Have We Reached a Consensus on a National CS Curriculum? I hope not

Alfred Thompson raises an important question here.  I agree with him — we haven’t reached consensus.  We also will never have a national CS curriculum in the United States, because we have a distributed education model.  It’s a state decision.  I do fear that there may be a de facto standard now.

But the bigger concern is at a higher level of abstraction: How should we make curricular decisions in CS (or anywhere else)?  I hope that we make our decisions based on empirical evidence.  I don’t see that we have the empirical evidence that any of the below classes ought to be the dominant model.

Oh boy are things up in the air in the HS CS curriculum these days. While we have some great advice from the CSTA (CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards) the implementation of those standards are still left up to individual schools/districts/states. Still it is easy to come to the conclusion from watching social media and some conferences that there is a consensus on a high school Computer Science curriculum. Today I got the following from a friend.

Is it an incorrect read or has a national consensus for CS in HS’s been achieved with a sequence of :

–ECS (Exploring Computer Science) Curriculum

–CS Principles/BJC Curriculum (Beauty and Joy of Computing)

–AP CS (JAVA [for now])

via Computer Science Teacher: Have We Reached a Consensus on a National CS Curriculum?.