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Arkansas Declares a High School CS Education State of Emergency
theodp writes: Aiming to deliver on Governor Asa Hutchinson's inspired-by-Code.org-and-others Plan For Job Creation Through Technology Education, the Arkansas House voted 99-0 last week to require high schools to offer [but not require] a course in computer science, either in a traditional or online setting, starting this fall. Hutchinson learned last December that the state has only 6 qualified instructors to teach CS to high school students, so it's envisioned that the courses will be offered online through Virtual Arkansas ("where AR kids are Our kids").
Interestingly, House Bill 1183 includes a pretty dire-sounding Emergency Clause: "It is found and determined by the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas that computer science and technology skills are of vital importance to meet the growing needs of the workforce; that public school students need opportunities to develop computer science and technology skills in order to be competitive in the future; and that this act is immediately necessary to ensure that the Department of Education has the time necessary to develop and modify academic standards for computer science courses before beginning of the 2015-2016 school year. Therefore, an emergency is declared to exist, and this act being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health, and safety shall become effective on: (1) The date of its approval by the Governor."
Interestingly, House Bill 1183 includes a pretty dire-sounding Emergency Clause: "It is found and determined by the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas that computer science and technology skills are of vital importance to meet the growing needs of the workforce; that public school students need opportunities to develop computer science and technology skills in order to be competitive in the future; and that this act is immediately necessary to ensure that the Department of Education has the time necessary to develop and modify academic standards for computer science courses before beginning of the 2015-2016 school year. Therefore, an emergency is declared to exist, and this act being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health, and safety shall become effective on: (1) The date of its approval by the Governor."
CS grads, assemble! We must all assemble and hurry to the blighted lands of Arkansas, where we shall seek to restore some stability through our arcane understandings of algorithmic complexity and the like.
Good thing parachute drops and hand to hand knife fighting were required courses in my CS program! Boy did I think that wasn't going to be applicable in real life. Keep that in mind college CS students the next time you are learning something that seems impractical.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's like squeezing blood from a stone. They're not going to get it from business taxes, that's for sure.
About the most used utility will be "The Word Processor!"
My programming skill was honed not in the classroom setting, rather, I got it from reading books, manuals, studying code examples of others, posting questions on programming forum, asking friends, experimenting, lots and lots of testing and experimenting
Since I never have any experience from attending 'programming classes' I won't comment on the merit or the de-merit of it, but I would like to ask the gurus over here ---
Do you think it is more beneficial for one to learn programming from a more structural form, in the classroom setting?
Who knows what all those nerds who would be studying CS will do now. We must do something before they alight from their parent's basements and on to the streets armed with Magic.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
So this is like, "help help! we need tech people". (But no more H-1B visas....)
Makes a LOT of sense... (NOT!)
The emergency language is probably just there for a legal reason--it's going to either free up certain funds for it, allow a body to act that otherwise wouldn't be able to, allow applications for certain funds, allow some other kind of budgeting change, or change the timeline determining when the legislation can become effective.
Is Arkansas unusual in having 6 CS teachers? Do non-magnet high schools regular teach the Comp Sci AP these days?
Judging from the title alone, at first I thought they were being far too over-dramatic in calling any kind of CS education situation an "emergency."
But after seeing that they only have 6 qualified CS teachers, I have to change my tune. Something is very, very wrong if a state of 3 million people only has 6 CS teachers.
For all the fledgling nerds-to-be in AR, I hope they can find a good, long-term solution to the problem.
Arkansas may have done their High School students a huge favor by not teaching them CS. Why train your students an a career path that will be destroyed by outsourcing and the malignant cancer of the H1-B guest worker?
All programming, network administration, hosting, etc. is being outsourced to India. I've seen it happen, people are losing their jobs to cheap overseas labor. So why the fuss for code.org and CS if clearly America wants to outsource these jobs anyway.
Just a guess, but likely working in IT pays far far better than being a teacher as well.
Filling those teaching spots could be a problem. And keeping them filled even more so.
A state of emergency for this? really? If there aren't more important things for these politicians to do then maybe we should close down their offices.
