States Are Calling For More K-12 CS Classes. Now They Need the Teachers.
source link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/10/07/2315204/states-are-calling-for-more-k-12-cs-classes-now-they-need-the-teachers
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States Are Calling For More K-12 CS Classes. Now They Need the Teachers.
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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "42 states to go!" exclaimed Code.org to its 1+ million Twitter followers as it celebrated victorious efforts to pass legislation making North Carolina the 8th state to pass a high school computer science graduation requirement, bringing the tech-backed nonprofit a step closer to its goal of making CS a requirement for a HS diploma in all 50 states. But as states make good on pledges made to tech CEOs to make their schoolchildren CS savvy, Education Week cautions that K-12 CS has a big certified teacher shortage problem.
From the article:
When trying to ensure all students get access to the knowledge they need for college and careers, sometimes policy can get ahead of teacher capacity. Computer science is a case in point. As of 2022, every state in the nation has passed at least one law or policy intended to promote K-12 computer science education, and 53 percent of high schools offered basic computer science courses that year, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Code.org."
"'There's big money behind making [course offerings] go up higher and faster,' thanks to federal and state grants as well as private foundations, said Paul Bruno, an assistant professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "But then that raises the question, well, who are we getting to teach these courses...?"
Bruno's work in states such as California and North Carolina suggests that few of those new computer science classes are staffed with teachers who are certified in that subject."
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There is a lot of us who feel the same way about anonymous keyboard warriors who think their opinions are in any way valid enough to rant on day after day about topics which they know nothing about.
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Don't feed the pathetic troll.
I know right? Did I say pathetic twice or troll? -
It's a spam comment that shows up on a regular basis, and has for months (if not years). Given the regularity and long time, it's probably an institutional bad actor.
Just flag it as spam and move on.-
That's certainly possible, but it could also be someone running a long-lived public sentiment experiment, or a fed bait or psyop, or something even more off the wall.
Without more information, we'll never really know. In the meantime, I still get a nostalgic chuckle when I see these old troll spams.
I almost miss the one about Cucking Zuck, or something like that.
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or od the mage version of it - take 15 jab 6th insurrectionisrs - throw then in a jaill cell and off one of them a pardon for ratting the others out - show will be over so quick you can show more commercials.
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The thing is teachers were one of the few careers that was chosen because someone wants to teach. The modern school environment has made less people want to be a teacher.
Few people get to be paid for something they actually want to do in life. Most work to get paid so they can survive. Teaching has become a job just like any other, and it shows.-
I wasn’t aware the bank would take the warm fuzzy feeling of teaching as a mortgage payment.
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Maybe a Credit Union?:-)
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It isn't important to capitalism. Educating children and having a more productive workforce is not something and ibdivudal can exploit for their own profit. So capitalism as a system fails to invest into something that offers no direct return. Even if we all agree that it is important and benefits the economy indirectly.
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Yes, education much like healthcare are things that markets doesn't really do a good job of solving for despite the fact that that the more people have access to them the more those economic conditions and all the other markets improve for everyone.
Capitalism absolutely benefits from and functionally requires an educated and healthy labor force but it doesn't actually contain the tools to provide those things in an efficient manner. There's a good reason every founding father despite their other disagreeme
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I struggle to convince some of my libertarian friends that there is a such thing as the public good. They think I'm trying to rob them. I guess I am because I don't want children to grow up to be illiterate unemployable adults that have nothing better to do than hang out in my neighborhood.
P.S. sorry for the typos in my previous post. the mobile version was slowing down and it was worse than typing on a 300 baud modem. Not sure if I should blame Android or/. or myself for even trying.
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Keep probing a libertarian long enough about how their society would work and almost all of the time they end up re-inventing the concept of "government". I know this because I used to be one.
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Pay them the babysitter rate [cafemom.com].
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When over 50% of US kids can't fucking read at grade level, are constantly told that they can be anything they want, and that reality is mutable, is it any surprise they don't feel like they need to work?
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by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday October 08, 2023 @11:58AM (#63909897)
What k-12 needs is competent math instruction, not CS. Furthermore, the morons who want CS don't know what CS is; what they actually want is "how to use this software" or "write some html."
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No mods, but so true.
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Completely disagree. What K-12 needs is data literacy. You need facility with data to be a part of our current society. You need to be able to look at data, download it, understand how to manipulate it. You need this to do high school projects. You need this to make sense of news stories (because journalists too often miss it). You need it to understand so many of the current events in society today.
Maths is only a part of data-literacy. For better or worse, CS courses cover more data literacy than other co
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You mean how articles claiming something is unusual ought to give enough statistics to deduce the mean and standard deviation, and all readers should by habit doublecheck that the claim is over three standard deviations from the mean?
