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White House Expected To Announce Big Computer Science Push
theodp writes: Politico reports that the White House is talking to groups about a push for computer science education in the coming weeks, possibly in mid-January, which could involve commitments from outside groups or companies. Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi recently credited a 2013 push from the White House for inspiring Code.org to dream up and team up with Big Tech on the wildly-successful Hour of Code, an event that brought teachers, schools, computer scientist volunteers, and other organizations together with the goal of bringing hands-on CS learning to 10 million K-12 students. Coincidentally, the Hour of Code event bears more than a passing similarity to the less-successful and now-abandoned National Lab Day (school flyer), an annual event announced by President Obama in 2009 that brought teachers, schools, computer scientist volunteers, and other organizations together with the goal of bringing hands-on STEM learning to 10 million K-12 students.
I dont see how it is beneficial to society to "push" education paths on people. It can only lead to bad resource allocation.
"His name was James Damore."
Normally, when you want a distraction from the fact that you've got an ongoing murder program, you make announcements that people will care about as your handwaving tactic. Who gives a shit about this? The existing coders are going wanting for jobs because of the mismanagement of the H1-B program. What benefit is there to kids to going into programming right now? Do we really need more fart apps?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I find it condescending and somewhat cruel the focus the politicians are putting on coding and programming. With ageism rampant in the field and large number of workers being forced out of their jobs while being insulted with the mandate to train their replacements, these actions are a slap in the face to everyone already in the field.
The powers that be are striving to make everything cheap ass manufacturing style work. That's what they're really getting at here. Big business thinks that all workers are too expensive if they make over minimum wage. This is just an effort to flood the market with cheap (and in the end poorly trained) labor. In addition to that if they don't train enough people to crash the labor market ( and thus the pay ) they'll import as much as is needed to do so.
Our political class, both sides, doesn't give a single fuck about any citizens in this country. They don't do a single goddammed thing that is good for the people. Every fucking action helps Wall Street or some big corporation or some powerful organization or "charity" that is only really a slush fund for connected wealthy elites.
This is all just hand waving and bullshit to keep us from realizing we're continually being sold down the river.
An initiative like this is a complete waste of resources and being done in the worst of all possible ways to get the task being done, which is to encourage young children to understand how to program computers. I really predict that whole dozens of children will actually learn anything from this effort, and that will be even hard to point at who was helped.
At best, what might happen is millions of kids will be introduced to something like Scratch or possible receive a Raspberry Pi, and a few very bright kids might on their own start exploring those computers from the ground up to understand those computers. Some really enlightened educators might even go so far as to teach kids some Minecraft redstone wiring concepts (building circuits with NOR-gate technology can be fun) or if funding was to be dumped into a 0x10^c derived game that taught real hacking at the assembly level to blow up virtual spaceships..... perhaps there might be some progress too.
Then again, I don't think the White House wants a generation of kids knowing how to write driver level software, even though that might be something useful for the future of America and the world in general. My expectation of this initiative is really quite low and teaching materials prepared by these groups are going to be as boring as Army training videos from the 1940's.
Women’s college enrollment gains leave men behind
Even though college enrollment rates among young people have risen in recent decades, a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that females outpace males in college enrollment, especially among Hispanics and blacks.
In 1994, 63% of recent female high school graduates and 61% of male recent high school graduates were enrolled in college in the fall following graduation. By 2012, the share of young women enrolled in college immediately after high school had increased to 71%, but it remained unchanged for young men at 61%.
A similar pattern is seen among young Hispanics. In 1994, among Hispanics who completed high school, about half of men and women immediately enrolled in college. Nearly two decades later, college enrollments for both groups improved, but women outpaced men by 13 percentage points.
For black high school graduates, there’s a different story. In 1994, young black men were more likely than young black women to be enrolled in college immediately after high school. By 2012, the pattern had reversed: The share of young black men enrolled in college remained stagnant, while the share of young black women enrolled in college increased to 69% —a 12 percentage point gap with black men.