Americans love declaring "wars" on situations and things, or regional/national "emergencies" don't they?
Why all the drama?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When I was in high school, we learned QBasic on IBM PS/2s. What's the current equivalent today? Nobody's completed the .net help file, so who has the book to teach it?
Sounds like a phone it in solution compared to the language used in stating the problem. Although given what they pay teachers compared to what you could get actually working in cs it's not too surprising. On the plus side at least they haven't tried to offer online gym classes.
Just like the way they teach science and history, it's a group reading of a textbook and having a computer in front of you to test theories. I've sat through 4 of them. (6th Grade Applesoft Basic, 9th Grade QBasic, 10th Grade Pascal, Freshman College level C) They all teach the same concepts like sorting, even though most people these days ask a database program to do sorting work with an ORDER BY command in SQL.
I graduated from an Ohio public high school in 2007 which was part of the Ohio High School Transformation Initiative (OHSTI), which was driven by KnowledgeWorks Foundation, which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I was actually very happy to be part of this initiative, and took Cisco courses throughout my years there. While I didn't get my CCNA right out of the gate, I did get my IC3 and A+ certifications during high school, and was actually picked to join an excellent IT internship opportunity that turned into a full time job after graduating. After which I then got my CCNA's and tons of field experience (and pay raises). I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity!
In a state of emergency, even pesky things like habeas corpus can be pushed aside.
Because it's for the children.
It's another hack-fest from theodp - the beater of the single horse.
Sometimes it's important, sometimes it's not. Mostly not.
Do we need to be reminded about every event? No. Do we need to be reminded from time to time when things turn nasty? I'd say yes.
Still, mostly no.
Is this an opportunity? As someone with a CS degree, could I teach in this poor stupid state? Admittedly I don't have any education experience but I do have decades of real-world experience with some of the most well known names in the tech industry.
I guess it would suck for the most part but as they say: if I could only change one individual's life then I would be OK with that.
I imagine though, with all the "child predator" or whatever terrorist bullshit, it would be hard for an adult male to get a job teaching young adults. regardless of qualification. In fact, even the thought of the discrimination turns me away.
Teaching doesn't pay. Scores are leaving the profession, and fewer and fewer graduates are going into it.
Education has now spent a decade as one of the five lowest-paying masters degrees in the country.
(Music Education and Social Work, perennially topping the list.)
For a degree that can easily cost a quarter-million dollars or more to obtain, starting salaries are scarcely competitive with the night manager at McDonalds.
If they want real talent, the state is going to need to change their compensation system in a meaningful way.
--- Little Atomo - The Amazing Thinking Robot from Atomocom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP9KisHi4k
In Arkansas acts passed by the legislature that don't declare an "emergency" take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends (usually in April) rather than immediately. This was designed to give time for a popular referendum to repeal legislative acts before they become law. Yes, the "emergency" clauses can get pretty comical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
When I was a school (many many years ago) computers were metal boxes with black and white (or green) screens and a flashing cursor. That's it. We were taught logic, binary and all that stuff. In school. We learned structured programming, some minor graphics but mostly it was how to do calculations, and make decisions etc. That set me up to pick up multiple programming languages over the years, and I moved from 8 bit through to 64 bit computers with ease. A decade or so after I had finished, schools were focussing on teaching computer skills which pretty much focussed on how to do 'things' in Windows or on a Mac and no-one knew jack about how the computer worked, especially the teachers. The result has been a generation of people who really know nothing about computers or computer science. If we taught other sciences like this we would still be thinking of elements like 'air' and 'fire' etc. Students need to know what is going on rather than skipping all that and focussing on making powerpoints.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
If not many, then Arkansas may be exporting a lot of Computer Science literate young residents.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
No, there is no benefit especially in high school. High school is about control, not actually educating people. Teach rigid solutions to simple problems, and collect a paycheck. Mandated quarterly and monthly testing ensures that free thinking does not happen in public schools. Only the tests matter. If teachers attempt to teach their students, their students will do poorly on the tests. The tests are designed so that all steps must be followed to get a correct answer, even if those steps can be simplified. The tests are how teachers keep their jobs, and get raises. The only thing the administrators need to understand to do their job is make sure that the test scores are good.
