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

Wrong. This isn't enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't fixed the education gap. What we need to start doing is taking white children away from their parents so that they can't benefit from their un-earned privilege, and have them raised by the state. This will level the playing field, raise equality, and the standard of life for all.

Re:Well that's great...

[AmiMoJo]

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?