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?

Comments

I hope not.

[funwithBSD]

I have a soon to be 6th grader.

Common core is a disaster. The homework is riddled with errors (found 3 on one page) and the instruction methodology is terrible.

Case in point: My son brought home an assignment where he was graded poorly, and one of the short answers was marked wrong. I know the material they were reading, the book Wrinkle in Time.

When I asked the teacher about it, this is what I was told:
His "team" (they are in 6 kid groups) decided the antagonists name "IT" should be pronounced "I.T.".

Under common core standards, the group can decide what the "right" answer is, as an interpretation of the fact, not the fact itself.
I can give a little under a "tomato" vrs "tah-mato", but...

I asked her if the group decided "IT" was a giant mouse instead of a giant brain, would that make the person saying it was a giant brain wrong.

She replied under the grading rules, it would.

Fuck me dead, we are raising an army of Project Managers!

No wonder public support for Common Core is about 35%