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Top Silicon Valley Execs and Others Urge Congress To Fund K-12 Computer Science Education (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report:Some of the biggest names in tech and corporate America, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, have teamed up with governors and educators to ask Congress to provide $250 million in federal funding to school districts in order to give every single K-12 student in the nation an opportunity to learn how to code. On the legislative side, these tech CEOs are joined by governors from both sides, including California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (R). Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called for more than $4 billion in funding for states, and $100 million for districts in order to bring computer science curricula to every single K-12 student in the country. What this group of CEOs, governors and educators is asking for today is different. They're saying that this issue can be addressed without growing the federal budget. The petition reads:Not only does computer science provide every student foundational knowledge, it also leads to the highest-paying, fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy. There are currently over 500,000 open computing jobs, in every sector, from manufacturing to banking, from agriculture to healthcare, but only 50,000 computer science graduates a year. Whether a student aspires to be a software engineer, or if she just wants a well-rounded education in today's changing world, access to computer science in school is an economic imperative for our nation to remain competitive. And with the growing threat of cyber warfare, this is even a critical matter of national security. Despite this growing need, targeted federal funding to carry out these efforts in classrooms is virtually non-existent. This bipartisan issue can be addressed without growing the federal budget.
Surely those assholes can scrape together a paltry $250 million dollars from their personal piggybank.
The individuals listed could personally pony up $250 million from petty cash. Why ask the government for funding?
Please train our future workforce with someone else's money.
Yours truly,
Rich Silicon Valley Companies
Otherwise known as algebra and geometry and formal logic proofs.
Unless they're seriously attempting to advocate that high school graduates be conditioned to join the programming workforce with their diploma, in which case I'd laugh out loud and say "good luck with that -- having a high school diploma isn't even a guarantee you can read!"
500,000 jobs. 50,000 "computer science graduates a year". Over 50,000,000 pre-k through grade 12 students in USA (doesn't count home-schoolers and other non-traditional learners) http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372. There are factors of 1,000x at work here -- is universal coding/CS instruction really the needed linchpin?
The federal government is broke. Why don't these tech giants put their money where their mouths are and pool the money themselves to fund the program?
Extremely overpaid douche canoes urge poor people to pitch in more to boost their profit margins.
They want more people in the industry so they can flood the market with labor and lower the pay of their tech employees.
It would be a better use of money to fund mathematics, logic, and problem solving in K-12 rather than something as specific as computer science. Someone with a solid base in those subjects would be easily able to transition to CS if it interests them, and unlike CS those skills will be useful even if they don't go into the field.
those same companies also beg, lobby and bribe for more h1-b visas.. and not because there currently exists a lack of qualified persons for those jobs
In 20 years our kids wont know cellular mitosis, because the theory of evolution was in such crisis and open to such broad religious interpretation that no state cared to endorse it. Our kids wont understand how to cook a cup of rice or plan a meal because betty crocker shuffled our home economics classes out the door with the sheer brute force of nutritionally bankrupt processed meals in a cardboard box. They wont understand US history because the budget folded it into gym class, which in turn wont be attended because curricula from the sixties hasnt taken into account a predominantly obese student body. These kids wont understand suffixed consonants and proper nouns because its hard to concentrate when the cafeteria is forced to define a french fry as a vegetable portion and pizza sauce as well. And the kids wont know how to wire a doorbell or build a simple circuit because the last known attempt at simple electronics turned into a witchhunt for improvised explosives.
oh but dont worry, theyll all be able to code so long as the OS is windows, the IDE is visual studio, the curriculum centers on industry goals, and the teacher is vetted and approved by an appropriate industry partner. the GPL and BSD kids at the back of the class however will do as they always have: shoot spitballs, trade mp3s, and work on cool projects they like until the bell rings and they can go back to hanging out on irc and pretending they wont spend their senior year expelled for a zero tolerance offense.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Dear Government, Please train more welders. Signed, Ford, GM, FC
Aren't these the same companies that lay off US based workers in favor of H1-Bs? Why train more US workers just so they can be replaced before they can even start?
I must be getting old. I read the headline and think, "Yep, we've seen this before. Next, they'll be pushing secondary education again. And shortly after that, they'll be requesting more H1B visas - you know, like has happened about 3 or 4 times in the past 20 years."
Do you know what the best way is to fuck up a supply based economy? Involve the government.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
They arn't trying to give kids opportunities. They want to saturate the market, at the taxpayers expense, so that they can pay bottom dollar for what amounts to digital Factory Workers.
