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$500K NSF Grant Boosted Girls' CS Participation At Obama Daughters' $37K/Yr HS
theodp writes: On Friday, a paper entitled Creative Computation in High School will be presented at SIGCSE '16. "In this paper," explain the paper's authors, "we describe the success of bringing Creative Computation via Processing into two very different high schools...providing a catalyst for significant increases in total enrollment as well as female participation in high school computer science." One of the two schools that participated in the National Science Foundation-supported project — see NSF awards 1323305 & 1323463 for Creative Computation in the Context of Art and Visual Media — was Sidwell Friends School, which a 2013 SMU news release on the three-year, $500K NSF grant noted was best known as the school attended by President Obama's daughters. Interestingly, in a late-2014 interview, the President lamented that his daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, adding that "part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way." Hey, nothing that a $4B 'Computer Science For All' K-12 Program can't fix, right?
The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success
No. This is wrong. The most accurate predictors of scholastic success are 1) IQ of the child's biological parents, and 2) Household income. Having "parents that care" makes no measureable difference once you compensate for IQ and income. What the parents do matters far less than who the parents are.