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Senate Draft of No Child Left Behind Act Draft Makes CS a 'Core' Subject
theodp (442580) writes "If at first you don't succeed, lobby, lobby again. That's a lesson to be learned from Microsoft and Google, who in 2010 launched advocacy coalition Computing in the Core, which aimed "to strengthen K-12 computer science education and ensure that computer science is one of the core academic subjects that prepares students for jobs in our digital society." In 2013, Computing in the Core "merged" with Code.org, a new nonprofit led by the next door neighbor of Microsoft's General Counsel and funded by wealthy tech execs and their companies. When Code.org 'taught President Obama to code' in a widely-publicized White House event last December, visitor records indicate that Google, Microsoft, and Code.org execs had a sitdown immediately afterwards with the head of the NSF, and a Microsoft lobbyist in attendance returned to the White House the next day with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and General Counsel Brad Smith (who also sits on Code.org's Board) in tow. Looks like all of that hard work may finally pay off. Education Week reports that computer science has been quietly added to the list of disciplines defined as 'core academic subjects' in the Senate draft of the rewritten No Child Left Behind Act, a status that opens the doors to a number of funding opportunities. After expressing concern that his teenage daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, President Obama added, "I think they got started a little bit late. Part of what you want to do is introduce this with the ABCs and the colors." So, don't be too surprised if your little ones are soon focusing on the four R's — reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and Rapunzel — in school!"
So, is there anything which has overcome the double tassel distribution which programming has always had?
For literally decades, it's been "these people get it, these people don't" with very little in the middle.
Have we fixed this? Have we found way to teach it which prevent this? Have we even explained it?
Otherwise this is fairly meaningless drivel which is little more intelligent than "Children should be 3% taller for each of the next 10 years".
I've know really smart mathematicians who couldn't be made to understand computer programming. And, likewise, I've known some awesome CS people who struggled with math.
So what makes us think your average school children will be any different?
As usual, I worry when Microsoft and Google are telling us what the future should be. Because it's all about the future as they want it to be and as it benefits them.
As long as Microsoft and Google are so reliant on H1B workers, educating American kids to code is a pointless exercise.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Fuck Microsoft and fuck google. Why should they expect the public to fund a specialized skill set that makes them money.
If they truely cared about CS literacy, they could institute and EASILY fund their own programs. Maybe they should consider doing on the job training? For example. They could create 9 month job opportunities (commonly called interships or co ops) and train people to code during that time. The ones that clearly have the mindset for programming can get hired on as full time employees, and the others have gained some valuable work experience.
All this ridiculous proselytization neglects the fact that a lot of people, possibly the majority, simply aren't wired neurologically to code.
The people that are, take to it like a fish in water. Those who don't will always struggle. Unlike core subjects like math, you don't need to learn how algorithms work to participate in modern society and they aren't particularly useful for things that aren't mathematical processes or coding. Improving technical proficiency would be great, but this is a pretty poor way to do it.
If any of the following apply 1) So tired of this, no energy to write a disparaging comment 2) Simply fucking tired of Zuckerberg and the cult of code(.org) 3) Dont feel like reading 10+ links in a summary 4) wonder why hardware and software development before the cult of code.org just really really hasn't been good enough for some in a very strong particular way...
the more people that understand computers, the less i'll be able to exploit them and steal their data and infect their computers.
Use my SEOChat.com and ChatButton.com services so i can install viruses on your users' computers!
If this thread is like all the others then we'll get a lot of posts along the lines of how kids shouldn't be taught CS, how if they're not self motivated to find it for themselves then they shouldn't learn it.
If you believe that, can you explain what about CS is different from maths, English, physics, chemistry, biology, foreign languages, history, wood working, underwater basket weaving etc etc?
Seriously, I'm not being snarky. This comes up a lot, and I'd like to know why people think this.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have not read too much on this, but listing these areas as core areas might have an opposite effect than intended. One provision of the NCLB act was that teachers need to be "highly qualified" and left that up to the states to decide what that meant. To my knowledge most states requirements for "highly qualified" teachers is that for "core subjects" they hold at least a bachelor's degree in that field.
The outcome of this is that many of these classes could be dropped because a Math teacher who had a minor in CS would no longer be considered highly qualified to teach in that subject. By raising title of these subjects but not having any standardized testing on the subject would likely cause schools to drop those areas in order to keep the arbitrary percentage of "highly qualified" teachers teaching classes in order to keep funding.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It means more work to design new courses, more certifications, and more areas of evaluation. Since teachers are a major part of system, you have to get them to buy in.
Like putting lipstick on a pig.
LOGO turtles - here we come!
CS might be an economically important subject, but it's hardly core. It's a composition of math, electronics and engineering.