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Very very hard to be data literate if you are innumerate.
Impossible to enter a formula into an excel cell if you have no clue what an equation is.
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Learning how to use a word processor, including how to use and update styles which few people understand, is a useful life skill. Also spreadsheets.
And there's value in teaching something like Scratch (or LOGO when I was young) to find the kids who have an aptitude for programming. (Not all kids have it, and it isn't easily taught.)
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No disagreement. The point of contention is whether it is a wise use of limited resources to do that to everyone as opposed to doing something more universally useful for everyone.
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What they're probably trying to do is get capital on their side by promising more programmers which are currently on the last vestiges of middle class salaries outside of the handful of strong union shops like the auto workers, UPS and doctors with their AMA.
They can get the tech bro billionaires on their side to buy off some senators maybe they'll get some extra funding, or at least that's probably the devil's bargain they're considering -
Yes, and this is not new. They should listen to people like Dylan Wiliam who's been very clear for a couple of decades that what most education systems need is to improve the quality of maths teaching (Research says you don't get good results on CS courses is the students don't already have a good grounding in maths, among other foundational knowledge, skills, & attitudes). You don't do that by recruiting new teachers, that has a very small effect. You do it by training the existing experienced, already
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Well, no surprise there. CS is a _specialist_ skill. It has no place in regular school education.
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Sort of disagree. And "introduction to programming" would be a worthwhile course. It should probably be around 20-40 hours of class time and perhaps an equal amount of computer lab. Anything more than that should be for specialists.
There should also be "introduction to statistics" and a few other such courses."Introduction to Rhetoric" would probably be the most valuable of the set. (That one teaches you to make and attempt to convince people with an argument you know to be false.)-
Nope. May as well teach them surgical stitching, paving a road or how to use a lathe for 20-40h. All just a waste of time. Even those that will later write software will _not_ get to the stage where they actually understand what they are doing and then be able to generalize in this short a time. Also what is wring with all the coding "bootcamps": After these, you still have no clue what you are doing, you just learned some rituals and templates.
I do agree on the rhetoric. We had it as part of "Ethics", the
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If you think coding bootcamps are bad, you haven't seen security ones.
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I have absolutely no doubt you are correct. Whenever some non-regulated skill is in high demand, there are always some assholes that claim to be teaching it to an useful level for money, but in actual reality are only ripping off people. Also refer to "Trump academy" for an example in a different field.
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Security is about not only applying what you know but developing new methods of approaching a problem. Rote learning is worse than useless since if it could be rote learned, what you are supposed to do would be part of the normal development process and you'd be useless.
Which you are after such a bootcamp. Please, people, don't waste your money on that snake oil!
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Exactly. All you can do after such a fake education is more damage.
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Not even that. All they can hope for is to get hired by a company that knows even less about security than they do, screw up and get fired as soon as (not if, not even when) the next security breach happens.
If they're lucky, they'll have had enough time between getting hired and that security breach to at least recover the cost for that worthless bootcamp.
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You kids and your newfangled, complicated words, "introduction to programming". Back in my days, we called that "mathematics and logic".
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Well, you have to admit, there is not a single R in CS, so they think they could probably pull this one off at least.
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to teaching logic and critical thinking. The kids would be better served.
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Yeah I gotta agree, K-8 need more of knowledge in pseudo-code type knowledge rather than actually programming. Loops, if statements, logic gates, probably an earlier introduction to basic algebraic concepts, really just training in the high level concepts of how machines and computers operate. Also the basic process of troubleshooting, breaking a problem down into smaller pieces and visualizing how to get to root causes.
I think if kids that age want to start actually programming the tools should be there to let them, allow those grades to have more elective classes to figure out which things they actually enjoy doing. At that age I would class programming the same as art or music, some kids are going to have a natural inclination towards it and some kids will figure out it's not for them. If they can figure those things out earlier the chances are they'll make better decisions in 8-12 and college.
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1) Who writes these goals?
2) How are they distributed to the teachers? Snail mail or text messages?
3) How do the these goals benefit the originators?
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Have you attended your local school board meetings?
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It's also pretty interesting that the decision makers seem to have no understanding of what compter science or the basics/base of computer science is, which is simple: math, that domain the first computer scientists came from.
Perhaps we need to educate people on that fact.
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Programming came from one small subset of math. It's an important part, but it's only part. Accurate reasoning is a better thing to teach, but it's much harder to evaluate.
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Logic and critical thinking? Are you nuts? Do you want to have riots in the streets?
