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Is K-12 CS Education the Next Common Core?

theodp (442580) writes In an interview with The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton that accompanied her report on How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution (the Gates Foundation doled out $233 million in grants to git-r-done), Gates denied that he has too much influence in K-12 education. Despite Gates' best efforts, however, there's been more and more pushback recently from both teachers and politicians on the standards, GeekWire's Taylor Soper reports, including a protest Friday by the Badass Teacher Association, who say Gates is ruining education. "We want to get corporations out of teaching," explained one protester. If that's the case, the "Badasses" probably won't be too pleased to see how the K-12 CS education revolution is shaping up, fueled by a deep-pocketed alliance of Gates, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Google alone has already committed $90 million to influence CS education. And well-connected Code.org, which has struck partnerships with school districts reaching over 2M U.S. students and is advising NSF-funded research related to the nation's CS 10K Project, will be conducting required professional development sessions for K-12 CS teachers out of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offices this summer in Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Seattle. So, could K-12 CS Education ("Common Code"?) become the next Common Core?

2 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. What a joke by Murdoch5 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Any thing that makes a teacher look like the truly lazy and pathetic adult that most them are will anger them and cause a push back. I can honestly say that with over 20 years of schooling under my belt and more then 30 teachers, I honestly respected maybe 4 of them, the rest were lazy, non caring idiots who only became teachers to not give a damn and to get summers off. Of course teachers will push back against common core, any thing that exposes the true nature of the "common" teacher, that being laziness, will cause a push back.

  2. Re:Common core changes history by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If it doesn't mention Christianity, why are the same people complaining that battles waged by Christians are called "massacres" in the same text? You can't have it both ways. Anyway, purely from a practical point of view, I'd expect the history of Christianity to be already well known among American kids, seeing as their parents tend to be Christians, so teaching them history of Islam, of which they probably know next to nothing, probably can't hurt. Of course, I'd be wrong, given that their Christian parents are often dumb Christians, so I wonder how much "knowledge" one can get this way, but still...

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    Ezekiel 23:20