There is no carrot and stick, there are only whips. Count how many administrators are required to operate outside of the school. That is the number of whippings each teacher faces whenever they attempt to act on their professional skills and "teach" a child in a school.
Sure, there are exceptions but you didn't ask about the exception. The normal is what I describe, just talk to a teacher who has been in the public school system for more than 5 years.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
why is this modded down? its a legit question to be asked. I learned the same way as you coming up about tech (im more of a networking guy than programming) Ive sat in classes, and ive done it on my own (cisco classes and others) and I found benifits to both
Learning on my own, there was less stress to get things done, which is a double edged sword. While I was free to do what I wanted, I had to have the mentality to keep myself on track though.
on the other hand in class, it made it easier to simply ask for help when i was stuck on something. and in my case, having access to actual cisco hardware vs emulators made a huge difference as well
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The Waltons outsource everything to China anyway. So why does Arkansas need programmers.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'd guess that adding an emergency clause frees up some sort of funding, and/or deals with district/union red tape.
No, no. You don't understand how the system works. Let me help you:
It's genius, really.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In k-12, dealing with the child personality is more difficult than the subject material. This requires people with a good emotional IQ, and only mediocre science IQ. Alternate jobs include fast food worker (minimum wage), day care worker (minimum wage), social worker (not so good pay). Teacher pay ~$45k-$60k, and health care. Now, teachers have to lecture, prepare lesson plans, do paperwork, run after school activities, in addition to lecturing in class. I'd rather have cheaper social workers doing a lot of that extra work, but the voters in my district don't agree with me.
Some teachers work. Their sense of obligation to the students makes them chumps.
It's their job to teach students and students aren't a raw material. They are more like tomatoes. Some are beaten up and bruised and torn and not all of them can be certified. In the end, it's a filter. This is distinctly different from "control" that you have up and unilaterally decided to rail against. You can succeed without a diploma, in the last decade, so I see no problem.
right after they finish up the creationism curriculum.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
where our kids are AR kids.
There is NO shortage of teachers trained in CS. There is a GLUT of middle aged people who were former programmers and engineers [in old programming languages which are out of date] who have decided to become teachers. I don't think that most of them are incapable of picking up Java or C# in one year to be able to teach kids. Maybe after learning a new language, they again become employable and leave.
Visit your local IEEE or ACM meetings.
Seriously, rather than focusing on CS, which is a relatively narrow focus, they should consider Robotics instead.
That is the future.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Your demonstrated lack of command with language and metaphor can only be seen as ironic . If your only measure for success is how much cash you made last year, you are a sociopath. My claim is exemplified by your metaphor which portrays humans as something you can eat or discard as you desire. Seek professional help.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
My programming skill was honed not in the classroom setting, rather, I got it from reading books, manuals, studying code examples of others, posting questions on programming forum, asking friends, experimenting, lots and lots of testing and experimenting
Since I never have any experience from attending 'programming classes' I won't comment on the merit or the de-merit of it, but I would like to ask the gurus over here ---
Do you think it is more beneficial for one to learn programming from a more structural form, in the classroom setting?
I have been programming since 1987 and have been lucky to have been taught by both methods, early on in a private school classroom setting, Later for years on my own during the 1990s and then went to college and got a degree in Software application development and two degrees in electronic engineering, with a focus on network communications, control systems and embedded electronics. I continue to hone my skills by doing programming and electronic projects on my own and have learned on my own at twice the speed by knowing how and where to look to solve technical problems without re-inventing the wheel. (Usually coming up with a new protocol or inventing code from scratch to do a thing is wasted time, because if you look for it there is probably a library that has already worked out the problem you are facing. That being said, the multi-faceted argument in the article is not well served by the fact that well educated students in my situation have major problems finding the programming jobs, due to the fact that employers see no work experience and do not count the fact that I was educated in programming languages GW basic and Pascal going back to when the Apple IIGS was a new thing. It is ridiculous because we have this divide where employers do not recognize the ability or the education so the individual high school students graduating high school are not going to be hired into programming jobs by virtue of the fact that they were 'educated' in high school on stem subjects, The problem is the business model and the HR of the companies.
