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WSJ: New Education Bill To Get More Coding In Classrooms
theodp writes: The WSJ's Yoree Koh reports that computer science has been recognized as important an academic subject as math and English in the new Every Student Succeeds Act, putting it on equal footing with other subjects when state and local policymakers decide how to dole out federal funds. The law is likely to be a boon for tech companies, Koh adds, which constantly face a shortage of engineers to hire, and have backed Code.org to lobby for computer science teaching in schools. "This legislation will increase access to STEM and computer science learning nationwide and will advance some of the goals outlined in Microsoft's National Talent Strategy," said Microsoft in a blog post. "ESSA makes a number of significant improvements to expand access to computer science education by diverse populations in urban, suburban, and rural areas," explained the ACM. As far as CS and STEM goes, the bill calls for "increasing access for students through grade 12 who are members of groups underrepresented in such subject fields, such as female students, minority students, English learners, children with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students."
The government has two major initiatives in computer science:
A) They've finally realized we're WAY behind in "cybersecurity" and it's costing us billions every year. The percentage of code written by people who don't actually know what they're doing isn't just an economic problem; it's turning into a national security issue.
B) They've decided to teach EVERYONE how to write a bit of code, without really understanding what they're doing.
If this were the 1980s and we were still primarily using Disk Operating System to run software on our Personal computers, (B) might be okay. People would be learning just enough to screw up their files on their floppy. We're not using DOS anymore. It's now web apps used over the internet. The "coders" who don't understand are writing web services in .Net and PHP scripts which they put on the internet, where they are attacked constantly.
The consequences of improperly designed software systems have increased 10,000 fold. A little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing when writing software for the internet. We don't need every worker publishing their own little poorly-designed web api to their part of the company database that they wrote in Excel and published from via Access. We need to recognize this is dangerous to other people, including customers, so we need it done better, by people who choose to specialize in the field. Designing software systems (for the internet) isn't so much like reading and writing English, it's more like designing buildings. You want it done right much more than you want it done by everyone.