Slashdot Mirror
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.
So "tech giants" are interested in burnishing their "diversity" image, and maybe even increasing the domestic labor supply a tad. I guess that means there's a "shortage" and they won't be doing any more layoffs.
the digits will fall into place.... truth + mercy = justice
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.
I find Could and Might journalism tedious. I'd prefer to read some Has journalism for a change. I'll be more interested if and when the P-TECH program Has fixed education and tech's diversity gap.
Diversity just means "no white people", so the diversity gap will no longer be a problem when there are no more white people.
Let the cream rise to the top. Why is it some kind of natural law that every demographic must be represented exactly proportionally?
irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work
Irrefutable proof that it might work.
There is a faggot
He puts his erect penis
In a man's anus.
What if they're just not that smart?
What if instead of lifting the bottom to the middle, we lifted the middle to the top? Or the top to somewhere new?
Learn how to make a thing for your corporate overlords, and, once you're done, have your job shipped to Brazil.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I doubt this is useful except as a method of turning out corporate drones all with the same mental DNA. Where do the arts flourish in an environment dominated by business concerns. Technology is only an enabler, it isn't an end in itself and this destined to produce uni-dimensional beings who cannot and will not think for themselves.
So one can get a 4 year HS degree and 2 year AA, now combined into a 6 year HS+AA degree. Brilliant!
or a magician's diversion tactic: look over here, not over there.
Yet another corporate-sponsored private school for rich kids isn't going to solve our education problems, because the solution is not the least bit scaleable.
The solution to our education crisis is to pony up and start spending enough money so that students have the resources they need to learn, and to start paying teachers what they rightfully deserve. The US doesn't lift a finger to provide a quality education. It only provides a bare minimum, and that is why the US is no longer a major world power. We simply lack the talent.
We'll just shoehorn people into fields they may not want to follow. Up next: We'll see IBM and the government fixing the dangerous jobs industries like mining and commercial fishing, while ensuring men don't have problems being called pedophiles for becoming k-12 teachers. And while we're at it, we'll ensure that there are more males entering psychology related fields. Should work out well, since women now make up the majority of the student body in universities.
I can't wait to see women enjoying a long day in the oil patch while men go off to become teachers with no issues.
Om, nomnomnom...
Which diversity ratio is perceived to be out of balance, and why does it need artificial programmes to fix?
Children : Adults?
Hispanics : Asians?
Men : Women?
People who drive to work : People who cycle?
Geniuses : Morons?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Since we are less than 10% of the world's population, and shrinking each year, AND all white countries are being invaded by millions of non-whites every year. Who is this 'minority' of which the summary speaks?
that the garbagemen here are all young white males. There's a diversity and culture gap here, we must fix it!
Of a government monopoly system that's ... doing so well ??!
and this article smacks of it.
Yes diversity is an interesting topic, but, all over the world there are scads of college graduates that are not employed in their field of training. I suppose it is easier to fix diversity than to fix the meaningful work problems that afflict the world.
Best,
A.C.
just sterilized. It's the humane thing to do.
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas. Every reputable study of marriage and family life has shown that kids from even semi-stable nuclear families tend to be significantly less prone to the pathologies common in the black lower class (where out of wedlock birth is the norm, not exception). Ever deal with white trash (not rednecks, white trash; there is a major difference)? It's the same sociological situation and even the same set of behavior problems and stunted options despite "white privilege."
A large part of the problem is that there is an active segment of society that doesn't want to deal with the moral issues that lead to this situation, denouncing that as "moralizing" and instead wants to focus purely on politics as though it's not all intertwined. Yet those issues are precisely the personal choices, enabled by public policy and culture, that lead to the destruction of the stable nuclear family in much of the black community. Blaming external factors for everything, which is the politically correct solution, is like Josh Duggar attempting to blame porn and Satan for why he graduated from molesting his sisters to serial adultery against his wife.
I'm sure they'll come out perfectly normal.
college transfer after this? how many credits will a 4 year school take from this?
There are issues with moving to a different school like
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new...
"Columbia wouldn’t accept credits for a class Hernandez had taken and passed in meteorology, for example, she says. “My dean said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that covers.’ I would think that would be so simple: It’s, like, about the weather.”
"For example, while some credits from one school may be accepted by another, they may not count toward a major, something students often don’t find out until after they’ve transferred."
Let me guess: theodp is against this. He doesn't like education because it might graduate people who might take his jerb. How does this guy keep getting his anti-education stories on his front page?
I've always found it interesting how many nerds here are against diversity in the workplace. As a male nerd, I want more women in the workplace in order to make the culture more professional. I can't tell you how many times I've been the victim of sexism in the workplace. Over and over again I've been told to "man up" or "turn in your man card" for failing to appreciate professional sports or for driving a fuel-efficient car. Numerous times I've sat in uncomfortable silence as an all-male project meeting descended into an unprofessional and disrespectful conversation about which female employees were the hottest.
