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Despite $30M Tech Push, Half of US States Had Fewer Than 300 AP CS Test Takers
theodp writes: As President Obama was 'taught to code' last December, Politico reported that the $30 million tech-financed campaign to promote computer science education was a smash success. And indeed it has been, at least from a PR standpoint. But Code.org and its backers have long spun AP Computer Science test metrics as a true barometer of CS education success, and from that standpoint, things don't look quite so rosy. The College Board raved about "massive gains in AP Computer Science participation (25% growth) AND scores" in a June tweetstorm and at its July conference, where AP CS was declared the '2015 AP Subject of the Year.' But a look at the recently-released detail on 2015 AP CS scores shows wide differences in adoption and success along gender and ethnicity lines (Asian boys and girls, in particular, set themselves apart from other groups with 70%+ pass rates). And, for all the praise the NSF lavished on Code.org for 'its amazing marketing prowess', half of the states still had fewer than 300 AP CS test takers in 2015, and ten states actually saw year-over-year declines in the number of test takers (if my math is correct — scraped data, VBA code here).
Schools are not prioritizing CS because it's really not all that important. Programming is a blue collar job that pays poorly and does not require much intelligence or creativity. Schools are much better off focusing preparing students for college or viable professions like law, business, medicine, or engineering (real engineering, not "software engineering" or "systems engineering"). I know many people here thought they were gifted because they wrote a hello world program while in middle school, but this is the sad truth about programming as a career and its social value as an educational subject. High schools in particular are much better off teaching kids how to use a decent office suite to format a paper, assemble a complex spreadsheet, or put together a professional presentation than teach them how to program.