They want quality developers, but they don't want to pay for them. Yet they keep trying to get it both ways, which is why all these H1B-sucking temp companies are doing so well.
Using feminine pronouns as though neutral always irks me. Are they implying only females will now want to code? "He" can be a neutral pronoun, "she" cannot.
Instead of trying to get the tax payers to train your code monkeys why don't you just pay your existing ones better? Talent will come when people see there is adequate compensation.
Why would a young bright person become a coder instead of a doctor, dentist, or a lawyer?
From the article...This group of CEOs, governors and educators is...saying that this issue can be addressed without growing the federal budget..."We’ll use the money to train over 25,000 public school teachers to introduce computer science to students who would otherwise never have this opportunity.”
This group appears to claim that no additional money needs to be spent if we can use the existing teacher workforce to teach computer science. If that's the case, what will those teachers no longer teach? I mean, it's not like teachers are sitting around all day with nothing to do. Should we pull math teachers, and just teach less math? Or maybe the music teachers? We can always teach less music, and I'm sure music teachers will have no troubles learning how to code, right? And certainly these coders will be top quality, having been trained by the best math teachers and music teachers our country has to offer.
I wish government officials could realize one day that there's never an educational initiative that comes without a cost. Training costs money. People cost money. Computers cost money. Electricity costs money. Time costs money. So tell this group of CEOs, governors and educators not to put another single unfunded mandate onto the table until they fund the ones they've been mandating so far.
Leads to the highest paying jobs until everyone and their mother can do it, then guess what? Saturate the market, drive down wages, increase profits.
I've taught CS in high schools on and off since 1986, and the biggest advantage to learning how to code isn't a job doing it. Most people just aren't suited to it and aren't interested in the long hours. Coding teaches you how to break down problems into solvable pieces and teaches abstraction. As C. A. R. Hoare wrote, “In the development of our understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction.” It's a mindset that will help you for the rest of your life no matter what field you go into. We should do it because it helps the kids, like teaching them math or logic, rather than for the fact that will have a small increase in the number that go into the field.
All these companies bitch for more H1-B visas and then wonder why there aren't any US CS grads lining up? Seriously this is the biggest two-faced bunch of bullshit to come out of Corporate America in awhile.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The individuals listed could personally pony up $250 million from petty cash. Why ask the government for funding?
They're donating collectively $48M. Think of it as a 1,000,000:1 matching donation - you give $1, they each give $1M or more.
Source (better article than TFA: https://www.washingtonpost.com... )
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
> long hours
And that is the biggest problem with the job. I've worked at eight start-ups in the Seattle area, and the five that survived all demanded "Seattle Hundreds." That's 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. It's not that the companies were evil. It's just that with programming it's so much more efficient to have someone work more hours than to add another programmer with all of the communication and learning overhead. The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks explained it much better than I could. Adding workers to a late programming project makes the project even later. I got my masters on the human elements of software engineering twenty-six years ago, and everything I have seen since then reinforces that. As long as it is much more efficient and faster to have people work longer hours than to add help, the smart companies will continue to us even harder. The only good thing to come from that is the money.
Back to the topic, the long hours required of programmers is acceptable for only a small portion of the population. Trying to expand the number of programmers will fail if you don't take that into account.
You're fooling yourself if you think you can teach abstraction to high school students.
I have a computer science degree, and I can tell you that computer science isn't science.
In its most abstract form, it's mathematics. The act of implementing algorithms in software could be more accurately described as software engineering.....if the profession actually had things like professional organizations and quality assurance measures like accreditation, certification, and licensing.
So I guess "computer science" really isn't science OR engineering.
What these guys want are more code monkey factory workers - and they want the government to pay for the training.
There are currently over 500,000 open computing jobs
WHERE?!?!
....then these execs will have no one left to replace with H1Bs
Some of the biggest names in tech and corporate America, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, have teamed up with governors and educators to ask Congress to provide $250 million in federal funding to school districts in order to give every single K-12 student in the nation an opportunity to learn how to code.
Cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet for US operations:
Apple $38 Billion
Facebook $18 Billion
Microsoft $105 Billion
Walmart $8 Billion
And they have the nerve to ask the taxpayers to pony up more for something they freely admit will benefit them? Here's an idea, they can fucking fund it themselves if they think it is so damn important. $250 million? Apple makes $70,000 in profit every 60 seconds. That means Apple could cover the entire amount with the profit they make in 2.5 days.
By the same logic, given the quality of the presidential primary candidates this year, Congress should take that $250E6 and fund K-12 political science along with a dose of dirt simple economics of the supply-demand level of complexity in order to germinate a crop of entry-level politicians who have their heads more or less screwed on straight. That would do more good for the country than attempting to fund the development of a generation of cheap coders.