Now that I'm 42 and a senior team member. I don't put up with it anymore. When a new member of my team criticized some other team members for "sounding like a bunch of women" as they argued over a technical solution, I challenged him, "What's wrong with sounding like a woman? I happen to be married to a woman and I have the utmost respect for her. Please be more mindful of your statements." After fuming over it for a day, he sent me a resignation email, saying he couldn't work for some "self-righteous SJW." Good riddance.
Diversity is good and diversity is going to happen whether you like it or not. Either grow up and accept it or find yourself replaced with someone who understands that IT is a customer-service oriented profession that demands professional, emotionally mature behavior.
It's nice to see, for once, a program in which "diversity" isn't being used as an excuse for racial and/or sexual discrimination. As far as I can tell, this program is funding schools in low-income neighbourhoods without regard for whether the residents are poor blacks or poor whites, which is fantastic: it may not be great for the industry, compared to spending the money on something else, but it should be a big help for those neighbourhoods.
It may be that the residents in the target neighbourhoods are primarily black, but that doesn't make the program necessarily racist, any more than the prison population being biased towards men and blacks makes the justice system necessarily sexist or racist. (It may be so, but you need more evidence than this to actually say so.)
Before the great depression, instead of going to college after completing high school, students went to college when they were ready. The expectation to stay in high school until the age of 18 was created to shrink the workforce and artificially reduce the unemployment rate. Not long after, Robert Maynard Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, began promoting early entrance to college for students who were ready.
The first dedicated college was SImon's Rock College, where entering students are typically about 16 years old. They earn a Bachelor's degree in four years. 78% of graduates go to graduate school. (I was one). The current wave of early colleges started about ten years ago. They are imitations of Simon's Rock. Several of them are run by former Simon's Rock staff. Some of the start-up money came from the Gates Foundation, which is not exactly the same as Microsoft.
In my view, the purpose of early college is to create an environment where young people are free to learn. For me, this was a big improvement over high school.
Simon's Rock College
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IBM sponsors education of 6 minority low-income children, claims success by offering a job to the 6 of them. Billion dollar education contract ensues ...
I mean, is anyone seeing the issue here? Offering these people a job is a small price to pay for IBM to 'irrefutably proof' the success of their program. I'm not saying their program is not good, but really, we should maybe have an external source assess this.
These companies just start enticing kids to learn programming by going back to the promise of a good long career with many possible promotions along the way for good hard work?
When you have to malipulate people into entering a segment of industry, there is something very, very wrong.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas.
You know, we actually HAVE real statistics instead of wild imaginings culled from whatever websites you are glued to... your theory that the "black community" struggles today vs. the 50's and 60's because of the collapse of the nuclear family is directly contradicted by statistics (from the National Center for Health Statistics, a CDC arm), which show that the birthrate amongst unmarried black women is currently about half what it was at the end of the 60's, and this trend has continued despite a steep drop in black marriage rates over the last couple of decades.
... significantly less prone to the pathologies common in the black lower class (where out of wedlock birth is the norm, not exception).
Nor is "out of wedlock birth the norm"; the married birthrate is about 40% higher than the unmarried.
Ever deal with white trash (not rednecks, white trash; there is a major difference)? It's the same sociological situation and even the same set of behavior problems and stunted options despite "white privilege."
So, are they "pathologies common in the black lower class", or are they perhaps pathologies common amongst all low-income residents, and race has nothing to do with it? Making me wonder why you brought it up...
Yet those issues are precisely the personal choices, enabled by public policy and culture, that lead to the destruction of the stable nuclear family in much of the black community. Blaming external factors for everything, which is the politically correct solution,
Wait a minute... these personal choices are "enabled by public policy and culture" (which certainly appear to be external factors to me) but at the same time blaming said factors is the "politically correct" (and by implication, wrong) solution? Which is it? Is everything all the fault of those short-sighted black folk making bad decisions, or does public policy have something to do with it after all? I'm so confused...
did this years ago. As far as i know, its popularity was pretty much nonexistent and nobody wanted to enroll in the programs. that was more than 8 years ago.
A study was run a couple of years ago that collected a group of low-income women, delivered comprehensive sex education, and gave them free access to the birth-control method of their choice.
In the fevered imagination of DittoHeads, the poor women would proceed to choose poor (or no) birth-control methods (or use them incorrectly), get knocked up (which is somehow supposed to be a money-maker... still haven't figured that one out), and become leeches on society.
What ACTUALLY happened? Exactly as you would expect rational people to do; the women had a tendency to choose the more-effective birth-control methods, and consequently birthrates dropped by (IIRC) 60-75% vs. the control group, which had no education nor access to free birth control.
Comprehensive Sex Education and widespread access to birth control WORKS. It's far more effective than abstinence-based sex "education", and leads to a reduction in birthrates (both teenage and otherwise.) If they were REALLY concerned with out-of-wedlock births, conservatives would be pushing for these polices, but really they are oddly fixated on the sex lives of American citizens and undesired babies end up being a side-effect that gives them something else to scold poor people about.
