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Tim Cook: Coding Languages Were 'Too Geeky' For Students Until We Invented Swift (thestar.com)
theodp writes: Speaking to a class of Grade 7 students taking coding lessons at the Apple Store in Eaton Centre, the Toronto Star reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook told the kids that most students would shun programming because coding languages were 'too geeky' until Apple introduced Swift. "Swift came out of the fundamental recognition that coding languages were too geeky. Most students would look at them and say, 'that's not for me,'" Cook said as the preteens participated in an Apple-designed 'Everyone Can Code' workshop. "That's not our view. Our view is that coding is a horizontal skill like your native languages or mathematics, so we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use."
So much money has been added to gov education over the decades from the gov and private sector in the USA.
The amount per student in some city and states should have produced amazing results if a lack of spending in the past was the only problem.
What the hell are you talking about? In my state, total per-pupil funding is about $7000-$8000/yr, and has barely been keeping pace with inflation. For reference, daycare for one kid costs about $2000 PER MONTH here - what the schools get is a pittance by comparison. And keep in mind that daycare can be done by college students and stay-at-home moms, while teachers must have a bachelor's degree, minimum, and often have an advanced degree. Many of those are STEM degrees, worth quite a bit in industry.
The schools haven't been adequately funded for decades, and things are only getting worse.
I suspect he's still out there, somewhere, causing people to be stuck with Filemaker.
Doubtless an open-source, platform-agnostic solution works better. I use Drupal these days when I want to do a job like that. It provides all the usual functionality you expect from a CMS, and a fairly small set of modules will let you create views on arbitrary database tables so that you can use it as a glorified database reporting tool without ever writing a line of code, CSS aside. You just create views. And the CSS is only needed to make it look pretty, not to make any sense of the information at all. And there are export tools.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(Discrepancy with the OECD stats is due to being from different years, and the OECD stats including post-secondary non-tertiary education, while the NCES stats are for only K-12).
Spending per student has about doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 40 years. and tripled since the 1960s. It peaked around 2007, and the people trying to get even more money put into education have been abusing that by using 2007 as the start of their spending graphs.
Where is all the money going? I don't have time to find it again, but the Education Department's own stats are contradictory. If you take the amount of spending it lists in teacher non-salary benefits, and divide it by the number of teachers they give, it ends up something like $50k/yr per teacher. What's going on is the number of non-teaching administrators has exploded since 1970, far outpacing the growth in number of students. These administrators have been hiding it by shifting some of their salary expenses into those of teachers in the stats. Every time education receives a spending increase, the administrators sop up most of it and let only a trickle get through to teachers. Every time education receives a spending cut, these administrators pass it all on directly to the teachers and students, while protecting their own jobs and salaries. As a result, the teachers are constantly complaining of not having enough money despite the huge increases in education spending over the decades.