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WA Pushes Back On Microsoft and Code.org's Call For Girls-First CS Education
theodp writes On Tuesday, the State of Washington heard public testimony on House Bill 1813 (video), which takes aim at boy's historical over-representation in K-12 computer classes. To allow them to catch flights, representatives of Microsoft and Microsoft-bankrolled Code.org were permitted to give their testimony before anyone else ("way too many young people, particularly our girls...simply don't have access to the courses at all," lamented Jane Broom, who manages Microsoft's philanthropic portfolio), so it's unclear whether they were headed to the airport when a representative of the WA State Superintendent of Public Instruction voiced the sole dissent against the Bill. "The Superintendent strongly believes in the need to improve our ability to teach STEM, to advance computer science, to make technology more available to all students," explained Chris Vance. "Our problem, and our concern, is with the use of the competitive grant program...just providing these opportunities to a small number of students...that's the whole basic problem...disparity of opportunity...if this is a real priority...fund it fully" (HB 1813, like the White House K-12 CS plan, counts on philanthropy to make up for tax shortfalls). Hey, parents of boys are likely to be happy to see another instance of educators striving to be more inclusive than tech when it comes to encouraging CS participation!
Just like Microsoft and Co, you're missing the "issue". Girls aren't taking programming classes because they don't WANT to.
There is far too much speculation and not enough actual research in this area. "Girls don't program because they were discriminated against starting in the 80s!" Really? "Girls just don't want to code!" Is that a guess? "All we need to do is spend more money and girls will become programmers!" How about you spend some of that money on researching why girls don't want to become programmers?
Seems like the research should be done before budgeting millions of dollars for a program you don't know will work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The research has been done. It's been done over and over. The message is really, really clear.
Rather than give you a long list of links, just start reading the following article. It has lots of references and links to studies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But a bunch of anecdotes creates a dataset, which is useful. If you disagree with this, then I want you to justify why an anecdote isn't a data point.
Data is systematically collected. Anecdotes have issues like self-selection or even verifiability. The difficulty is figuring out whether your sample of anecdotes is representative of the population at large; a collection of stories from slashdot probably isn't.
As mentioned earlier, if it's something you care about, you can search for the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" and find plenty of information.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In all seriousness this is a very valid point. Women and girls just aren't interested in STEM. And research now shows it's less to do with nurture than previously thought. Christina Hoff Sommers cited two studies in a recent video that more or less confirmed the final premise of this documentary:
http://rixstep.com/2/20111127,...
The idea is that the more free and safe a society becomes, the more likely men and women are pursue their biological predispositions. This manifests as men having careers in hands-on jobs & STEM fields and women in jobs with high social quotients.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"