Do you have a faint idea what would be going on in this country if more people had the mental capacity of realizing what is going on in this country?
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Critical reasoning is part of Common Core State Standards for Mathematics [ccsso.org] and therefore part of North Carolina curriculum.
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Ya, but then there'd be fewer Republicans -- oh, wait...:-)
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Yeah, but then they might become "liberals" (as if the conservatives even know what the word means in historical context say a few hundred years ago)
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But the current public school systems and teachers' unions can't teach the basics.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/o... [baltimoresun.com]-
Can you tell an op-ed piece from news? Yes this a complex social problem involving everyone, students, parents, and teachers. There are no easy answers. Do you think that teachers are simply not trying?
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Well if some states did not fine or arrest teachers for teaching facts, then maybe this would not be a problem. The way things are going, the safe bet in many states is to teach myths from a book that is between 1500 and 3000 years old
Also pay them a living wage, remember you get what you pay for.
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That and many states, e.g., Texas, want to take education funds and allow private schools to dip their snout in the trough. They are not thinking private as in elite, they are thinking private as religious. It is important to indoctrinate the little sprogs while they are too young to think for themselves.
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That's a part. Another part is that anyone qualified to teach CS can get a job that pays more for fewer hours/week. This is also true for many other skill sets. And you've got to put up with massive abuse from parents.
That it's hard to get enough qualified teachers should hardly be a surprise.
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by 192_kbps ( 601500 ) on Sunday October 08, 2023 @12:57PM (#63910019)
I have an MS in CS and could get certified quickly. But, I won't. Why should I? I work remotely with minimal supervision. Why tolerate the extreme schedule rigidty, interacting with unruly children, and getting called scum by a large proportion of the population, for a 75% cut in pay?-
by rayzat ( 733303 ) on Sunday October 08, 2023 @01:06PM (#63910039)
My daughters 3rd grade teacher quit mid-year last year to take the noon shift as the manager of a Sheetz, big fancy gas station, because it paid more, had better benefits, had fewer hours, and had fewer jerks to deal with.-
It's a bit mean to label them all as jerks - they're only in 3rd grade.
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If I had mod points, I'd give you one. The only problem is, should it be for insightful or funny?
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That's funny. For the sake of others, she was referring to mainly the parents.
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So... jerklets?
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Companies are reigning that in, apparently as a pretext to encourage staff to resign without having to admit layoffs to investors, or to pay the benefits layoffs would require.
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Please, forgive me, I meant to say companies are "reining that in".
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I have seen a email sent from school administrators to their teachers that asks them 'Would you rather be teaching or being deposed in a lawsuit for failing someones child?' This is the reason why its all broken. They are leaving them behind by pushing them toward the finish line without preparing them for the future.
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I have no clue how a student can fail, at least in my school district, one of the largest in the US. They have study guides for every test, where 80% of the questions are lifted verbatim from the study guide. If they get below an 80, and 80 is a B, they can retake a sometimes identical test. They can then correct the test for 50% credit on the wrong answers. Policy is 10% of the grade is HW, which isn't graded and is just turned in and is often multiple choice. Mathematically if you just randomly guess on t
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Whoa, tough school district. The district my friend taught in (Freshman english) outlawed HW. And at least in his district, you could not fail. In such cases, the principle would ask him if he was ok raising the grade to a D or sometimes even a C. Of course what could he say, the boss just asked him. And that same boss decides if you get a contract for next year. So in your district it sounds like you at least have to read the study guide in class instead of looking at your cell phone the whole period. My f
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Oh it's pretty much the same. No one actually fails. Teachers are forced to come up with extra credit after extra credit. My friend put the study guide for a test up during the test and people still failed. He had to rewrite the study guide so the test was in the same order as the new study guide and people still got stuff wrong.
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Yeah sounds the same. My friend did not really see the implications though. I kept telling him these were the people that would be giving us pills at the nursing home. And he had one other funny story, one of his students who did not do well (well he passed and graduated of course) ended up being on his garbage route after he graduated.
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And this is the reason why the diploma they get is totally worthless. If I could enroll my dog in a course and he would get a passing grade, all the degree certifies is that they're housebroken.
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CS will be later, for those who are interested
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Maybe some of the Asian kids could help out the slower Western kids and teachers.
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It's really hard to attract good teachers when you don't pay them.
It's especially hard since if you are even remotely competent in CS you would get WAY more money in the industry than in education.I train high school teachers to be better CS teachers (for HS). They often mention unless you are a true believer in public education, people move to other career because the pay is so bad.
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Nope I suggested that and was modded down. Apparently if you want to teach you're supposed to live out of your car.
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