Math is a core subject, but only once they quit with the "math = arithmetic, algebra, calculus" mantra in schools. Start teaching logic and inference.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Make GNU/Emacs the national standard editor and Scheme the national teaching language. It couldn't be less popular than Michelle's school lunch program.
I'll make my usual rant about over-emphasizing "coding". There are a lot of areas of "computers" that should be covered. For one, how to communicate the relationships between "parts" of anything is an important business skill whether you code or not. For example, what are the trade-offs with using hierarchies versus sets, unique single identifiers versus non-unique versus compound identifiers, etc. Even if you don't code on the job, you'll be facing part numbers, employee numbers, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
A "core" subject has multiple levels and is the basis for other knowledge. Basic math is fundamental to many jobs; you can't be a plumber or an architect without it. Ditto for reading and writing. If you excel on one of these disciplines you may need advanced skills; like trigonometry in math or learning the difference between composing a novel or a newspaper article if you're a writer.
Programming doesn't qualify for the same sort of focus. You can operate a computer without programming it the same way you can drive a car without being a mechanic. Programming computers is more of an end than a means and many people, both now and in the foreseeable future, will be able to make a life without having to write a single line of code. Calling it a core subject will just create a loss of focus on what core subjects are all about.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Wouldn't it be:
reading
'righting
'rithmatic
'rograming?
C.Sci is a good career, it's not the only career. I would rather teach kids:
If kids have basic life skills, they will also choose their own career paths wisely. By all means, offer a great C.Sci elective and ensure it's available to all willing and able. But pushing one single career on everyone seems overboard. By the time they graduate, other jobs will be in top demand.
And, whenever government starts making something policy, it has jumped the shark.
Google and Microsoft are old technology: they are today. And instead of trying to cater to the old guard, why don't we teach kids to learn, logic and inference as the parent said. Who knows what the future will bring. I don't want our kids being trained to compete with the Third World. I want them to be trained to lead - NOT keep up.
I want them to create a new industry and technologies that put us ahead and not fight for crumbs; which exactly what this program is for. CS is turning into "shop class" - it's something to do if you don't want or can't go to college and get paid as such. That IS their goal.
So that anyone who wants to take it can, but those who aren't interested don't. Also, make it accessible, my high school had CALCULUS as a prerequisite for the C++ class. Needless to say it wasn't a very popular.
I'm not sure what your point really is. K-12 is does not imply that Calculus is getting taught to 1st graders, so the problem you bring up happens to be impacting to the "advanced" levels of education. Sure, customize the top end of High school with advanced classes and nobody would argue (or at least not that many of us). Kids in first grade lack the capacity for critical thought, so teaching them coding is pure lunacy. There are far to many other things for first graders to learn, which in turn sets them up for the ability to begin thinking critically (years later).
I will go a bit further here and state that there are different types of programming. A pure mathematician won't be able to do artistic programming very well. Give him an algorithm problem however, and they could. A purely artistic person on the other hand could whip out UI code all day and be pretty happy about this but probably hate trying to invent math algorithms. There is no right or wrong kind of programming, and never will be. Art is not always logical, and logical is usually anything but art.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But perhaps not too late.
Rather than teach CS as a separate subject, teach the other subjects in the context of CS.
If the goal is to train the kids today for the jobs of tomorrow, there will be CS elements to every job, even if it is just using computers.
Case in point: Wife was an attendance clerk at the local school. When the new attendance tool was rolled out, it came with no pre-defined reports.
Clerks were sent to a class, and then were expected to write their own reports.
Did not turn out well for a lot of clerks who have had zero CS experience, which was pretty much all of them. Including my wife, who went and found another job.
From what she has heard, all the report writing has been done by two clerks out of about 100, who just happen to have some CS experience from previous jobs.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
...but is likely a necessary skill to do well in a computer science course of study, as well as engineering, physics, etc.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Funnier if the 4th thing is actually R?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Back when I was a young lad, in the mid-early 80's, our school acquired a whole room, now what we would call a computer lab, full of Apple computers. I believe these would later be known as Apppe lle boxes. The beige boxes with funky green screens, glowing, like something out of a sci-fi movie. Being in kindergarten at the time, I think, our class mozied on down to have us each take a seat in front of a computer. And there we typed, on a clickity clack keyboard, the word 'logo' or 'LOGO' . It's been to long at this point, to remember which. And subsequent to pressing 'enter' (or was it Return...) , the screen changed to a line with a rectangular block, and a triangle below it.
That was my 1st introduction to computers, and programming apparently, I think ... (dad had several C64's from work, but things get hazy being that young...). I remember recognizing that I could make this little triangle do the same thing, continuously, but slightly different, to create a geometric pattern, usually with a circular based appearance. Being that young though, I didn't recognize the math 'required' to adequately create, what was in my head. I knew from a single point, around it, 360 degrees was a circle. And what an acute angle was, but that was pretty much it.
