, streaks, or points that can be used to reward compliance or trigger disciplinary intervention, often disproportionately affecting students of color (Noble 2018). These configurations reproduce existing racial hierarchies by channeling minoritized students into highly surveilled, low-autonomy learning environments while more affluent peers encounter platforms as optional supplements to richer, discussion- and project-based literacy instruction. In this sense, access can function as capture when platform logics render minoritized students' literacies as data points to be managed, reducing complex interpretive and composing practices to simplistic, behavior-tracked routines that mirror and magnify existing racial inequalities rather than disrupting them. By foregrounding local school communities, Crooks provides a situated account of how specific platforms take on meaning instead of operating as interchangeable tools. This emphasis resonates with Garcia and Nichols's (2021) call to understand educational technologies as complex environments or platform ecologies, where the social uses of technology, design decisions, and material infrastructures converge to shape teaching and learning because their social uses, design decisions, and material infrastructures collectively shape classroom life. An ecological lens makes visible, for instance, how default settings around data retention, participation visibility, and integration with third-party services structure which students feel safe to contribute, whose work is archived and circulated, and how teachers' own labor is monitored and evaluated. Emerging work on algorithmic bias in educational platforms shows how recommendation engines and automated scoring systems can systematically disadvantage students who do not match dominant linguistic, racial, or behavioral norms, flagging their writing as off-topic or at risk at higher rates and routing them toward remedial content (Garcia and Nichols 2021). Moreover, freemium and paywalled features, such as premium annotation tools, expanded text libraries, or advanced feedback dashboards, often concentrate richer literacy resources in schools and districts that can afford enterprise licenses, while Title I schools must make do with stripped-down versions, further stratifying opportunities for critical reading and writing. Read through the lens of platform ecologies, the concept of capture illuminates how these design and business decisions, algorithmic sorting, tiered access to features, and data-intensive analytics are not incidental but central to how platform ecologies reproduce racial and economic inequality in literacy education. Access is Capture is organized through a set of recurring access frames that reveal how educational technologies restructure literacy practices in racially stratified schools. The frame of access as racial progress demonstrates that one-to-one laptops and broadband are frequently celebrated as evidence of equity gains even as classrooms remain governed by test preparation, punitive disciplinary regimes, and racialized expectations; in such contexts, devices tend to facilitate drill-and-practice and compliance rather than culturally sustaining or critical literacy work. The access as social justice frame illustrates how district and philanthropic actors deploy social justice rhetoric to legitimate large-scale edtech purchasing while deflecting attention from racialized poverty, segregation, and exclusion, allowing digital inclusion to function as a proxy for justice and to obscure the structural constraints that limit students' opportunities to read, write, and participate fully in civic and community life. The frame of access as surveillance captures the ways learning management systems, proctoring software, and behavior-tracking applications extend institutional oversight into students' digital activities, recasting literacy events such as reading responses, online searches, and essay drafts as streams of log data that can be flagged, audited, and linked to disciplinary action, with errors disproportionately attributed to students of color. For adolescent readers and writers in particular, ordinary acts of inquiry, hesitation, or exploration can be reinterpreted as risk indicators within data dashboards, shaping how teachers, administrators, and external vendors perceive and act upon students. Critical work on AI and algorithmic governance underscores these dynamics: Joy Buolamwini's (2023) account of the coded gaze in Unmasking AI shows how AI systems encode racialized and gendered biases in ways that render already marginalized communities more visible to surveillance yet less visible as full subjects. Similarly, Safiya Noble's (2018) Algorithms of Oppression documents how commercial search and recommendation systems disproportionately associate Black girls and women with hypersexualized and demeaning content, illustrating how ostensibly neutral information infrastructures can reproduce and legitimize racialized harm. When literacy platforms import similar logics, ranking students, auto-suggesting texts, or filtering participation through opaque algorithms, “access is capture” becomes a concrete warning about how datafied reading and writing can deepen the very inequalities equity-oriented initiatives purport to address. Framing access as management, the text highlights how data dashboards and standardized content libraries mediate classroom decision-making so that time-on-task metrics, completion rates, and behavior tallies become stand-ins for literacy learning, constraining space for student-led inquiry, community-based projects, and multimodal composing that resist easy quantification. This draws attention to how teachers' professional judgment is subtly displaced by algorithmic recommendations and vendor-defined “best practices,” a dynamic that is especially consequential in classrooms serving racially minoritized students where high-stakes accountability already narrows curricular possibilities. The frame of access as community control traces how data-driven reforms extract value from minoritized communities by harvesting student data to refine products and fuel markets without commensurate benefit to the schools that produce those data. Within this frame, Crooks identifies emergent forms of refusal and alternative design in which community organizations, families, and educators assert their own norms of data stewardship and contest harmful technologies. Situated alongside Buolamwini and Noble, this text advances