Instead of getting the Government to fund computer science education, how about we just require computer companies to pay competitive salary? It doesn't require any tax dollars, and it's just crazy enough to work.
The problem is, the past 30 years have taught MBA's that *they're* the ones who are supposed to get the $200k salary, and the computer engineer is the one who's supposed to have a Masters and 20 years of experience in a 3 year old language and work for $60k until their job gets outsourced to India.
The problem will largely go away once the computer geek's biggest problem is "Do I buy the BMW or the Mercedes", and the MBA's are crying themselves to sleep, praying they can pay their student loans off before they hit 40 and are too old to spreadsheet.
How many people realize that our education system has gone from the best in the world 100 years ago to 3rd rate today. Look at a test per grade in the 1900s and today, and see how "great" the takeover has been. Oh sure, it was gradual and planned to be gradual. Departments started pushing toward centralized testing and industrial education back in the 30s. Most schools were using Prussian education by the early 40s and Classical education was on the way out. The nail in the coffin however is when the Feds took over the schools completely. How many people realize that the Department of Education was founded in 1979? At which point schools have degraded immeasurably. Arts are mostly gone, which includes music. PhysEd is mostly gone, debate is mostly gone. English has become "best guess at intended" instead of grammatically correct, Math has gone from conceptual to task based half assed rote learning. Science has similarly become doing what passes a measure, not what teaches a kid. All of it has become "WHAT PASSES THE STANDARDIZED TEST!", and not remotely related to making intelligent people.
Making yet another standardized test process to avoid actually teaching does not fix the problems with education. It will simply mean that the few people left who try to find facts will also be left in the cold.
Oh sure, there are parents out there trying their damn best to fill in the gaps and school on their own despite paying taxes. We are also starting to see parents chastised for trying to teach anything that the Government did not approve the school to teach. Systems are out there already preventing parents from seeing what kids learn, all licensed to the few corporations who own Common Core of course.
Most teachers a few decades ago worked to better society. Today I talk to more teachers who work for a paycheck than who want a better society. Government audits have educators on very short leashes, and constant fear is not a good motivator. I'd say the world is going to hell, but I'm not quite convinced we are not already in hell.
Want to fix it? Okay, fire the Feds and State and hire educators who will revert our system to a Classical system of education. Change is scary, but what we have today was a change from a system that worked for a couple thousand years. Someone else can have the soap box now..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And the problem will go away on its own.
Compensate appropriately and the educated will arrive.
.. is what these companies are aiming for. Also, not all children can learn to code. Coding takes a certain discipline. It's unfair to those children who are not able to nor have the willingness to learn a trade so Facebook can hire programmers at a cheaper rate. I'm really tired of corporate America pushing their agendas on a government they can't be bothered to pay their fair share of taxes for.
Just my 2 cents.
Adding CS to the US K-12 system sounds all well and good, but I might suggest that they step up their game. The US K-12 system exists because manufacturers needed folks to work in the Industrial Age, manufacturing, who had more wanted people to work for them with more than an 8th Grade education.
Today's Knowledge Age employers need to not merely be asking for CS, they need to be asking for a Pre-K through Bachelors system to get the sort of workers they really want.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
I really wish people would stop confusing computer science with programming computers. As the saying goes, "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
My skepticism about being able to train school teachers aside, isn't it easier than it ever was for people to learn about computers, programming and computer science? I mean, I grew up in the 80's and taught myself how to program out of magazines and books. There was no Internet, no YouTube videos and no Kahn Academy. You couldn't look questions up on StackExchange, or even order books from Amazon. Computers were also really expensive, now you can get a $30 device that will run Linux and everyone is walking around with smartphones.
So why not engineering science, so children know how cars and planes work? Or medical science so they know how antibiotics and vaccines work? They at least are part of the STEM industries that President Obama promoted last year. Or maybe he should just mandate that schools teach a lot more science, since that seems to be an issue.
With the declining quality of education in the USA (and other countries with entrenched conservative government), surely mathematics and numeracy need to be improved before they start teaching the science of mathematical engines commonly known as a computer.
In Michigan, we can't seem to fix Flint's water, our crumbling roads and infrastructure, or a come up with a sane tax system. The only thing the legislature seems capable of is passing laws every year that cause chaos in public schools.
