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K-12 CS Education Funding: Taxes, H-1B Fees, Donations?
theodp writes "Back in 2010, Bill Gates Sr. made the case for I-1098, an initiative for a WA state income tax that Gates argued was needed to address K-12 funding inequity, which he claimed was forcing businesses "to import technically-trained employees, while our own people are shut out of highly paid careers." Opposed by the deep-pocketed, high-tech studded Defeat 1098, the initiative was defeated. Four years later, some of the same high-tech leaders who records show funded Defeat 1098 — including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ($425K), Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith ($10K), Code.org founder Hadi Partovi ($10K), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ($100K), Microsoft Corporation ($75K) — have gotten behind groups like Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and Code.org, which are singing a similar Chicken Little tune, telling lawmakers that U.S. students will continue to be shut out of highly paid computer science careers without additional K-12 funding, and the U.S. will lose its competitive edge unless tech is permitted to import even more technically-trained employees. In a departure from Gates' income-tax based solution, Microsoft and Code.org argue that the-problem-is-the-solution, proposing that tech visa fees be used to fund K-12 CS programs. To 'accept that computer science classes are only available to the privileged few,' writes Code.org, 'seems un-American'. So, as some of the nation's biggest K-12 school systems turn to Code.org for CS education programs, should they expect the funding to come from taxes, H-1B tech visa fees, or the-kindness-of-wealthy-strangers philanthropy?"
... we want educated people at slave wages.
Signed,
Bill gates.
I agree completely. I think we should start by replacing expensive American senior executives with foreigners. You know, we don't want to lose our competitive edge.
I think K-12 funds could be used to greater benefit for teaching fundamental skills such as a core STEM curriculum. If students have a good foundation in mathematics and science and have had to use standard computer programs such as a word processor and spreadsheet program, they should be all ready to begin a computer science curriculum. From what I've heard, CS classes in high school are a joke and seem to turn students off to programming. I studied programming on my own and achieved a 5 on the computer science AP exam even though computer science was not taught at my school. Are there any of you who have a good experience with a programming class in high school, or did you just learn it on your own like I did?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Underfund K12 general education but send money to try to teach your illiterate, mathematically incompetent students computer science. I'm sure Ballmer and Bezos have wet dreams of armies of intellectually complaint code monkeys.
Speaking as someone who actually *has* a computer science degree, the CS you can teach to someone who is not intellectually prepared is just code monkey stuff. Real CS is quite mentally challenging, and requires a strong grounding in mathematics. It requires some creative thinking too, which is something you can't expect a college student to manifest after a lifetime of intellectual impoverishment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why would you tie CS education to visas for those who will compete with those same students receiving that education? Think about that. When we have a barely adequate supply of home-grown talent, will the visa numbers be reduced? If so, funding for education will also be cut, returning us to the days of insufficient education.! If CS education is important to our society (and it is) then it should be funded on its own merits. This is a rich country that is constantly pretending to be poor. If there is a lack of funding, it's because taxes on the wealthy have been cut and cut again. For example, if capital gains were taxed as regular income, we would have no problem funding education in this country.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Isn't tying funding for education in a given field directly to the number of laborers imported to make work in that field cheaper just a trifle perverse?
At best, I could see it being saved by virtue of sheer lag (unless going directly into the data mines out of high school, the K-12 students affected by year X's funding level are anywhere from 2 to 16+ years away from the workforce); but that same lag would also lead to fluctuating and potentially nonsensical funding levels under basically any circumstances other than 'high, stable, levels of H1-B demand that mysteriously don't translate into lower incentives to enter the field', a condition that seems potentially unrealistic.
If we are treating CS as a foundational subject, some combination of a new part of the math curriculum and a valuable skill for all, we are going to need a more stable funding level (regardless of how high or low you think it should be, oscillating is stupid: you'll just get a lot of staff churn, 'fat year' infrastructure expenditures that rot because you can't do upkeep during lean years, and similar wastes of money).
If we are treating CS as largely vocational, producing students whose educational quality depended on the demand levels of the job market starting over a decade before they enter the field seems like it could go poorly...
I don't understand why these top business people keep trying to say that we need to push more CS type stuff into grades k-12. Why would we tailor such early education specifically to one career choice? What happens if we now have too many programmers, and that is all these young people have been trained for? Other countries do not do this. K-12 should be about fundamentals, and broad education. If you are exposed to a variety of topics, and simple things like the scientific method, math, and problem solving, you can do almost anything in STEM. The problem is our education system is about memorization and regurgitation. Switch to an interactive model where kids actually build stuff ( code, chemistry, woodworking, anything ) and tie lessons into that. Then they will be prepared for whatever comes down the road. Myself, there was zero computer education at my school, as it was in its infancy. Yet somehow I managed to teach myself to do it on the one or two apple IIs we had, and made quite a go of it. What I had learned all my life was first how to learn, and second, how to problem solve. Given those tools in your tool belt I believe anything is attainable. I can't help but feel like this is all a smokescreen to keep tech workers wages capped. I topped out quite a few years ago, and only move up slightly. Don't get me wrong, I am paid well in the grand scheme of things, but if the industry is so strapped for great programmers, like they say they are, why aren't wages through the roof? Every interview I have done ( recently switched jobs ) they have immediately offered me a job. All of them want to only pay either slightly less, or slightly more than I am making currently. The wage gap between a kid just out of college, and a top senior engineer is pitifully small now. That's not right.... They want H1Bs since they are trapped. I am all for allowing work visas, but how about we revamp the program and make it a 2 year work visa where they can switch companies at will. Let's see how many of these tech companies will be scrambling to acquire them then, as then they will have to pay them the same as everyone else, or lose them.....