the notion that platformization in ELA is part of a wider pattern in which datafication and AI intensify racialized surveillance under the banner of innovation, while community-based resistance articulates alternative visions of data and literacy grounded in relational accountability and local knowledge. Taken together, these frames help readers see that digital access is never simply about devices; it is about the conditions under which students read, write, and compose, and about who benefits from the data those practices generate. The NCTE policy brief on digital platforms underscores these uneven effects, warning that platform logics can intensify existing inequities through opaque algorithms, data analytics, and the outsourcing of curricular decision-making to commercial actors (LeBlanc et al. 2023). The concept of capture sharply illuminates the racialized and classed consequences of seemingly mundane platform practices in ELA schooling, including login routines, assignment workflows, and data dashboards that appear neutral but are embedded in what Noble (2018) describes as a long history of racial sorting and control. Access is Capture interrogates how datafication, artificial intelligence, and neoliberal reform rearticulate access as a racialized project of sorting and control rather than a straightforward expansion of opportunity (Sander 2024). By extending Sander's framework for critical datafication literacy, the text underscores the need for pedagogical and policy responses that foreground structural inequality, civic agency, and collective action. The book contends that access cannot be reduced to broadband connectivity or device distribution but must be understood as the capacity for students and educators to participate in, contest, and reshape the platformed infrastructures through which literacy teaching now occurs, a shift that speaks directly to ELA educators, teacher educators, and literacy researchers working to reimagine reading and writing instruction in environments saturated with data infrastructures. One of the book's contributions lies in the implications for ELA teachers. Reading and discussing the books with colleagues can anchor critical conversations about platforms in methods courses and field experiences. Emerging work in ELA teacher education has called for preparing candidates to interrogate how platforms structure literacy learning, redistribute power among teachers, students, and vendors, and entangle classroom practice with larger data infrastructures. In dialogue with this scholarship, the text offers a theoretically rich and empirically grounded lens that can help teacher candidates see platforms not simply as convenient tools but as sociotechnical systems that shape which students are seen, measured, and supported, and which are ignored or disciplined. Such a framing aligns with calls for novice teachers to develop critical orientations toward platforms so they can make more deliberate decisions about whether, when, and how to incorporate them into ELA classrooms. Rather than offering another set of classroom tools, this book invites literacy educators to reframe their guiding questions. Instead of asking only, “Do students have devices?” it prompts educators to ask, “On what terms are students engaging with digital tools, and whose interests are served when they do?” This shift has practical consequences for classroom design in adolescent and adult literacy settings. Instead of relying on behavior-tracking apps or participation dashboards that publicly rank students, the book encourages practices in which teachers and students co-construct norms for digital engagement and use reflective writing to surface how surveillance shapes their learning. Literacy teachers might design assignments where students read platforms as texts, analyzing terms of service, mapping where their data travel, and composing multimodal counter-stories that challenge deficit labels or predictive scores attached to them. Such work situates digital literacies as an opportunity to interrogate, not just consume, the infrastructures that mediate everyday reading and writing. For school and district leaders, Access Is Capture underscores the importance of involving students, families, and teachers in technology decision-making, insisting on transparency about data flows, and creating professional learning spaces where race, technology, and power are studied together. These moves align with literacy approaches that value community knowledge and shared authority, offering educators concrete avenues for resisting models that cast them primarily as data producers and system users. For ELA educators, the book not only offers a critical vocabulary, access, capture, surveillance, management, community control, but also actionable orientations: reading platforms as texts, designing assignments that surface data flows and coded bias, and collaborating with students and communities to resist platform arrangements that narrow literacy and amplify racial harm. A key strength of this text lies in its sustained attention to the harms and contradictions of edtech initiatives in racially stratified schooling contexts. At the same time, the emphasis on failure means that readers may find fewer extended portraits of classrooms where educators and communities have successfully repurposed or redesigned tools for emancipatory literacy aims, particularly beyond the Los Angeles context. Questions remain about how access and capture unfold in rural districts, international settings, or adult education spaces with distinct histories of race and infrastructure, suggesting important directions for future research in literacy and technology. The book nonetheless makes a substantial contribution to debates in literacy, educational policy, and technology studies by offering more than a general critique of edtech hype: it provides educators and researchers with a precise vocabulary and a set of conceptual lenses for naming how racialized power operates through the infrastructures that increasingly mediate reading, writing, and learning. For literacy educators, teacher educators, and scholars, Access Is Capture: How EdTech Reproduces Racial Inequality is a valuable resource for rethinking digital initiatives, designing critical digital literacies curricula, and pursuing research that centers racial justice in conversations about the critical use of educational technologies. The author declares no conflicts of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.