When I think about what the districts really want in the computer program I recall a parable of a king who was walking with a friend and was asked how he kept order. His response was to draw his sword and knocks the top off some wheat growing nearby. He then said “there is your answer, never let one rise above the others.”
The same rule applies in education. It has been, recently, made clear to me, as a teacher, that it is more important that all of the classes that teach my subject produce consistent “product” than for me to teach my students more.
As a Computer Science (Computer Science is now a STEM subject) teacher at a middle school I am forbidden to teach any programming. I am also being told to stop teaching computer fundamentals ( . . . whats in the box, why is more RAM [up to a point] going to make the computer work better and how does the internet work. . . material like that)The focus, and the test, is entirely on computer applications.
All the time that was going into a core understanding of computers is to be switched to more presentations. I am not against presentations; I just feel that there is a limit to how much time we spend on it. We will also take time from spreadsheet fundamentals (understanding what they are doing, instead of just putting stuff in cells . . . for that matter, what is a cell?). The reasoning is that, "kids like making pictures," and, "that other stuff is just too hard."
There is some truth, I am not getting the target 90% mastery. I am closer to 85%. However, I am getting over 98% improvement of knowledge. The goal, though, is mastery; as such, it is easier to teach less and have the students able to demonstrate "mastery" of less (I have been told, by the district, that my definition of "mastery" is a bit strict). Further, my students measurable increase in the topics called for by the district exceeds that of the other district teachers; so what to do with this? Full stop. Return to a consistent curriculum. That is the district decision, not mine. Part of the problem is that several of the teachers do not have the background to understand what I am teaching, let alone teach it.
However, the real problem is this; my students are entering the High School with significantly more knowledge than the students from the other district middle schools. I do understand the districts problem, there is a real problem when the student’s get to the High School and get mixed into a class when they “already know this stuff,” and the other students have not been exposed to it. Further, the students from my classes expect to learn, not to review what I already taught them.
As far as the programming, there is a fear that knowledge of programming could lead to, “Hacking.” As such, it is to completely stop, even in the “after school” extracurricular classes. The same with the computer fundamentals, the district decision is that “kids don’t need to know that anymore.” Fear of knowledge and the need for a consistent curriculum outweigh small, hard to scale, class improvements.
I was just, as in this week, told that what the teachers before me were doing was sufficient. Okay, of three teachers before me, one handed the kids a typing book and told them they needed to do one typing lesson a day and then they could play games. The second had so many personal problems that she didn't try to teach anything, she just let them play games. The most recent required them to produce something (yes, something was loosely defined), then they could . . . you guessed it, play games.
As such, I am told "the children don't like lectures and the parents think your class is hard." Here is the reality, the . . . I will say it . . . upper income, education driven, parents are in my corner; but the ones that don't come to meetings, they just cal the district to complain, parents are unhappy because, and I quote "expect him [the student] to study."
The result is that I have been given, and mandated, a curriculum for next year, as far as daily lesson plans (that don't even fit my class schedule; but that is a different issue). Guess what, work is out, make it fun, make it easy is back in.
Don't blame the teachers.
With recent advances in machine learning, a large number of which have come from American universities and companies, and the amount of telemetry data available via mobile phones, America has a golden opportunity to lead the world in automatically personalized fart apps.
Personally, what I'm looking forward to is the ability to bring up an app, fart into my phone, and have it tell me what I need to buy the next time I go to the store to replace what I used to cook dinner. If I just ate at a restaurant, it should also know that because of the phone's GPS, and in addition to adding to my shopping list, it should email me the recipe. Now *that's* a fart app!
On ageism, it's not just whether programmers work, it is the quality of the work and the independence of the workers. Where might that matter? Consider the democratic need for programmers to follow ethical standards about privacy and democracy and openness and user empowerment (in their designs) that much centralized proprietary behind-closed-doors big data CS just ignores.