We embrace that notion; but if being a non-genius leaves you unemployed or receiving advice from HR about how to apply for food stamps to supplement your paycheck, we embrace the notion of telling you to go get some skills or fuck off and die...
You act like that's hard or ambiguous. When you form a club, let's say the Justin Bieber fan club, you set rules, goals, and a mission statement. The founding fathers did that, it's only the people who don't agree with personal power, liberty, and economic freedom who pretend that there are no American values.
Europeans spend weeks learning about every country in Europe, yet they don't seem to be doing all that badly. You seem to dislike learning about other people and their cultures and how this can influence and inspire you, and well that's your loss, but removing history and geography to put more time in science is NOT the solution. The much greater problems are teachers, methods and parents. Pay teachers a correct wage (which can easily be done by just reducing salaries for administrative leeches and shutting down the hilarious iPad programs), use good methods for teaching and evaluation (as opposed to Texas textbooks and horrible standard tests) and inform the parents that their job is to help their children learn (instead of just protesting loudly whenever they get a bad grade) and things would already work out much better.
Ironically enough, you're trying to get the US to stop looking at other cultures (or dramatically cut down their importance) when the biggest flaw in US education is wholly a cultural problem.
Multibillionaires crying that the TAXPAYERS are not providing enough free resource to make the 1% even richer. How about this? BUY H1-b by paying 100% of the lifetime costs of 3 American Students for each and every wage cutting imported $15,000 / year engineer. YOU pay the costs for driving America out of business with your wage cutting H1-B's. There, now, pure captialism. You want something, YOU pay for it, Gates!!!
Better still, outlaw union-busting corporations by breeching the corporate veil every time they get caught. It will stop and there will be no more offshoring when the Board of Directors has to explain how they turned billions of shareholder value into worthless paper. Nothing new needed, just enforce the law and put the corporations to death for union busting. Voila, it's 1968 and America is on top again!
The problem with education isn't money; we throw tons of money at schools in the US, and the outcomes don't correlate well with money thrown; Newark, NJ schools receive more funding than Millburn, NJ schools, and the former are horrendous while the latter are among the best in the state.
As far as CS goes, it's not about replacing lessons about the American Revolution with lessons on Mexican culture neither one, whatever its merit, has any relevance to science and math. Nor does it matter for CS if students know more about Booker T. than George.
Nor is it any lack of CS or other computer education in primary and secondary schools. Nearly every CS job nowadays requires a bachelor's degree at minimum, and those 4 years are plenty to learn the fundamentals of computer science, assuming the underlying foundation is strong. So what's necessary IMO, from a CS education point of view, is for the foundation to be strengthened. The major thing missing from the traditional algebra-geometry-trignometry-calculus sequence is formal propositional logic; it's kind of taught alongside geometry proofs, but it might make sense to teach it separately and before (or even instead of) that sort of geometry. That doesn't necessarily require any more money.
But the real problem is the foundations just aren't strong. A lot of students can't do algebra entering 9th grade, and they can't do arithmetic entering 6th. Until you solve this, you can't solve anything at a higher level. Fix elementary education, fix secondary education, and only then worry about adding CS programs.
Public schools, just like Microsoft, have no shortage of money. What they have is a plague of incompetent management.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
> So it works really well for kids whose parents can afford to to pick up 1/4 of the tab.
Pretty much every measure says it doesn't work well, for anyone.
US scores are routinely lower than countries that spend half as much.
The US has alot of education funding and a lot of " worst" rankings. More of the same is more money spent on more garbage.
Overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Iran and Guatemala during the Eisenhower Administration.
Helping to overthrow the democratically elected government of Brazil during the Johnson Administration.
Destabilizing the secular government of Afghanistan, during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
And on, and on (and never forget Operation 9/11)......
Europe has the same shortage of tech workers as does the US
You mean they don't have a shortage either?
It is easy to ridicule this as a benefit to the privileged, but our current funding of education, primarily with property taxes, is the root of much of the inequality in America. Property taxes are high in areas with high incomes, and low in areas of low incomes. Low income people also tend to have more school age kids. So the result is that rich kids attend schools with good teachers, libraries, computer labs, music programs, etc., where they only associate with other rich kids. Moving to a system of funding based on a broader tax base would do a lot to create more equality of opportunity.
"Except Utah".
Utah has one of the lowest housing costs in the nation, and therefore lower property taxes; California has one of the highest property taxes in the nation, except for commercial property shich is never actually sold (you sell the holding company that owns the property instead of selling the property in order to use the technicality in Prop 13 to avoid tax increases on commercial property_.
Utah has some of the lowest per-student funding in the nation; California has some of the highest per student funding in the nation.
Utah has some of the largest class sizes in terms of student/teacher ratio in the nation; California has one of the smallest.
Utah ranks twice as high in SAT scores by students than California.
Guess what folks: it isn't the funding that's the problem.
It seems obvious to me that $race month is racist.
How about science month? What company today is hiring for "Lead $race Developer". None.
Spending a month out of each nine-month school teaching racial division when our students are so far behind their international competitors is simply foolish.
You think they should teach black history, Mexican history, hill billy history, gay history, and tstv history. I think they should teach history. They'll have enough time for stupid identity politics when they're grown.
That's a major reason our daughter won't be going to public school. She's not going to be taught to hate whitey, she'll be taught math, science, literature. I aim to keep her focused on useful skills as long as possible before she starts asking for details of her heritage so she can figure out which hive you expect her to be a drone in.
There are 36 weeks of 5 days each in a typical American school year. How do you think they should be spent?
Where I live in Texas, six weeks are devoted to seperating out assorted "minorities". (Hispanics and women are actually the majority, but students are incorrectly taught that each is a minority.) Another 8 weeks or so are devoted to assorted political indoctrination.
Just over half of the year remains for useful ormarketable skills like math, science, writing, etc.