It has been said before again and again that there is no shortage of STEM workers in the US, but employers need to stop with the ridiculous gatekeeping practices like "Must have 5 years experience in programming language X" when X is something that has not been out more than 5 years. The question is irrelevant because they seem to dismiss the fact that I have been programming for 28 years! I have seen it over and over on top of having people who are from the "mainframe" generation who look at someone like me and try to say "I don't believe he has all the skills he says he has" Oh ok great guy, let me ask you this what is faster in C++ a heap sort or a bubble sort? and their response is "You just made that up!" ok.. it is clear who does not have the skills they claim to.. I 'm sorry to have wasted your time.. have a better day! Bye!
Former Arkansas Governor Huckabee wants to run for president and is currently beating the drum denying climate change.
Arkansas is a state where verifiable scientific facts are ignored in favor of religiously endorsed stupidity. Trying to drop a high technology mandate into such a system will not work. Critical thinking has been replaced by magical thinking. Keeping rational thinking unpolluted by fanatical belief is a loosing battle. The best that they will get is skilled technicians.
Think about it. Would you hire someone who was primarily educated in a madrasa, a place where religion was emphasized over any other subject? Hiring a person who was mostly educated in Arkansas is the American version. No matter how smart a person is, unless they are capable of critical thinking they will never be in the top tier. So unless someone from Arkansas leaves the state and overcomes their bad early training, they are not someone who can be trusted to make rational decisions.
Although this sounds harsh, if you think about it rationally it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.
Why is Snark Required?
You are just keeping away the very best developers from giving quality time to school kids by requiring them to have a Masters' degree in education just to teach programming.
I agree with you. It seems like the decided to go in a certain direction, realized that they didn't have the resources to go in that direction and then raised a flag. Despite the word "emergency", it seems fairly rational to me. It is an emergency in the sense that they will be wasting money on an initiative that is doomed to failure unless they spend some money that they didn't originally plan. It is unfortunate that their lack of resources was initially missed, but it's better to have raised the issue late than to have pushed on ahead without paying attention.
I have no idea what American schools teach, so I can't comment on your other question. I worked in a Japanese school and there were definitely 2-3 qualified "computer instructors" at all times (Japanese teachers usually only stay in the same school for 5 years at a time so the faculty changes regularly). I don't believe any of them had CS degrees -- mostly math, but it didn't matter. The level of things they taught could have been taught by just about anybody. General computer organization, basic SQL (I always laughed at this), Excel macros, etc.
Like you, I wonder how much they are intending to teach (or were teaching previously). There is almost nothing taught in high school that requires a high level of domain knowledge to teach (probably music, art and PE being the biggest exceptions). The hard part is the teaching. Especially if you have a curriculum, the material is all laid out and explained in the text books. No matter what your background, if you can't understand 100% of what's in a high school text, you really have no business being a teacher. Something like Code Academy would be quite easy for most competent teachers to teach and would go far beyond what I think high schools actually teach. Hiring part time assistant teachers might be a way forward.
Teaching is one of the easiest jobs someone can get - you get 3 months off a year,
Between 2 and 2 1/2 (depending on the state). Unpaid.
you work at most 6 hours a day,
8-10, when you include lesson planning and grading papers (yes, this is "work")
you can't be fired,
Tenure only comes after several years of sucking up to the administration (five in the district I worked in), during which you can be fired, either at will or by nonrenewal of your (annual) contract.
and you get a tax payer funded pension at something like 80% of your final years salary.
This part is correct, at least.
Teachers pay absolutely nothing for healthcare.
Varies by district. In mine, I had to pick up 100% of the costs, and all the plans were crazy expensive because of all the old retirees who were also part of the group (and the expectations for how plush the insurance was supposed to be for them). Now in the private sector I'm paying a hell of a lot less out of pocket.
