America's Coming Geek Gap
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/12/stop-thinking-that-codi...
On a more serious note, here is a list of complaints about education in America:
1) Teachers are remarkably anti-math in culture. This has an obvious set of effects.
2) The radical decentralization of responsibility means that all districts get ripped off on everything they have to purchase.
3) The radical decentralization of responsibility combined with wealth segregation means that poor children get poorly educated.
4) People who are nominally progressive think that gentrification is terrible instead of our first chance in fifty years to get wealthy people to pay for the education of poor children. So we're going to waste it and kick all the poor people out to the exurbs instead.
5) School boards are the worst possible case for democracy. They are too local for newspapers to cover. No one understands what they do. They regularly make terrible decisions, and are unaccountable because no one knows about it. Sometimes it's Scopes monkey-trial nonsense, sometimes it's corruption, sometimes it's just being a money-sink.
6) Higher education is promoted in a miserably hypocritical manner. If you're sending student loan money home to keep the lights on you shouldn't be getting a history major, not if you don't know the next step. If you tell someone who is sending student loan money home to keep the lights on that they shouldn't worry about their major, you should go to a special hell, where they can't mail you your pension. The defense of this is usually absurd bullshit about the importance of broad liberal education, and romantic notions about the pursuit of knowledge. A remarkable demonstration of arrogance and privilege from people who make their living denouncing the arrogance of privilege. Encouraging people to spend years of their life and go five figures into debt so that you can feel good about aristocratic conceits from old europe is awful.
Anyway, the point is, K-12 education is systemically broken, and American education as a culture is opposed to a world in which the 'coming' geek gap was fixed.
In fact, measuring computer science education entirely through formal means is shortsighted in general, due to the nature of CS itself and how it's learned.
But especially the AP CS exam, which is essentially little more than a Java course ("The Perils of JavaSchools", indeed), is hardly indicative of anything.
Last year, not a single girl took the college-level coding test in 2 states
Actually looks like that's three states based on the data, but in those cases the total number of test takers was only 1 (Mississippi), 11 (Montana), and 0 (Wyoming).
Another interesting thing is that the percentage of female test takers varies pretty widely. I found it surprising that in Tennessee and Arkansas, close to 30% of test takers were women, which puts those states right near the top of the list for female participation rates.
https://www.tracy.k12.ca.us/sites/clunetta/Java/practice/pra...
The last question on the test is this:
The method mixup is defined as follows: String mixup(String word) { if (word.length() == 1) return ""; else return mixup(word.substring(0, word.length() - 1)) + word.charAt(word.length() - 1); }
What is the value of the string returned by mixup("IDEAL")?
a) IDEAL b) IDEA c) LEAD d) LEDA e) DEAL
I don't program much in Java, so maybe I'm missing some gotcha, but shouldn't the answer to this be "L"? The recursive mixup call will go: IDEA... IDE... ID.. I, at which point the final return value will be "".
So the value of the returned string will be "" + "L" therefore returning "L"?
In any case, the point of looking at this was to get some sense of whether a kid would even want to take AP Comp Sci. My concern with this, knowing how most of these subjects get taught in school, is that teachers would teach to the test, therefore sapping all of the fun out of programming. Knowing some of this stuff by heart is potentially valuable I suppose, but kind of operates in a vacuum, as practically you have a ton of resources at your disposal when programming (ie Google, Stack Overflow, API references, etc). This rote memorization of things could actually turn kids off of computer science instead of drawing them in.
The increase has come in certain tests because those tests a) require less new infrastructure expense b) are easier to teach, and c) are of greater general interest.
STEM teachers should get at least a 50% skills differential in pay.