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Within a few years, every single student in the San Francisco Unified School District will be studying computer science, at all grade levels.
The city’s Board of Education unanimously approved the measure during its weekly meeting on Tuesday evening.
"Information technology is now the fastest growing job sector in San Francisco, but too few students currently have access to learn the Computer Science skills that are crucial for such careers," Board President Emily Murase said in a statement on Wednesday. "We are proud to be at the forefront of creating a curriculum that will build on the knowledge and skills students will need starting as early as preschool."
According to the district, computer science classes are relatively rare across the United States.
"Currently, no national, state, or local standards exist for Computer Science and the academic research in Computer Science education is quite limited," the board wrote. "As such, a cohesive progression of Computer Science knowledge and skills does not yet exist."
It's the year 2015. Why isn't CompSci a mandatory part of the curriculum everywhere in America? It was at my gymnasium (academic high school) in Germany, and that was 25 years ago.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VortexCortex on Sunday June 14 2015, @05:27PM
I file this under the "every kid in the district needs a laptop | tablet" thinking that seems to be everywhere lately.
I did the same. It's another profit driven agenda. Not only does the government then subsidize hardware & software companies by purchasing products / OSs / Compilers (because you know lobbyists won't be for FLOSS), but it fits right in with the Bilderberg / Bill Gates manufactured crisis in CS [slashdot.org]; The two prong approach aims to get more H1B visa workers (while refusing to hire locally and only appearing to comply with job listing regulations) and further to drive down the cost of hiring CS grads by flooding the market. An unspoken issue is that the false "shortage of CS grads" drives more people into poverty by saddling them with a debt they can't pay off. Meanwhile, a self taught high school graduate who's a "natural" at CS and has a portfolio full of FLOSS contributions and completed projects due to their "hobby" is able to get employed sans degree; By the time the CS graduate competitors enter the work force the self taught individual earns about the same or more as they do, but without any of the debt or wasted years; This combined with the lowering quality accreditation due to online courses demonstrates an education bubble is about to pop. The CS degrees are worth less than they cost (hence employment exams are needed, because a degree says squat), and businesses (esp. colleges) are trying to milk the bubble for as much as they can before having to cash out.
From the link above:
The NY Times' Eric Lipton was just awarded a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that shed light on how foreign powers buy influence at think tanks. So, it probably bears mentioning that Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy (PDF) to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas — which is on the verge of being codified into laws — was hatched at an influential Microsoft and Gates Foundation-backed think tank mentioned in Lipton's reporting, the Brookings Institution. In 2012, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a forum on STEM education and immigration reforms, where fabricating a crisis was discussed as a strategy to succeed with Microsoft's agenda after earlier lobbying attempts by Bill Gates and Microsoft had failed. "So, Brad [Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith]," asked the Brookings Institution's Darrell West at the event, "you're the only [one] who mentioned this topic of making the problem bigger. So, we galvanize action by really producing a crisis, I take it?" "Yeah," Smith replied (video). And, with the help of nonprofit organizations like Code.org and FWD.us that were founded shortly thereafter, a national K-12 CS and tech immigration crisis was indeed created.
Now, it's my experience teaching children to make games in Javascript, BASIC, C and Assembly (in days gone by) at my local Community Centers, that most children only want to be able to say "Look at what I made", they don't really want to learn to code and do the work to make something. About 10% of those who attend actually take to computer science like water, complete their project, and typically begin to intuit higher mathematics from their newfound ability to see algorithms in action. Last year, one 15 year old began to re-invent calculus to solve the problem of efficiently rendering curves. I immediately begged her parents to get better schooling, homeschooling if necessary, at least purchase some used college algebra, trig, and calculus books. That is to say, I think CS can really help inquisitive students who learn by doing. However the CS courses should be elective, because most kids just don't learn that way -- in fact, everyone learns a bit differently: different subjects at different rates and different times in their development, thus curriculum free schooling works well. [wikipedia.org]
Furthermore, the kids who accelerate their learning of higher mathematics by leveraging their CS knowledge should be given an avenue to study at a higher level -- The same goes for all subjects, but this is not typically the case in public schools. Given that the current public education system is designed to neuter brilliant minds [youtube.com], and the likelihood that only a subset of children will grasp (and utilize) CS's abstract problem solving principals, I see this "CS across all grades" push as yet another way to retard the education of students on average. The goal being that those who do excel will quickly become bored and frustrated with the dead end of our outcome based educational methods, and the others will simply struggle with yet another useless (to them) subject. Meanwhile, the rich will educate their children in private schools which have a more flexible curriculum, giving children of elites another leg up, and further cementing into being a less educated and compliant working class having been normalized in skill, opinion and attitude by the corrupt and manipulative public education system. If this sounds outlandish, watch the video I linked above, the practice has been going on for decades.
I won't apologize for the long-winded post, it's difficult to come to an understanding of what's really going on in the current educational system without understanding it and the agendas of those pushing these programs -- to say nothing of Common Core. [wordpress.com] I wasn't surprised in the least to see the agenda coming to San Fransisco first, knowing of the degree of influence certain ideologies hold there.