Picking up a worthless masters in education
I'll give you that. That's a problem with teacher training, though, not the school system. It's not exactly as if schools could just start taking unqualified people and plop them in front of 30 people without raising hell (unless it's Teach for America and the school is in the ghetto, of course).
(earned by sitting in a classroom in the summer for 5 days and taking a saturday test)
No idea where you got that from. It's easy as far as master's degrees go, but it still involves a thesis.
gives you a guarenteed raise.
Is this a problem? Teaching is one field in which extra knowledge is inherently directly applicable to your day-to-day work. In any case, what of all the analogous opportunities in the private sector?
And finally - teachers DON"T WORK. 15 min of lecture and then assign homework which isn't graded.
Watching the kids and keeping them at work is much harder than actually presenting the material. (Planning out the lesson also involves a fair bit of work.) Have you ever tried watching 30 kids at once, never mind teaching them anything?
Jesus Christ - teachers even dress like slobs now!
This is mostly the case with those whom the kids walk all over. Either that or they're old, have been there forever, and can do whatever the hell they want because no one's going to give them shit for it. Again, same as in the private sector.
Teachers are completely overpaid!
And how would you recommend we come up with a more equitable way to determine teachers' salaries? Regardless of your own ideas about fairness, how do you reason that lowering teachers' salaries will improve American education? Do your ideas about salary reductions only apply to teachers, or do they apply also to your own field?
Finally, if teaching is such easy money, why didn't you pursue it?
By that logic let's just do away with school altogether. It costs a lot and everything you can learn there you can learn from books.
Get your algebra teacher (if your damned public school even has one of those) to teach the kids elements of discrete math and logic. The tell the teachers to get lost and recruit some students to teach the language of their choice. I guess that won't work because unionized teachers ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE QUALIFIED !!!! to teach highschool CS, and the only adults who are really qualified to teach programming are professional programmers who wouldn't be interested in the pay cut.
Do you think it is more beneficial for one to learn programming from a more structural form, in the classroom setting?
Having earned a CS degree myself and worked many years as a software engineer, I believe that I'm qualified to speak on this point. My first real effort at programming came when I was in high school and we were all introduced to programmable graphing calculators in our math courses. Some use of the calculators was required and some students used them minimally while others really learned to use them and a few of us got into the programming side of things and began writing and trading crude programs to help us with our math courses. Of all the people in my class I was the only one who really caught the programming bug, the rest were dabblers. I decided to study computer science in college to explore this desire more fully, but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. It took me five years to complete the degree, but I made it. Some of it was very interesting, other parts were terribly dull and the details, as the textbooks often say, are left as an exercise for the reader. At my first job I was the typical young hot shot out of school, a real blue flame special. In fact, I knew almost nothing about writing software in the real world. If I had even known that I knew nothing that would have been something, but I didn't. Curse those damn professors and their UML diagrams. I mean, Christ, nobody actually uses those in the real world or at least nobody outside of NASA or maybe JPL. So, I began reading whatever I could find online about tools that professionals actually use to write code for money. I studied code that I came across at work, open source code and I read lots and lots of technical books with more code examples and gradually, over a period of years I filled in the gaps in my knowledge and began the long road of the journeyman programmer, competent and working but always learning more and improving, especially from those who I felt had something worthwhile to teach. That would be my best piece of advice to my younger self, seek out mentors whom you respect and can learn from. Read their books and follow their blogs and if you're ever lucky enough to meet them in person, try not to make an ass of yourself. In theory you could learn it all through hard experience, but I find that programmers who go that route write code that lacks polish and is chock full of bugs. Of course, they think that their genius "hacker" code is brilliant, which makes the problems even worse. Find out who the real experts are in your niche and learn what they do and how they do things. Hacking is fine for experiments and fun, but not so much for production code. However, in the end both types of learning are important. Classroom (probably at school) and reading of books, code, articles and blogs, but also experimentation and self-guided exploration and discovery. Strike a balance and have other people read and critique your code and be always willing to check your ego at the door and you might just learn something, have fun doing it and earn enough money that you can live with the whole thing. That's it.
We are going for the glory.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley