US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class

theodp writes: In A New Chapter for Computer Science Education, the U.S. Department of Education explained earlier this month that the federal STEM Education Act of 2015 'provides an unprecedented opportunity to fully leverage federal resources' to address large gaps in students' participation in Advanced Placement (AP) computer science classes based on gender and race. "In three states," lamented the DOE, "not a single female student took the AP computer science exam" (that only 8 boys took the AP CS exam in those same 3 states was apparently not a concern). And the DOE has good news for those hoping to tap Title I and II funds for CS, but don't have any computer science teachers. "A background in math or science isn't necessarily a requirement to teach CS," explains the Dept. of Ed, "as disciplines like English, history and civics can also provide a solid foundation for teaching CS concepts."

Comments

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

And people wonder why so many jobs are outsourced?

Re: Duh

[Archangel Michael]

The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them

I work in education. The "US" hasn't decided anything. Schools hiring teachers are limited to paying UNION wages for far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend. The biggest problem IMHO to the problem with Teachers is that there is NO competition for good teachers. Teachers live where they can get a job, and there is very little (if any) incentive to have teachers improve their skill sets.

And due to the complete lack of competition, and the inability for any district to hire "the best, at whatever cost" they are left wanting bodies to fill positions.

And to be very clear, every school district has some really fine and outstanding teachers, most good teachers. What I am talking about are the hanger ons that would otherwise be unemployable without a teacher's credential, who are there to fill seats in chairs in front of students. The problem is, you cannot dodge all the raindrops, and there are enough of them to matter.

And to my point about teachers who won't take basic skills classes (where they need them) to learn how to properly use Technology in the classroom, without getting paid stipend, it really does matter. I simply look at it this way, teachers who don't want to learn, for learning sake aren't good teachers. Period. And this is proven by a recent training a colleague of mine did, training 2nd Grade kids, and Teachers/staff the exact same "introduction to Chromebooks", and the 2nd Graders fared much better than the adults. They paid attention, didn't talk, and learned how to log in (barely able to write) to Google/Chrome with much more ease. So even being paid to learn 2nd Graders were able to out compete the teachers.

When teachers don't want to (or can't) learn, it is a sign they shouldn't be teaching. Best teachers I know, all of them have a singular quality, thirst for knowledge and a passion for learning. Far too many teachers basically said "I don't want to learn anymore, I'm done" and that translates directly into the passion they have in the classroom.

The DoE is, and has always been useless.

[jcr]

They have no students. They operate no schools. They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.

-jcr

Re:The DoE is, and has always been useless.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

They have no students. They operate no schools.

And worst of all, they have no clue what CS is. They think CS is writing a document in Word, creating an Excel spreadsheet and googling.

Hey, English teachers can do that, so English teachers can teach CS!

I'm just wondering where the folks at the DoE got their educations . . . ?

Unconvinced...

[RogueyWon]

Back in the mid 1990s, my (otherwise extremely good) private school found itself caught off-guard by the need to provide IT teaching. With no existing staff with computer science experience, it went about trying to rectify the situation in fairly horrible ways. First, it recruited what it thought was an IT specialist from industry, only to find he was a chemical engineer with no more than a basic level of computing literacy (and no teaching qualifications). He lasted a year.

Then it decided to use non-specialists to teach IT classes, having basically bought a bunch of mail-order courses. I'll emphasise that this was a private fee-paying school with high academic standards that would never have considered this approach for any other subject.

Anyway, the level of teaching was predictably disastrous. The teachers drafted in to cover the subject (including a number of elderly Catholic Priests) lacked any kind of background in it. Not only couldn't they teach the subject, but they couldn't convey why they were even trying to teach the subject. They would spend each lesson reading from one of those mail-order worksheets, with no idea how to either advise a pupil who was having problems, or how to recover the lesson if something went wrong.

The fact that the school's computer lab functioned at all was basically down to the volunteer efforts of a few of the more IT literate students (self-included), who would fix things after the latest balls-up and be called on during free-periods to get an IT lesson back on track after a teacher encountered an error message he hadn't seen before. I didn't particularly mind at the time; I wasn't taking any qualifications in IT, so the quality of the teaching didn't matter to me and helping out earned me a few perks. In particular, it got me out of the compulsory (but non-academic) religious education classes from ages 16-18.

But for those who were actually taking the subject formally (admittedly only a tiny handful in my year-group) it was a pretty catastrophic situation. In any other subject (including the practical ones such as design and technology), my school expected its teachers to be in command of their area. IT was just seen as being different somehow.

Re:Unconvinced...

[jcr]

When I was in 8th grade, I got my hands on an Interdata 8/32 system that had a pair of teletype ASR-33s, and a BASIC interpreter. I spent a year mostly waiting for my turn at one of the two keyboards that about a dozen of us wanted to use. I typed in BASIC games from David Ahl's book, and I played around with punching large letters on the paper tape and printing out ASCII art.

In my high school, we had a computer lab with three HP terminals, that connected through a leased line to a pair of HP2000 and an HP3000 minicomputer. The HP machines were able to submit batch jobs to an IBM 360 through an RJE(remote job entry) facility.

My computer teacher was a retired USAF colonel who had some experience with mainframes, and some exposure to basic concepts of computing back in the 1950s and early 60s. For most of the kids, concepts like hashing and basic statistical methods were over their heads, so he taught me and two or three of my friends, and we taught the class.

The main thing we got out of the school's computer lab was access. The most interesting things we did had nothing to do with the curriculum, they were all after-school and free period projects. We learned how to defeat the trivial security that HP had at the time, we wrote BASIC programs that did fun tricks on the CRT terminals with cursor control, we had a rudimentary chat and e-mail system which the administration kept trying to shut down, and we got our hands on a BASIC rewrite of Crowther & Woods Adventure, and later Zork games, which we experimented with and modified. About this time, a handful of my friends were getting their hands on Apple and Atari computers at home.

Where I really learned to write code was on my first two computing jobs: the first was a company that was developing games for Cox Cablevision to run on a set-top box that they were test marketing. The second job was where I learned the C language, by writing code and making every possible mistake while sitting in an office beside two much more skilled C developers (one of whom later went on to serve on the ANSI committee that standardized the language.)

In the years since then, every good programmer I've worked with has been largely self-taught, and they started at the same age or earlier than I did. I'm convinced that the best thing an elementary or high school can hope for today is just letting kids figure it out by working with their peers on whatever interests them.

-jcr

Re:Wh3r3f0r3 @r7 7h0u R0m30!

[thegarbz]

Not just the USA. My partner is Australia is a Science teacher. She has a Bachelor of Science and a Diploma in education, but is criticised by idiots for not instead having a Bachelor of Education without any formal training in the subjects she's supposed to teach.

That is becoming the norm. Idiots who "know how to teach" but don't actually "know what they teach".

Subject matter experts vs teachers

[sjbe]

There are some subject-matter-experts who are a genuine menace in the classroom(I suspect that most of us probably took at least one course in college from the TAs they shoved all the actual work of teaching the course onto.

I've had more that a few full tenure professors who had NO business lecturing to a classroom. In many of these cases I was actually glad when they handed off to a TA. I want the best teachers and could not care less if they are subject matter experts beyond the level of the class. The research most professors do has little or nothing to do with what they are teaching most of the time. Even when it is related the classroom stuff is so far below their research that it becomes irrelevant. I don't need a Nobel prize winner to teach me physics 101. I just want someone who is a very good lecturer and has an solid grasp of the material being taught at the level it is being taught.

That said, the notion that teaching theory is somehow a substitute for actually knowing the subject is an absurd and dangerous notion. Learning about driving in a classroom is no substitute for actually having spent time driving. I cannot fathom how anyone would thing a background in civics could possibly qualify someone to teach computer science no matter how good they are at the mechanics of teaching.

This isn't just at the Federal Level

[Pollux]

In my home state of Minnesota, they allow anyone with either a business licensure or a mathematics licensure to teach computer science. In college, I majored in Computer Science and Secondary Mathematics Education. I found it ironic that it was my math licensure that allowed me to teach computer science and not my computer science degree. I found it just as silly that I was not allowed to teach keyboarding; mathematics teachers are not qualified for that. Also, just as amusing, anyone in the state with an English licensure is licensed to teach web page design.

It's a complete joke that our government advocates for increased computer science education, while in the same breath says that anyone can teach it. By that same perverse logic, I should be fully qualified to become a law professor. Right? Computer science is very logical...very layered...very structured...lots of inheritances...sounds like a good foundation of law to me.

First learn what the Dept of Education does

[sjbe]

And stuff like this is why many think the Department of Education should be eliminated or severely scaled back. Perhaps set national standards but not get into the day-to-day operations of a school.

Aside from No Child Left Behind which was mandated by CONGRESS, the Dept of Education has very little to do with the day to day operations of schools. In fact the Dept of Ed is by a wide margin the least involved ministerial level department for education in the civilized world. The US education system is hugely decentralized and demonstrably NOT controlled from Washington. People calling for the Dept of Ed to be eliminated or scaled back invariably have no idea what it does. Any meddling it does with regard to operations of schools is because it was instructed to do so by Congress. All it would take to change that is another act of Congress and in fact such a law was just passed. Repeal NCLB and ESSA and the Dept of Education would have almost no direct interaction with most school systems.

Once upon a time, well 1960, there was a Presidential Debate where candidates discussed societal issues (imagine that). One topic that came up was the nature of federal support for local schools. Both candidates, Kennedy (D) and Nixon (R), were concerned that federal support (funding) would lead to federal meddling.

And very little has changed. There is very little funding and for the most part very little meddling.

I think we are now seeing the wisdom of their shared concerns regarding centralizing too much control and authority in Washington DC.

"Wisdom"? No. That is ideology, not wisdom. Virtually every other country in the civilized world has FAR more centralized control over education than we do in the US and many of them get measurably better results. If you think decentralized schooling is good I'd invite you to visit the school districts in places like Detroit or Cleveland or Los Angeles. They get terrible results and no one holds them accountable or gives them any substantial help. Federal control has problems to be sure but so does local control.