The Negative Consequences of Brown v Board of Education: Integrating Computing Education

The second season of Revisionist History has just finished.  This season didn’t have the same multiple episodes with tight ties to the issues of education as last season (as I described in this blog post), there was one standout episode that does relate to our issues: Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment.  The podcast deals with the negative consequences of the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case that declared that separate was not equal and forced schools to integrate.  The well-documented consequence of the integration was the closing of the schools for African-Americans and the firing of Black school teachers.  Gladwell first considers what the Brown family (named in the case) and the other families in the case actually wanted, and about the longterm impact that even today, there are disproportionately few African-American teachers in the US are African-American — and that leads to impacts on students.

When I studied Brown v Board of Education when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, we were taught a negative consequence that Gladwell barely touches on.  Gladwell mentions that there were few jobs for an educated Black person at the time of Brown v Board.  The Supreme Court’s decision, and the consequent firing of Black teachers, was an enormous blow to the African-American middle class in the United States.  Employment was lost at a large scale, and longterm impacts on wealth and prosperity can be measured today.

The connection to computer science education is part of the question of how do we reach everyone and help everyone to succeed.  Today’s computing education is de facto segregated — not in the sense of colored vs white classes, but in terms of only certain demographics are in CS classes and other demographics are not.

• In many of the high schools we work with, even if white and Asian students are in the school population minority, the computer science classes are mostly white and Asian.
• English CS classes are almost entirely male, maybe even more than in the US (described here).
• US undergraduate CS classes don’t seem to be retaining women (blog post here).
• Code.org classes have are almost half poor students (blog post here), and have excellent diversity (see their Medium post here). What are the rich students taking?  The diversity that Code.org is seeing is not reflected in undergraduate CS (see Generation CS report) which has little diversity and has mostly prosperous students. That’s important because undergraduate CS is the path that most students will take to the IT industry, which is mostly white/Asian and male.

How do we improve diversity in computing education?  Can we avoid a heavy-handed and expensive mandate like requiring CS for everyone? I side effect of requiring everyone to take CS might be that we get all the same kind of CS.  Can we provide equal access to everyone without the negative consequences that Gladwell describes from Brown v Board of Education?

Brown v Board of Education might be the most well-known Supreme Court decision, a major victory in the fight for civil rights. But in Topeka, the city where the case began, the ruling has left a bittersweet legacy. RH hears from the Browns, the family behind the story.

Source: Revisionist History Podcast