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Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?
theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."
The near excessive use of hypertext in this article is precisely how HTML was envisioned to be.
It's beautiful. /sniff
Can you translate this to English, Spanish, American or some language humans speak? I'm pretty sure it's valid HTML, but WTF?
i have a kid in a NYC public school. one of the best elementary schools in the city. i also talk to people who have kids in other schools or work in other schools.
the curriculum is the same. the kids are not.
in my school the kindergarten kids at a minimum know the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten. most of the kids in my son's class already know how to read simple books when they come in to kindergarten. by the end of kindergarten all the kids in my son's school are expected to read Scholastic Level F books
i have talked to people and there are first graders in some schools who don't know the alphabet.
if you want smart kids, make them smart. some days my five year old only watches documentaries on netflix and no cartoons.
What a crapton of links in an article.... i have no idea what the point was either.
i guess i'll just go with the standard WE HATE MICROSOFT.
I don't know about that. Everyone on /. seems to be a fuckin' critic, yet critics still have jobs.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.'
This is no surprise, whether it's a requirement of theirs or not, it sure seems to be standard practice. It causes big problems though, people running the program, like those in charge of the department of computer science at my school, come to push MS products for everything and pigeon hole students into the MS technologies. It's amazing just how many students there are that have used MS all their lives, but are still inept at using even the Windows command line, FSM forbid that you present them with anything else. Innovative teaching of technology in grade school - university should involve a variety of technologies and platforms, especially in secondary education.
--There are two kinds of people in this world. I don't like either of them.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
No, señor, it's Carlos.
Mexican drug lords are often viewed as heroes because of how they bestow largess on the poor.
You are aware Gates was a dropout right?
He made his business based on family connections at IBM.
Do they teach proper capitalization in your son's kindergarten?
Suck my dick.
From what I hear in the news, they do teach that in public schools.
He dropped out of college, but because he decided to found Microsoft. He did not get kicked out, and he didn't get to Harvard by being an idiot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.