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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

"Disinformation" would be an accurate description of your claim.

Code.org is not "pushing for pay deductions on teachers whose CS classrooms consist of <40% females" as you claimed.

The actual proposal: [1]

* isn't about teacher's pay, its about classroom funding rewards being paid by Code.org [2]

* doesn't refer to % of class that is girls, it pays $750 if 15 or more students reach a certain goals, and $1,000 if, of those 15 or more, 7 or more are girls.

[1] http://code.org/educate/20hr

[2] Direct quote: "These rewards are not cash prizes for teachers - they are classroom rewards. This program is not permanent, it's a one-time campaign to see if rewards can help grow the pool of C.S. teachers and increase total enrollment (especially by girls)."

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Very well. This is still trying to incentivize equality through what is essentially bribery. At least they don't intend on doing it regularly, not for now.

The rest of my claims still stand. In fact, the affirmative action is probably one of the lesser worries. There's other, much bigger reasons.

> Very well. This is still trying to incentivize equality through what is essentially bribery.

Its not incentivizing equality.

The major incentive is for getting any set of 15 or more students through the program. This is 75% of the potential reward.

The minor incentive is for getting 7 or more girls in the set of 15 or more students. This is obviously not an incentive for equality (as, at the minimum number of total students and girls for the incentive, its not equal, and, there's no ratio-based requirement -- if you get 30 students through and only 7 are girls, you get the same additional $250 on top of the base $750 as if you get 15 students through and 7 were girls.)

In addition to not being "incentivizing equality", I don't see how rewarding what works in acheiving goals is bribery.

> The rest of my claims still stand.

The rest of your claims are unsupported fuzzy generalities. In the one case you discussed an easily verifiable fact claim, it was completely wrong. I don't see any reason to assume that your generalities are based on any clearer of a picture of reality than your simple fact claim.

If that extra pay for recruiting girls more heavily works, that's ok.

If, absent that reward, there weren't many or any girls in the class, isn't that some kind of problem right off the bat?

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