Fast forward to today. A coworker, taking CS courses at a local community college, shows me what he's learning on.
- Now, truth be told, I'm not a programmer by nature. However, I can program. Some CSS, HTML, PGP, JS if needed, all interfacing with a db if needed. My present job covers from hardware, to db's, to client end application configuration, to network and interface troubleshooting. All heavily VM'd. I consider myself a sys-admin, but title says Systems Analyst...
Back to topic... So my coworker is showing me this interface where he's learning CSS, HTML and JS for class. All in the same interface. I forget who the software package was created by, but, in my 15 years of computing profession, I must say that was the most convoluted learning interface I've witnessed! Being the good coworker I am, I told him to fire up his shell on the class 'Linux' box, and start typing away in VIM. I showed him how to disect websites with in browser developer tools, which the class made no mention of!!! And, what I was taught, was the basic nuts and bolts of web design in modern browsers. (I say this outright, because I honestly don't know any proffesional web developers, who don't have to use multiple browsers, developer tools, and disect what they write. If you don't, and are a professional web developer, chime in here!)
Granted this is just a community college, offerring a bunch of CS courses, that isn't geared toward an Bachelors in CS. Still, if I'm to believe that, even at the college level they aren't getting it right, in presumably what is supposed to be a professional environment, I know for damn sure they won't get it right for K thru 12.
Looking back, that little glimpse into LOGO in early grade school gave me far more interest and creative thinking at that age, than anything else at that time.Knowing people with kids in grade school at the moment, what I hear isn't promising compared such simple interfaces that I and others had. The 'GUI' , first of all, has muddled things, leaving too much open to exploration and not focus.
If my opinion mattered, I'd argue kids should be learning logic, geometry and basic computing concepts, far before they touch a programming language. From what I can tell, that isn't happening. Even at the college level!
OK, you're just doing it wrong.
Recess first. Fun stuff like coding after kindergarten is over.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem with this is the same problem that's happening with elearning. Administrators see a cool video by a vendor and decide that's going to be the magic bullet. Then, you have 3rd graders learning Java. Then in middle school, they switch to VB. Then, in high school, it's back to Java again. Teaching kids to code like this is going to make them hate everything. Furthermore, good luck finding teachers for this- there's already a massive teacher shortage, and far too few math and science teachers, much less anything else. Instead, a better path would be to start teaching kids digital literacy. Sounds like a buzzword, but really what it comes down to is teaching kids how to use the internet and other technologies to learn. I saw a librarian who took a musty old high school library and turned it into a digital learning center, where he'd partner with teachers to add online components to their curriculum, so whenever kids felt a need to do so, they'd go to the library to do the curriculum there. All the computers faced his desk, so he could keep an eye on them. I saw something in that place I had never seen before- rows of teenagers at computers, and none of them were on youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. They were all looking at blogs, wikipedia, etc. Teaching kids that the internet is more than just facebook is far more powerful for the purpose of creating a stronger tech workforce than shoving prepackaged garbage coding plans down people's throats. (Furthermore, if you want to really ruin any subject for kids, make it common core.)
Nobody wants to hire a mediocre programmer.
Forcing everyone to learn programming in school is going to result in a lot more mediocre programmers, and almost no increase in good programmers.
You know what would make a difference?
Getting all the students who have basically no chance of learning to program out of the class, so the rest of us don't have to deal with them.
There's a big problems here. Who will teach the students? They will have to be competent programmers, and competent teachers. This seems unlikely. Schools can't offer a competitive wage so that will throw most competent programmers out of the running. This leaves incompetent programmers and a few competent ones that are willing to accept lower wages because they want to teach. But there is no guarantee that the competent programmer is a competent teacher so that will whittle the pool down further. Finally how can the school administration tell a competent programmer from one that isn't? Like is they cannot. The likely result is that you'll have teachers that cannot program and aren't enthusiastic about it to teach children. This leads to a **bad** experience driving potential programming talent away from the field.
"Something must be done! This is something, therefore it must be done!"
Identify a problem and flail randomly at it until, well, forever. Bureaucracy grows without limit.
We should add "medical doctor" to the Core curriculum. This would be a great way to cut down on the ever increasing costs of medical care. Since everyone is now a doctor who can self diagnose their own issues and self prescribe their own cures, we will have successfully cut out a huge middleman in the medical industry. Thank god I thought of this. I am off now to tell congress of the plan going forward.
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
I am not going to discuss whether CS should or shouldn't be a "core" subject in the schools. Rather, I am much more disturbed by the idea that Congress, in D.C., wants to decide the "core" subjects for every school system in the US.
First and foremost, regulating education is not a function entrusted to the Federal Government. It is a quintessential State issue. It is not the kind of problem (unlike, say, national defence or immigration) which must be solved at the national level.
