Standardized Tests Blamed, Asian Students Ignored In Google-Gallup K-12 CS Study

theodp writes: According to a study released Thursday by Google and Gallup, standardized tests may be holding back the next generation of computer programmers. The Google-Gallup Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education report (PDF) found that the main reason given by a "comprehensive but not representative" sample of 9,693 K-12 principals and 1,865 school district superintendents in the U.S. for their schools not offering computer science "is the limited time they have to devote to classes that are not tied to testing requirements." Which makes one wonder if Google now views Bill Gates as part of the problem and/or part of the solution of K-12 CS education. The Google-Gallup report also explores race/ethnicity differences to access and learning opportunities among White, Black and Hispanic students — but not Asian students — a curious omission considering that Google's own Diversity Disclosure shows that 35% of its U.S. tech workforce is Asian, making it by far the most overrepresented race/ethnicity group at Google when compared to the U.S. K-12 public school population. Which raises the question: Why would the Google-Gallup study ignore the access and learning opportunities of the race/ethnicity subgroup that has enjoyed the greatest success at Google? Not unsurprisingly, the Google-Gallup report winds up by concluding that what U.S. K-12 education really needs is more CS cowbell.

Comments

Re:Asian the most represented?

[Spy Handler]

It didn't say "most represented". It said "most overrepresented".

If whites are 70% of the population and Asians 15%, but among computer programmers whites make up 60% and Asians are 30%, then Asians are overrepresented in that field. Comprende?

Re:The Indians place a high value on Education

[jedidiah]

> As for the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, the Afghans, the Indonesians and the Malays, their utmost priority is Islam, their religion

That's odd. I've known a number of Desis and Pakastanis in IT.

I even known a couple of genuine hadjis. It didn't seem to interfere with the job.

Apparently in Pakistan engineers and doctors have high prestige and IT gets lumped in with engineers.

Re:I don't think K-12 CS is a good idea anyway

[Solandri]

It's actually far, far more instructive to read and think about and critique less good books. By seeing the mistakes those authors make, and how they abuse rules of composition in ways that don't work is far, far more instructive.

Exactly. For a visual analogy, if you see a movie with good visual effects, you come out thinking that looked really good, without really understanding why it looked good. If you see a movie with bad visual effects, you come out and talk with all your friends about how this effect looked so fake because of A, and that effect was bad because of B. Once you understand a bunch of stuff which doesn't work, what's left over is mostly stuff which does work.

One of the greatest benefits of digital photography has been the instantaneous feedback. You see something interesting and take a picture. The picture doesn't look like you imagined it would, so you tweak some settings on your camera and take another picture. You repeat this process noting which changes seemed to improve the picture the most. And eventually (hopefully) you arrive at the picture as you imagined it would look. You have to crawl through all that stuff which doesn't work in order to learn what does work. Being presented only with the final successful picture does very little to teach you how the photographer arrived at that picture.