Wired: IBM's School Could Fix Education and Tech's Diversity Gap

theodp writes: Wired positively gushes over IBM's Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), saying it could fix education and tech's diversity gap. Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology, allowing them to earn a high school diploma and a free associate degree in six years or less. That P-TECH's six inaugural graduates completed the program in four years and were offered jobs with IBM, Wired reports, is "irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work" (others aren't as impressed, although the President is drinking the Kool-Aid). While the program has only actually graduated six students since it was announced in 2010, Wired notes that by fall, 40 schools across the country will be designed in P-TECH's image. IBM backs four of them, but they'll also be run by tech giants like Microsoft and SAP, major energy companies like ConEdison, along with hospital systems, manufacturing associations, and civil engineering trade groups. They go by different names and are geared toward different career paths, but they all follow the IBM playbook.

Comments

Re:Diversity gap is irrelevant

[fche]

"Individuals have different potential and interests, but over a population of millions it averages out."

It doesn't mean that the averages over sub-populations are the averages over the whole population. Potentials and interests may well be multi-modal.

"Or are you saying that some races and genders are just inherently inferior?"

Why are you dragging value judgements like "inferior" into this?

Re:Well that's great...

[Ol Olsoc]

Mashiki, this is getting old now. Like clockwork, you make your second standard mistake: assuming that women are not interested in tech.

Care to explain why in the past more women went into technology than do now? Or why these courses are generally quite successful at attracting girls to study them?

A pure bit of conjecture here. During the mid 70's the first group of women who were liberated frmo their traditional roles were entering the fields. I worked with many of them in a university research environment. There were indeed a number of men who had difficulty accepting them, although most of us had no issues.

Those guys who often were actually real nasty to these women? They either ignored them or the put the guys in their place. After a few years, those guys either came to respect the ladies, or simply had to retreat to let their misogyny fester in private.

Regardless, the ladies in general displayed abilities comparable to the men.

And we tended not to think a whole lot about gender - at least as applied to work.

Over the years however, the numbers of ladies there dropped off somewhat, finally settling down to today's anemic representation

Why?

Efforts to get young ladies interested in the fields were out and out failures. The polling results showed that tech fields were just about at the bottom of the career preferences. And these were the daughters of Scientists and Engineers.

In our workplace, we attempted to attract as many women and treat them as well as possible. I voluntarily gave up a number of promotions in order to free up promotion space for a woman (silly quota system)

But still the numbers shrunk.

Why?

In the end, I came to the conclusion that after an initial period of time when women were trying out different careers, they eventually as a group settled on careers they actually liked.

I do not buy the idea that the anemic reasons given that young ladies are kept out of STEM by dongle jokes or pictures of Playboy model's faces, or all of the other lame reasons given that end up painting an exceptionally offensive picture of women as incredibly weak people, who can be cowed by any criticism or anything that they don't agree with. Those first generation liberated women I worked with at the time, would have laughed at that idea.

People can disagree with me, but my observations are based on experience and trying to get young ladies interested, not some modern male pushback against third wave feminism.