I think that many people believes most states are "getting it wrong" on education (say, here, by not mandating enough CS classes), so they are hoping the Feds will fix it. But the states making bad choices ought not to be, on its own, a source of power for Congress. Some people imagine that, once Congress takes over, it'll be easier to get things right, since there'll be only one decision-making body not many, but this ignores the massive lobbying that will take over once convincing Congress suffices to influence the whole country. It is much easier for interest groups to dominate Congress than to dominate each State and school district separately.
Was car mechanics ever core subjects, or dentistry?
CS is a pretty small field, and while there are a lot of "IT workers", there is nothing special with computer science that should elevate it to a core subject.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
CS is not a core subject, it's specialist training. Logic, sure that would make a nice core subject.
NCLB may have sounded good but is' the worst thing they could ever have done to education in the US. Bush and the republican congress that passed it should rot in hell for it.
maybe if I changed my name to rajiv, I would be able to get a job in the bay area doing software work.
And we're supposed to believe you live in the Bay Area?
I am almost ready to just give up
You might do that. Because you have to be criminally incompetent if you can't get hired in the Bay Area now. You can make high five to six figures merely by being mediocre.
today's working class
I'm giggling that you think anyone in our industry is 'working class'. Most helpdesk bitches don't even qualify that low on the economic scale.
So it won't matter what you TRY to teach them.
But let's all put our heads in the sand and pretend that the Jewish media is telling the truth about everything! We can't have those damn white people simply living around their own kind! They'll end up expelling all the Jews who have enslaved them, for the 110th time...
I think a basic logic course should be mandatory and certain CS course could cover this requirement.
But this seems too specialize to require of all teachers.
I think you meant, "... don't be too surprised if your little ones are soon focusing on the four R's — reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and requirements-gathering...." ;-)
FTFY.
Now the schools can do shitty jobs of teaching people to program and the universities will have to deal with the results. They will need a semester or two to un-learn all the bad practices that the programming teacher/basketball coach let slide.
In thinking this will have nothing to do with code whatsoever?
I somehow get the feeling this would be like letting Phillip Morris into schools to teach health classes.
I foresee MS wanting to get into schools, now they have, which means all these kids will come out having grown up using MS products meaning their future market share is now ensured.
I feel as though Uncle Sam has fucked us for a buck again.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
This is a really stupid idea. Most people never have to code. First, we don't need it. And second, this will not lead to having more software engineers, this will institutionalize "programming sucks" because now schools will be forcing it on people in a way that turns them off to programming. I'm serious.
If you want to make the world a better place, then add a small mix of logic, critical thinking and basic behavioral economics to the core. Coding is not nearly as important of a foundational skill as getting a clue how to think and how bad we are at it.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I would hope for that as a subject before something like programming.
I realize the stories of the young programmer hitting it big with a new website or app are very appealing, and sometimes people feel swathes of society are left out of that lottery because they don't know the first thing about programming. But it's still a very low percentage lottery.
Also, Zuckerberg et. al. don't like paying top programmers salaries like top lawyers or doctors receive.
Please show me in the Constitution where the Federal government has the power to impose laws about education.
Oh yeah, there is this:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The four R's — reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and refactoring.
As with most laws for 'education' this is nothing more than another attempt to divert millions of tax dollars to big corporations. Not only that, it totally misses the talent shortage problem the US (supposedly) faces. Want more folks to enter the CS field? Drop college tuition to zero! That will cost way less then these new rules and will be more effective. At the same time the government should actively work against the actual or perceived issue of H1-B and other work visa programs that hit especially the CS area of the job market. Doing computers in high school is all fine, but if there is no future in that field it is wasted effort. At the same time I doubt it is wise investment for schools to spend substantial amounts of cash on technology that is outdated within a few years. I know it from own experience, I learned programming on an Apple ][ even when MS-DOS was _the_ platform. On top of that, my school banked on Logo as language to teach...it is a neat idea, but in my opinion the most useless programming language to master. Teaching us assembler on the Z80 would have been much better, a skill I could use even today decades later!
LET a <- a * 2
Let A be less than the additive inverse of A multiplied by 2?
The tax clause states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." How does helping the several states fund public education not "provide for the [...] general Welfare"?
In all likelihood they will have picked up a lot on their own already, same as someone who, in a previous generations, is interested in auto mechanics would have already confirmed that interest by helping helping replace the oil, air and gas filters, plugs, distributor cap, rotor, points, and wires on the family chariot and gone on to trade school.
I don't see how a child can guarantee having that opportunity, especially one whose parents prefer locked-down devices such as iPod, iPhone, iPad, and video game consoles. See previous comments by betterunixthanunix and Anonymous Coward.