That's substantially (though not entirely) because we have a republicans in control of the state house, state senate and governorship. As a result they break out in hives any time anyone mentions the word "tax". The only way we will fix Michigan's shitty roads is by raising taxes in some fashion and they are completely unwilling to do it. If you haven't been to Michigan lately, you literally can tell when you've crossed the border from Ohio or Indiana with your eyes close in many places. It's that bad. Furthermore since teacher's unions are a traditional source of power for democratic party they do everything they can to weaken teachers, even if that comes at the expense of students. They seemingly have no concept of the idea of education being a public good.
The Flint water problem is honestly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems in Flint. Flint's problem go FAR deeper than the lead in their water pipes. But the water in Flint is a classic case of stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel. It's a lovely potpourri of arrogance, incompetence, bad policy, corruption and politics.
Sad thing is that Michigan is actually a really nice place to live even in spite of these problems. Yes even in Metro Detroit. (most people don't actually live in the city itself) Shame it's been so badly managed because it could be so much more than it is.
Next you'll tell us that political science isn't a rigorous experimental science.
This is basic supply manipulation. These companies want H1B-style pricing for local developers.
Firing Americans to hire cheap Indian labour doesn't play well in the media. Solution: teach everyone to code. If everyone's a programmer, companies can play cheap locals off of cheap imports, and "hire more americans" at significant savings.
Optics solved, costs reduced, profits maximized, management class protected.
Assholes.
It's history for people that don't want to be history professors.
Roughly 13% of all students (people) can learn to code. That's it; the folks expressing Piagets **formal operations** skills are coincident with possible computer coders. Then, let's say 25% of those able can tolerate the shit-work coding boils down to. I get 3% as the number of students who can usefully be taught to code for computers. Only 3% will 'succeed' ( what-a-word. I'd rather go beachside and derive Greens Functions with a goose-quill & parchment ) while billion$ are spent terrorizing 100% to trytrytry ..... insane ....
Hmm I didn't see any CTOs in that list or any other strictly "technical" person. I wonder why that is.
Well, that explains why they keep on harping about "computer science" edumacashun even in lower schools. They could instead focus on things that would actually really help down the road, and for a small fraction of the money these billionaires are begging for. The key? Actual education, basic skills, reading, writing, mathematics. Without the math there's no staying power for higher education*, and without the reading comprehension and basic writing skills, there's no getting started. Since they're not promoting that, and we know education could stand improvement there, it's not important to them. Which more or less shows that they're after something else, and visas seem a good bet, yes.
* Recently heard about a girl entering sociology, generally considered a "soft" science so it came as a nasty surprise to her that its science-y credentials hinge entirely on... statistics. Turns out she could hardly do long division, n'mind all the other stuff she really needed to master statistics. Didn't last long there, no, not at all. The "harder" sciences are not less founded in math, no, not at all.
Let's just pretend that all the races are the same, because the Jew media says so.
If all the races are the same, why are millions of non-whites desperately moving into white countries every year, but not the other way round?
If most white people (or even 10% of them) want to live among non-whites, why aren't millions of whites moving to non-white countries every year?
The article is laughable, because the US is being turned into a slave nation, due to open borders, full of sub 80 IQ cretins with nothing in common with each other- just what the Jewish banksters want. And you support all of this, because you're too lazy and stupid to spend a few hours on the internet, questioning everything you've been told by the media all your life...
Wake up people! Individuals can not get a fair deal without leverage. Corporations exist to leverage capital, Unions exist to leverage labor.
If being an individual contributor was the best way to create and preserve wealth there would be no corporations.
Try to compete on a level playing field --- UNIONIZE.
--- Joe Hill
Perhaps consider hiring unemployed, experienced IT workers instead of focusing on students fresh out of college? Just a thought...
Ken
You'd have to be a sucker to do tech.
I am an EE, I've built lots of things, but I saw the writing on the wall 10 years ago.
I work in finance now, and make 4 times what I did designing ICs for a fraction of the mental effort.
If you're smart enough to do tech, do something else instead. Do the tech in your spare time. I have a nice lab to play with. Better equipped than any I worked in for others.
I'm on track to retire at 50 now, comfortably. This would not have been the case on a technical career.
My technical skills automated large swaths of the data I need to do; my job only takes me a few hours a week, plus travel.
Pay isn't there. Chickens slowly coming home to roost. Film at 11.
High paying jobs that everyone is qualified for, otherwise known as field saturated, low paying jobs. We have 500,000 open jobs. We want you to train 50,000,000 people to do those jobs. Next up: Pay-per-Character coding which leads to massive sprawling code horror. Wow, it takes a limited amount of skill to come up with stupid ideas, who knew?