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology,
I think they meant to say:
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids for low-income careers in technology,
Given IBM's lack of interest in hiring or retaining American workers, that must surely be what they meant.
I'd be fascinated to know, though I admit that I'm not sure how you would disentangle this, how much of the success of this approach has to do with any particular twist on how the education is done(the introduction of the college classes option earlier in HS, curriculum restructuring and shuffling, etc.); vs. how much has to do with the fact that the corporate sponsor is(through the internships and preferential hiring) making the connection between achievement in school and tangible payoff particularly strong and evident.
I'd certainly be the first to agree that many kids are dumb, impulsive, and shortsighted(some grow out of it, some turn into adults with the same traits); and that some schools are just atrocious. However, while slavishly adhering to the 'rational actor' model can lead to absurd excesses best left to economists; it can sometimes be helpful to imagine, at least as test, that people might actually be behaving "rationally", at least in a local sense.
Thinking back on my own education, some of it was undeniably useful for basically anyone(literacy and basic mathematics), some of it was of no direct use but almost certainly good for the mind in ways that are broadly applicable(writing essays about works of literature or classical greek political events isn't terribly relevant; but knowing your way around a coherent thesis backed by a reasonably competent body of argument and evidence sure is handy); and some of it was probably included for reasons little better than 'because tradition'. However, my surroundings always made it abundantly clear that (in addition to being a social expectation) education had rewards. My parents had degrees and jobs that were only possible because of their education; our neighbors and family friends were almost entirely the same way, we watched older kids head off to college, to internships, to various jobs; even if some dickhead still asked "When are we ever going to need this?" during some aspect of calculus that annoyed him, nobody was in any serious doubt that, even if you thought that some of it was just hoop-jumping, education was obviously valuable.
Had I grown up in a worse environment, gone to lousier schools, I would have likely enjoyed worse teachers and facilities; but I also would have been substantially ignorant of, or unbelieving of, the value of education: both because a diploma from the local high school probably isn't all that valuable; and because I'd have relatively few references for people who had done the work and gone on to some sort of professional career thanks to that. Maybe my sheer virtuous love of learning or whatever would have seen me through; but I certainly wouldn't put too much faith in the possibility.
In this case, IBM is making it quite clear that "Do this schoolwork for 4-6 years, depending, and you will see internships and quite possibly a job offer". That's relatively concrete, relatively short-term, easy to understand. To the degree that students are rational actors, that would seem to be a pretty big difference between this program and a school where the payoff is less visible or simply not there.
Can this be expanded to other industries? I know STEM is getting all the attention but this scheme should be put where more graduates are needed.
So everyman and his dog will sign-up for it. Then they all drop it when they realize it's not easy. That's magnified when the disadvantaged students have no experience with academic self-discipline. Maybe the first part of the course should be teaching study skills then choosing those who score well to join the AD program.
all this constant hand wringing about diversity and lack of minorities, etc., etc., ad nauseam, in IT. We should be concerned about (1) getting the brightest AMERICAN CITIZENS (regardless of sex, age, ethnicity, etc., into IT jobs, and (2) keeping the H1B visa quota as low as possible (India et. al. need skilled people working in their home countries not over here). Further, in my day (I'm 68 years of age) the women in IT where I worked outnumbered the men. And most of them were brighter and better than the men. And as I was usually on the interview committees for hiring, the female candidates were usually better qualified and motivated than the males, as so got hired. What happened???
The widespread glee and initiatives shared by nearly all relevant tech companies points to suppressing wages in the long-term, and looking good doing it. Money is the only motivation for this level of manufactured enthusiasm. I think Neal Stephenson predicted correctly in the Diamond Age when he depicted engineers as low-level grunts.
In many of the cases where you have one super successful model is that it's tied to the people driving it, not the model itself. This has happened countless times, where a model is pushed onto a school/classroom, but without the buy in and passion of the original innovators, it fails miserably.
Symbolically Capturing the Inanity of Making Trite Acronyms to Rememberstuff
Seriously, is theodp sleeping with one of the Slashdot editors or something? They publish one of his biased, totally misleading anti CS education rants practically every single day.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Is this the rebirth of trade schools?
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.
This is either a new form of trade schools, or some kind of corporate takeover of education.
I was reading the article and they get people through the system faster by cutting out "extra" courses in high school such as science and history so they only concentrate on English, Math, Technology, and workplace learning in the freshman year. WTF?!?! It's bad enough that they are cutting out the other classes. How are you supposed to learn what you like if you don't get exposed to all of these different things? But what the hell is workplace learning?
A tech company is attempting to get domestic workers by training more of them. Rather than importing foreign nationals at some reduced rate or under other favourable terms.
Quick, this program must be destroyed! Or others may learn of it's existence!
If you can demonstrate a problematic diversity gap in the Olympic 100 meter dash then I'll be totes OK with the suggestion that there is an issue in other areas.