As I found in academia (for example in the PU CE&OR department in the late 1980s), when half or more of the graduate students in an academic department are foreign nationals being paid by their governments to get degrees, where when going back home without a degree would be a huge disgrace and maybe loss of career, the atmosphere of the place changes. That might explain why dealing with systematic financial risk was not a big topic at the time then.
So, if most programmers are nervous about their jobs with tons of H1Bs and cheap young labor, what effect is that going to have on taking a stand for important issues? And these are not just ethical issues, they are even issues like pushing back on inefficient or brittle designs, or designs users won't like, or whatever. It takes a certain level of confidence to do that (a confidence that includes knowing you can always easily get a job elsewhere, which may be true for a fifty year old civil engineer but is less true for a fifty year old programmer). And I'm not talking the brash confidence of youth or even a willingness for self-sacrifice like Snowden or Manning -- which is a different thing. I'm talking about a well-earned confidence in the context of a supportive community which is the basis of day-to-day successes by a democracy accountable to the needs of citizens.
See also:
"Smile or Die" (which discusses the financial crisis in part resulting from no one being able to point out systemic risks without losing their jobs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
And even my other post here mentioning John Taylor Gatto who talks about compulsory schools as being designed specifically to shape compliant workers.
My latest folly is based on remembering what computers and our democratic culture were like in the 1970s and 1980s, is to want to help create software that respects a citizen's needs for private data controlled locally and shared peer-to-peer (like via email) instead of a typical web business' needs (like Slack or gmail) to centralize and control other people's data: :-) Here is that project:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
I started that with the news that Mozilla, supposedly about internet freedom and privacy and user empowerment, is going to kiss off Thunderbird, meanwhile billions of dollars are poured into the web space to make the opposite of Thunderbird (and some of those dollars are going to Mozilla in a way as a conflict-of-interest). See also my post here:
http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
The USA should be funding thousands of people to work on such FOSS tools. Meanwhile, Thunderbird suffers for lack of a funding model. Volunteers and open source go together well -- but relying on volunteers is problematical when you have literally one gigabyte of legacy C++ and XUL source code that need to track every security issue in Firefox.
If this was really about increasing interest in computers, just give green cards instead of H1Bs, insist on overtime for programmers, require every employee have a window (like in parts of Europe) and do basic stuff like that. It might also help if we reduced the churn in "new" technologies that are often not as good as the old one (still waiting for something a lot better than 1980s Smalltalk, for example). Getting rid of software patents would a
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
People tend to exaggerate their salaries in this business because nobody wants to admit that they aren't "successful" and making the "Google wage" of 150 thousand per year.
And other people tend to exaggerate how hard it is to succeed in the IT industry because they have failed themselves.
I live in the Midwest (30 miles from the nearest major city), and it was quite easy to break into a six digit salary. When it happened I wasn't even asking for it. After about 8 years in the industry my boss at the time just gave me my yearly review and added a promotion to senior developer along with a $25k salary bump. I thought I might have been being overpaid (I was consultant at the time), but a year later I was recruited by a company along with another $20k salary bump. I don't expect that kind of rapid growth to get me all the way to $200k, but the $100k barrier was hardly a barrier at all.
Not every developer will hit $100k easily, but EVERY developer worthy of a "senior" or "lead" title will hit six figures without much fuss. And this includes people living in areas where you can get a 3000 sq ft house for under $300k.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It is much simpler than you think it is. The politicians understand that not everyone can be a doctor. They don't understand that not everyone can be a competent programmer.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
a complete reboot of US healthcare, ending "don't ask don't tell, gay marriage, dream act, killing Bin Laden, normalization of relationships with Cuba, saving the auto industry, net neutrality, new START treaty with Russia, doubling of car efficiency standards, etc.
I don't think Obama is hurting for accomplishments--he's the most productive president since probably FDR, and there's absolutely nothing you can say on the internet that changes that reality.